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Experienced, detail-oriented and versatile arts writer based in Gloucestershire, England. Equally at home crafting long features as I am writing profile pieces, book reviews and shorter articles. My writing on art appears regularly in The Wall Street Journal and on Christie's website. I also write cultural pieces for The New York Times, The Financial Times, American Vogue, Air Mail and Town & Country. Fluent French and acceptable Spanish. Contact: [email protected]
In a famous 1860 essay, the French poet Charles Baudelaire wrote that a "painter of modern life" must possess an originality "so powerful and clear-cut that it...does not bother to look for approval." In their own ways, Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas each embodied that ideal.
The artist Peter Doig, born in Edinburgh in 1959, has led a peripatetic existence, living and working in Trinidad, Montreal, London and New York. He secured his early reputation in the 1990s with a series of large-scale landscape paintings full of atmospheric foreboding.
William Kentridge needed an intuitive medium to express the absurdities and injustices of apartheid-era South Africa. He chose charcoal: A black, burned, semi-destroyed material that can easily be erased but always leaves behind a vestige of the original mark. "Drawing for me is a testing of ideas," Mr. Kentridge told me.
Not even World War II could halt Marcel Duchamp's quest for miniature perfection. The French artist posed as a cheese merchant in Nazi-occupied France to source the materials he needed to complete his famous 1941 Boîte-en-valise, a "box in a suitcase" containing miniature replicas of his notable works.
In the first few years of the 20th century, no artist seems to have fired Pablo Picasso's imagination quite so much as Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Picasso attended retrospectives of Ingres's work and frequently visited the Louvre to study his masterpieces, such as "La Grande Odalisque" (1814) and "The Turkish Bath" (1862-63).
As a former stage actor with a love of Shakespeare, the British painter Walter Sickert liked to inject an element of showmanship into his painting. His early fame in the late 1880s sprang from his depictions of London's rowdy music halls, where he saw an opportunity to portray English popular culture the way that French artists like Edgar Degas and Édouard Manet had done with cafe culture in Paris.
Piet Mondrian was a jazz nut with a vast collection of records he liked to listen to while working on his pioneering abstract paintings. He was also considered a very good dancer, often going out to nightclubs where he favored the fast, high-stepping Charleston.
When David Hockney visited New York for the first time in 1961, he had little money and a lot of ambition. Straight off the plane, the young British artist made his way to the Museum of Modern Art, where he showed a portfolio of his prints to the curator William S.
William Hogarth's sketching habit did not go down well in France, where it led to his arrest for spying. He was only released after he managed to prove he was an artist by drawing several disobliging caricatures.
Sandro Botticelli's reputation as an artist of extraordinary refinement tends to overshadow his skill as an entrepreneur. Giorgio Vasari, the pre-eminent chronicler of the Italian Renaissance, wrote that Botticelli (1445-1510) "squandered his money" and died in Florence a penniless old man.
After the Roman emperor Nero committed suicide in 68 AD, at the age of 30, a hostile Senate made a concerted effort to suppress any record of his existence.
When the 20-year-old Georgia O'Keeffe burst onto the New York gallery scene in 1917, the American art world was under the sway of French Cubism. But O'Keeffe's abstract charcoal drawings presented a version of modernism that was radically individual; she later described herself as "working into my own unknown-no one to satisfy but myself."
The artist Julie Mehretu, 51, likes to work on a grand scale. A silent short film by the British artist Tacita Dean shows Ms. Mehretu at work on her monumental painting "Mural" at the New York headquarters of Goldman Sachs in 2009, high up on a cherry picker as she grapples with a canvas 80 feet long and 23 feet high.
The British illustrator Ralph Steadman often begins a picture with a splat of ink on a white page. "It's a very positive way of making a mark," he says. "I can spread ink out easier than I can oil, and I can splash and blot, which I like to do."
Henri Matisse is often bracketed with Pablo Picasso as the most daringly creative artist of the 20th century. But while Picasso preferred to cloak his art in mystery, Matisse was a theorist and teacher who felt honor-bound to explain his artistic innovations.
From Salvador Dalí's melting watches to René Magritte's men in bowler hats, Surrealism is full of eye-popping imagery that makes an increasingly profitable splash at auction. "What's becoming clear today is that it's not necessarily about scholarship or aesthetic tastemakers defining the market," says Thomas Boyd-Bowman, head of Sotheby's Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sales.