John Constable, the revolutionary nineteenth-century painter of the landscapes and skies of southern England, is Britain's best-loved but perhaps least understood artist. His paintings reflect visions of landscape that shocked and perplexed his contemporaries: attentive to detail, spontaneous in gesture, brave in their use of colour. What we learn from his landscapes is that Constable had sharp local knowledge of Suffolk, a clarity of expression of...

Discovering painting at the age of 40, Sir Winston Churchill revelled in his new pastime. He went on to produce over 550 paintings, with over 130 of them on the French Riviera.0The fellow artist and Riviera resident Paul Rafferty has tracked down many of the locations Churchill used in Provence, an area the great man so aptly called 'paintatious'. 0Many of these locations are newly discovered and his 'fearless impressions' stand alongside to illustrate...

This illustrated biography follows Nicholas Hilliard's long and remarkable life (c. 1547-1619) from the West Country to the heart of the Elizabethan and Jacobean courts. It showcases new archival research and stunning images, many reproduced in color for the first time. Hilliard's portraits-some no larger than a watch-face-have decisively shaped perceptions of the appearances and personalities of many key figures in one of the most exciting, if volatile,...

In Hoban's dramatic and fast-paced narrative, we follow Freud from his birthplace in Berlin to London, where he fled with his family in the 1930s, and then to Paris, where he mixed with Picasso and Giacometti. He led a dissolute life in Soho after the war, gambling and womanizing with fierce energy. He painted his wives nude, his children nude, himself nude. He married twice, had an uncountable number of children, and kept working through it all,...

Director Phil Grabsky gained privileged access to David Hockney as he prepared for two remarkable exhibitions at London's Royal Academy of Arts. A Bigger Picture; explored Hockney's return to his native Yorkshire where, using innovative techniques and technologies, he captured the landscape as it changes across the seasons. For 82 Portraits and One Still Life; viewers see Hockney at work under his self-imposed deadline of three days for each painting....