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Great Works: Last Stand of the Kusunoki Heroes at Shijo-Nawate 1851 (left to right: 38cm x 26.2 cm; 38.2cm x 25.7cm; 38 cm x 25.8 cm) by Utagawa Kuniyoshi

Sat, 19 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Great art can often seem quite cloistered, set apart in its cultural loftiness, the stuff of museologists and finicky, Harris-Tweeded connoisseurs. These feelings are often underpinned by the grave monumentality of so many of the wonderful buildings in which much of this art is displayed. We all know it so well, don't we? It helps us to walk tall among those who know just a little less, hem hem.

Great Works: My Room at the Beau-Rivage 1917-18 (73cm x 61cm) by Henri Matisse

Sat, 12 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Rooms as painted spaces, forms of stage-setting if you like. Sickert's rooms in Whitechapel, for example: dingy, dark, mildly urinous; depositories for heavy, blowsy, pneumatic flesh sprawled across beds; exuding an air of indefinite menace. Or Vuillard's rooms in France: fussily patterned, closing in on themselves, smaller than they probably were.

Great Works: The Shelf: Objects and Shadows – Front View, 1982-83 (71.1cm x 91.5cm) by Rodrigo Moynihan

Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

To an artist, there is nothing more precious than his studio. It is his birthing suite and his retirement home. Francis Bacon's was a creative maelstrom. It looked like a scene of warfare, carnage. It was where, by sheer force of will, he fought his pitched battles against rage, despair, frustration.

Great Works: Thomas King as Touchstone in As You Like It, 1780 (91cm x 55.5cm), By Johan Zoffany

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

This painting, which usually lives as a non-paying guest at the Garrick Club, is currently on display at the Royal Academy's Zoffany show, and you come upon it there rather suddenly, quite close to the entrance, like some clever bit of theatrical staging. Here is Touchstone in Shakespeare's As You Like It, stepping in from the right to declaim to Rosalind some very bad, jog-trot verses in imitation of ones that have been pinned to a nearby tree by her love-sick lover, Orlando. You do not see Rosalind at all – the painting has been cut down.

Great Works: Napoleon I on his Imperial Throne, 1806 (259cm x 162 cm), Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

There is something both thrilling and repugnantly strange about this grandiloquent portrait of Napoleon, queasily perched on his throne of self-glorification, by Jean -Dominique Ingres. It is huge when confronted face to face – in fact, its presence almost seems to bear down on us, cowing us into submission, as if we were so many grovelling minions at his court – but in reproduction, and quite surprisingly, we could almost imagine it to be as small as the span of a hand, because the symbolically over-adorned figure of the seated emperor himself rather puts us in mind, in spite of the overwhelming fuss of its opulent detailing, of an 18th-century figurine of the kind we might keep on the end of the mantelpiece. It has a kind of ceramic solidity to it, as if it is solidly grounded in its squat thinginess.

Great Works: Merz Picture 1A (The alienist), 1919 (51.5cm x 41.3cm), Kurt Schwitters

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Kurt Schwitters first invented the term merz in 1919, to describe his own artistic practice. It began its life as a fragment of a word – it had clearly fallen off the back end of commerz, which means commerce in German. Schwitters opted for the fragment, and tacked it to other words, depending upon the nature of the game that he was playing with his art. This was what Schwitters was doing all the time, playing games with shapes, colours, bits of detritus. He did the same sort of thing when he made his wonderful sound poems, creating sound shapes in the air that had something to do with other kinds of sound shapes, but not too much.

Great Works: Diana and Callisto, 1556-59 (188cm x 206cm), Titian

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on...' Yes, I knew you would recognise that familiar gobbet from the agitated pen of Edward Fitzgerald, whose thrillingly inaccurate translation of various poems by Omar Khayyam was first published in pamphlet form in 1859. Fingers are very important in art too – an excellent book was written about them in 2010. It's called The Finger: a Handbook, and it was written by Angus Trumble, who is Senior Curator of Paintings and Sculpture at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut. Fingers, being so wheedlingly curious, get everywhere in art, the long and the short varieties, the crookedly gnarly or the pearly-straight-and-oh-so-evenly-tapering. Think of the extraordinarily extended fingers of Parmigianino's figures; or of the bolt of electricity that zaps across from the extended first finger of a very gruff God to the First Man on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; and, most pertinently today, the crucial, nay pivotal, importance of the finger in this mid-career Titian, which has just been rescued for the nation, sparing us the horrible humiliation of being obliged to see it elsewhere in the world. It is currently on display – go and look at it for yourself – in an altarwise, owlish light in Gallery 1 of the National Gallery.

Great Works: Nocturne: Blue and Gold, St Mark's Venice, 1879-80 (44.5cm x 59.7cm), James McNeill Whistler

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 00:00:01 +0100

You could say that the subject is far too much fussed over, known to too many, sobbed over by every right-thinking lover everywhere. And still the writers, the painters, the sketchers return, eager to make their own particular bond with the great, ruin-strewn theme-park that Venice is, and eager (in the case of the painters) to pocket the rewards for having done so. Whistler was there at the end of the 1870s. He tried not to go for the over-familiar sites. Instead, and for the most part, he chose the overlooked nooks and crannies.

Great Works: Der Blutende (The Bleeding Man), 1911 (103.9 x 80.5 cm), Max Oppenheimer

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 00:00:01 +0000

Blood is never only blood – and especially at this moment in the Christian year. It sustains us all. It is also a magical substance. The Christian myth tells us that Christ shed his blood for all our sakes, in order to redeem the fallen; and the drinking of that blood, miraculously made available to us over and over again as if from some inexhaustible well, is central to the Catholic Mass.

Great Works: Woman with Bicycle, 1952-3 (194.3cm x 124.5cm), Willem de Kooning

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 00:00:01 +0000

By the 20th century, the human body was being disassembled and re-assembled by painters of the various avant garde schools to an almost wild and frightening degree. You can almost hear the uproar as they did all that metaphorical sawing and hacking. This was the century of the uncalm, the feverishly experimental, the moment when the terrible undercurrents rose up and overwhelmed the surface.

Great Works: Niagara Falls, from the American Side, 1867 (260cm x 231cm), Frederic Edwin Church

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 00:00:01 +0000

Water for its own sake. The roiling immensities of water when seen from the cliffs above Le Havre, for example – all that beguiling shape-shifting, all that tonal tricksiness – as Monet would have seen it... Yet how many painters in the Western tradition really took water seriously as a subject for art before the 19th century? Answers on the back of a postage stamp? The seas were there all right, but they were backdrops to heroic naval skirmishes, a context in which to admire the outlandish, self-preening beauty of ships in full sail. They were also, soberingly, an enduring site of tragedy – there was always death by drowning to provoke a tear. And then, from later on in the 18th century, came the Romantic impulse. Water began to take on a life of its own. Two-thirds of the world's surface suddenly became interesting. Quite true? Well, let us say that it was found to have boundless imaginative possibilities in so far as it enabled the boundlessness of the self to be contemplated, boundlessly, and even reflected back at itself. And in the wake of all that renewal of water and its potential came Turner, Monet and.... Frederic Church.

Great Works: The Ruins of the Kreuzkirche in Dresden after the Prussian Invasion, 1765 (80cm x 110cm), Bernardo Bellotto

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 00:00:01 +0000

There are ruins and ruins, distant ruins and more recent ones. There are ruins that are set apart from us, as much mythical as physical, and other ruins that are painfully close to us, and seem to be almost extensions of our personal tragedies. Compare the ruins of Ancient Rome with the ruins of Passchendaele in 1915, for example. The 18th century had a great appetite for the contemplation of ruins: think of Claude Lorrain or Nicolas Poussin. Those ruins were often the remnants of the great classical civilisations of Greece and Rome. Such scenes could be heady, if not blurry, with mythological association. They were great stage sets against which immemorial dramas were still being re-enacted. Gods made mischief amid the fallen columns. Such ruins were not necessarily for the prying eyes of ever curious archaeologists. Nor were they to be swarmed over by tourists. That painterly enterprise represented a conjuring of vanished worlds that neo-classicism would strive, in part at least, to re-create. The 18th-century poet delighted in the idea of the laurel crown.

Great Works: The Art of Painting, circa 1666-7 (120cm x 100cm), Johannes Vermeer

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 00:00:01 +0000

In its making, this painting is utterly characteristic of the mature Vermeer: admire the warmth and the moistness, if not the butteriness, of the light; the different weight and tactile force of the colours, shifting from soft and yielding through to hard-edged; the lovely, almost seemingly effortless, manipulation of perspective; and the way he has organized objects and people within the space of the painting – to such an extent that what we are looking at almost has an air of inevitability about it. And yet it offers a little something extra too, this painting, something we meet less frequently in this artist's work. Is there not just a gentle touch of self-conscious panache, and even of swagger, in that title, which causes us both to look at what is in front of our eyes – and go on looking and looking at this inexhaustible scene – and to step back and admit to ourselves that this is both a painting and a reflection upon what the art of painting, when practised at this level of achievement, actually consists of, what the art of illusionism – and what the art of history painting, that most exalted of genres – really mean?

Great Works: The Painter's Mother II, 1972 (229mm x 210mm), Lucian Freud

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 00:00:01 +0000

We see from this painting by Lucian Freud of his mother, one of several currently on display in an expansive exhibition of his portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery in London, that for this artist the human face is fundamentally a landscape that increases in interest as it matures towards the magnificent, terrifying decrepitude of extreme old age, God's cruellest joke, a sight that seldom fails to induce spasms of pity and horror in just about equal measure. Yes, you could say, somewhat harshly it has to be admitted, that things do get better as they get worse – from a certain point of view. There is more to be looked at – and looked for. As a baby, there is not a lot to interest the painter, except perhaps for the strange and unpredictable physical manifestations of the fact that the tender babe is so unknowing of its human condition. The years of early maturity are sometimes the least interesting of all, when the features are often relatively bland and smooth, and there emerges that tiresome urge towards self-beautification, which tends to mask the interestingly complicated truths about our humanity (although it has to be said that self-beautification can itself be an interesting subject to the painter). Then come the truly absorbing years, when the face is moving inexorably in the direction of its inevitable decline, and the flesh begins to slacken, puff, blotch, contour, decay, collapse in on itself, often quite alarmingly, like a dynamited building,.

Great Works: Somewhere in America, 2000 (178cm x 254cm), Jock McFadyen

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:00:01 +0000

Sometimes a spasm of perversity strikes: we find ourselves wanting art to take us – transport us if you like (that verb seems entirely appropriate to this particular picture) – to nowhere in particular. We have grown sick of interesting or highly significant subject matter, self-vaunting portraiture, the fanfare of grand buildings in prime architectural locations such as Venice or other places that dress themselves up to look like world-weary grandes dames.

Great Works: Christina of Denmark, Duchess of Milan, 1538 (119cm x 82 cm), Hans Holbein the Younger

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:01 +0000

In the spring of 1538, after the death of Jane Seymour, Henry VIII sent Hans Holbein to Brussels on an exploratory fishing expedition for future brides. Christina of Denmark, not so recently widowed, was a possible contender. He spent three hours in her presence – no more than that, according to the official records. He probably made a drawing – or even more than one. After his return to England, this was worked up into a full painting, which pleased Henry enormously, to such an extent that he was said to feel acute pleasure when in its presence. It was spirits-raising – a little like the prospect of the 2012 Olympics is said to be, if we are to believe the newspapers. In spite of Henry's positive response to Christina's likeness, there was no marriage. For all that, Henry liked the painting well enough to want to hang on to it – and the nation has hung on to it to this very day, although it nearly got sold off and spirited away to America early in the 20th century.

Great Works: A Pair of Boots (Les Souliers), 1887 (33cm x 40.9cm), Vincent van Gogh

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 00:00:01 +0000

Enid Blyton, that writer adored by children and despised by the middle classes for her straitened vocabulary and unimaginative plots, once wrote a story called "The Brownie Biddle's Boots". It was read to me from a children's omnibus during the 1950s in Sheffield, when I lay a-bed at nights, and I always wanted it to be repeated again and again by my mother because, being an afflicted child of (presumably) imaginatively straitened, working-class parents, I found it imaginatively inexhaustible. It told the story of a pair of old boots that took matters into their own hands one day by going off on their own without a pair of legs to lead them. They were stout, wilful items of well used footwear that chose to please nothing but themselves, forever on the tramp, tramp, tramp. Yes, tramping was their game, on the road to the forever unpredictable excitements of nowhere in particular.