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Eugène Boudin: the man who mentored Monet?
Today my students were examining 19th century artists who painted en plein air. Partially this was an ideological issue in that a person could only be true to nature if he was standing among nature...
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Love, sex and family wealth in Florence
Two years ago the topic of Italian marriage chests had mesmerised me in this blog. In noble families, marriage in Renaissance Italy involved huge expense by both sides. The parents were obliged to buy...
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Australia's first female, and very fine Prime Minister - Julia Gillard
Since Australia federated and became a sovereign nation on the 1st January 1901, prime ministers have come and gone. Some were intelligent, some were learned, some were ideologically principled and...
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Monumental elephants in French public art
By November 1789 the Bastille Prison structure in Paris was largely demolished but what would take its place? On the Place de la Bastille, the very birthplace of the Revolution, Emperor Napoleon wanted...
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Shocking skating disaster - Russia or Britain?
My grandmother lived in most of her young years in Jaffe in Israel, but when I was a young girl, I was most interested in her stories about her real homeland near Odessa. Ice-covered waterways...
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Arts and Crafts Vs Vienna Secession - chairs
In 1861, William Morris founded Morris & Co. to make all the interior decorative elements that would be needed in a comfortable home - furniture, textiles, wallpaper and decorative glass. The...
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Anna Pavlova's London home and garden
Although only a teenager after she graduated from the Imperial Ballet School in St Petersburg in 1899, Anna Pavlova (1881-1931) must have been a skilful ballet dancer. She was soon offered a number of...
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The White Man's Burden, decolonisation and modern Britishness
The White Man’s World by Bill Schwarz was published by Oxford University Press last year, but it doesn’t seemed to have arrived in our bookshops yet. So I will take some of the review written by the...
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Great art exhibitions in Amsterdam and Dresden
In the 17th century, the Dutch East India Company prospered in international trade, bringing enormous wealth; soon the first stock exchange was established in the centre of Amsterdam. The Dutch...
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Seven Wonders of the World: Christ the Redeemer, Rio de Janeiro
The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, as confirmed by the Phoenician poet Antipater in the first century AD, included the: Great Pyramid, Walls and Gardens of Babylon, Zeus' statue, Temple of Artemis...
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A Carpenter Gothic church in rural Victoria, 1856
In the 1840s, according to Bobb Stagg (Gippsland Country Life 21, Summer 2012), the Church began making visits to the early settlers in Gippsland in Far Eastern Victoria. Itinerant ministers travelling...
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French art and architecture in San Francisco - Legion of Honour
Alma de Bretteville (1881–1968) was an American teenager who developed a love of art and enrolled in San Francisco’s Mark Hopkins Institute of Art to focus on painting. She may not have had a great...
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Australian history in English silver art: 1864
This large 1864 presentation vase was and is the most important example of mid-C19th silver in the Australian Collection at the Queensland Art Gallery, cast and chased to the nth degree. Its elaborate...
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Sonoma - the most important Spanish Mission in California?
A few years ago, when visiting San Diego, I was fascinated by the Spanish plan to dot the Californian coastline with Catholic missions. In every location along the 966ks-long el Camino Real, the goals...
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Worcester Festival - porcelain, music and garden landscaping
Worcester (pop 100,000) is not a city I know well, but it is a city that has touched my life in three significant ways.Firstly I love looking at, and especially collecting early Royal Worcester...
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Oskar Schindler's factory-museum
Oskar Schindler was born in 1908 in Moravia, now in the Czech Republic but then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Many Sudeten Germans became ardent Nazis because of their resentment towards Czechs, whom...
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Heritage synagogue architecture in Hong Kong
Jewish representatives of Baghdad-based trading houses made their way by sea from India and the ports of the Persian Gulf, along the Asian coast to the port cities of South East Asia. Communities were...
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Gertrude Stein, Alice B Toklas and Harriet Lane Levy
Harriet Lane Levy (1867–1950) was born in San Francisco in 1867 and lived at 920 O'Farrell Street until her mid 30s. Like Gertrude Stein, Alice B Toklas and Stein’s cousins Claribel Cone and Etta Cone,...
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Jane Austen's House Museum
Would you have ever heard of Chawton if it was not where Jane Austen (1775–1817) created her work? Just as well I adored Austen novels during my young teenage years, devouring Sense and Sensibility,...
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Seven Wonders of the World: Taj Mahal, Agra
In Life Magazine (Vol 13, 2, June 2013)’s quest to find the Wonders of the Man-Made World, India’s Taj Mahal came fourth. So who created this masterpiece and why? Enperor Shahjahan (1592–1666) was one...
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