Essays & Features

I introduce a new edition of Mary Chamberlain’s landmark work of rural and social history. Fenwomen: A Portrait of Women in an English Village is now reissued in a 50th anniversary edition.

“Fenwomen catches with extraordinary vividness the routines and concerns of its moment in the mid-1970s, and, reaching back in memory, it suggests patterns of experience across a full century. It has the power to shock us in the present – with the extremity of what women have endured, and with the familiarity of tensions that are still far from resolved.”

Photo copyright Angela Phillips

JMW Turner’s ethereal landscapes are works of conceptual collage – yet the magic of his painting came from his keen observation of light and scenery. This essay for Tate tries to fathom his strange powers.

“Harnessing the visual language he revised and honed through all his port pictures, Turner makes a political protest that reaches back to antiquity and forward to us in the present. The arrest of a poet signals that a whole civilisation is in decline. The suppression of imaginative freedom is no marginal matter but casts glorious empires into cooler light.”

An essay for the Royal Academy celebrating the lucid watercolours of Turner’s great friend and rival.

“The White House at Chelsea is particular and intimate, yet so simple as to have an abstract and universal quality. It’s a secular revelation. Any humble place might suddenly, quietly become for a moment the organising centre of a world. Girtin’s mastery and originality as a watercolourist is in everything he doesn’t do here, leaving the foreground bare, holding back from expressive gestures, giving space to the calm.”

A long-read for royalacademy.org.uk, drawing on research in the RA archive and thinking about the relationship between fine art, design, and the objects we want to take home.

‘…A 1993 visit to Terry Frost in Cornwall produced a particularly long list of proposed products, from ‘Tikkers’ watches to socks, plates, and rugs. There’s no sign of Frost being concerned to protect the purity and apartness of his abstract forms. Where Alexander Calder’s mobiles in the 1930s had been silent, otherworldly aerial sculptures, Frost was happy to see his half-circles and dashes bobbing and floating on affordable mobiles for children…’

Painting the wildness of nature in the midst of her domestic garden, Jean Cooke made works that revealed her freedom of spirit. This appreciation was published in the Royal Academy magazine, responding to an illuminating show at the Garden Museum.

Royal Academy of Arts Magazine, Spring 2024.

“Her name was heard in the coffee houses and parlours of London before she arrived. Angelica Kauffman: a young painter in Italy who was coming to England. Prodigiously talented, it was said. She was Swiss, apparently, though some said Austrian. She spoke at least four languages. She had studied in the galleries of Milan, and Bologna, and Rome. Her Portrait of David Garrick, painted in Naples, had already been displayed at the Free Society of Artists in London. There the actor was: turning in his chair, alert, with an air of amusement but taking it seriously, gripped by the experience of being painted. A woman artist staring in the face of a man: it wasn’t proper. Yet really it didn’t look indecent, this picture. Its intensity was of another kind. It was as if one brilliant, questing, assured artist were looking right in the eye of another.”