Category: Voice

Giverny in Normandy, where Claude Monet lived and painted for 43 years, was until this spring one of the most visited artists’ homes in the world. Up to 2,000 people passed through its brightly coloured rooms and famous gardens every day. Inevitably, this presented a problem as Giverny became a victim of its own success […]

Best art on show this winter

Andrea Marechal Watson reports on trends in the jewelley trade Early man believed that the strange bright stones they found in mountains and on river beds, created by mysterious underground forces, were somehow godlike. Countless legends spanning the world from ancient Greece to Australia share the idea that jewels are somehow of divine or superhuman […]

How Outsider Art has become big business

Across London, colourful murals in all manner of styles from bright graffiti to verdant jungles are appearing on walls and houses, many painted to order. And it’s not just in the East End. Dover Street Market in Mayfair just celebrated its 15th birthday with a work by the Russian artist Pokras Lampas. Other commemorative murals […]

A pen and ink sketch by the Renaissance master Andrea Mantegna, currently on tour, is to be offered for sale by Sotheby’s New York on January 29th. The preparatory drawing for a painting in the Triumphs of Caesar series belonging to the Royal Collection and now in Hampton Court Palace, is one of only 20 […]

CHELSEA BARRACKS – The beginning of an artistic legacy By Andrea Marechal Watson ‘Poetry and Sculpture exist to keep our passions alive’ the Irish poet W.B Yeats used to tell his fellow students. At Chelsea Barracks a series of inscriptions bring together these two pillars of the fine arts. The Chelsea Barracks Frieze takes the […]

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the designs of William Morris – his trellises and willows and honeysuckles – are a little out-of-date and irrelevant. Popular designs like Strawberry Thief adorn cushions and mugs but do they really fit the modern interior? Surprisingly, not only have these botanical themes made a massive comeback but Morris […]

Centred on a haunted house in the suburbs of Mumbai, the Indian horror film Vaastu Shastra takes its title from ancient Vedic principles of architecture. The plot involves a young family who move to their new home with an old banyan tree in the garden. As the film rapidly descends into gore and nonsense, we […]

The rich are famously time poor. But with P.N.C. Menon, the billionaire founder of Sobha Realty, it’s not like that. The Indian-born property mogul, who recently opened an office in Park Lane, Mayfair (ironically in premises vacated by Foxtons) lives up to the image of a “suited yogi” and seem genuinely time rich as we […]