Art

Michael Greenhalgh describes how a masterpiece of fifteenth-century Italian art was for a long time used as an ashtray, only to pass into the national collections.

‘Unwearied in the office of friendship’, all his life Crabb Robinson was devoted to men of genius and faithfully recorded their behaviour, as Joanna Richardson here discusses.

David Mannings describes how the painters of the eighteenth century conducted their studios and sittings.

Prudence Hannay recounts the life of the Bostonian who first set sail for Britain in April 1815. Ticknor would go on to pay his homage to and became the good friend of many European intellectuals. Among those he met were Byron, Scott, Goethe, Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael.

Elka Schrijver describes the art and making of a northern Renaissance man.

Impressions of the social and literary scene in the French capital, as recorded by nineteenth-century visitors.

Aram Bakshian Jr. profiles a true Venetian, Lorenzo Da Ponte, who, like his associate Casanova, had an extravagant and boldly adventurous career.

Versatile artist and vagrant man of the world, Johan Zoffany has left us a vivid and exquisitely detailed record of the late eighteenth-century social scene from Scotland to the Indian subcontinent. By Aram Bakshian Jr.

R.B. Fountain introduces an influential French artist of wild animals and the chase.

Robert Hermstorff describes how Goethe moved to Weimar in 1775 and during the rest of his long life made the small Saxon town the centre of German letters and learning.