4 William Blake works for a world beyond the ordinary
A dragon, a fallen king, a midnight creature and a luminous rescue. Enter Blake’s imagination through four extraordinary images.
Art Stories
Stories behind the art: extraordinary artworks, the stories they hold, and ways to make them yours.
Famous paintings of houses: 14 homes that great painters fell for
A painting of a house is never only about walls and windows. These fourteen are about pride, memory, loss and home, from a burnt-out Dutch manor to the red cottage that shaped Swedish design.
4 Arnold Böcklin paintings for a beautifully strange room
A ruined shore, a listening painter, sea creatures and a solitary musician. Four moods from Böcklin’s imaginative world.
The Cary-Yale Visconti tarot, painted for the last Duke of Milan
Older than the Visconti–Sforza deck, with Faith, Hope and Charity among its trumps and women knights in its suits. The 67 cards at Yale, and the ones that are lost.
A museum walk after hours: Masterworks by lantern light
A lantern, four rooms and a wall drawn to scale. How to walk our collection one story at a time, from Saint George to the myths of Le Temple des Muses.
The Palace of Sleep and its two gates of dreams
Horn and ivory gates, nocturnal figures and competing interpretations in the final plate of Le Temple des Muses.
4 Baroque masterpieces: the warmth of Rubens, the presence of Velázquez
From an arresting gaze to a sweeping allegory, four works reveal how much a body, a gesture and a little light can say.
From photo to famous portrait: 8 before and afters in the style of the old masters
Eight everyday photos and the portraits made from them in the manner of Lely, Lawrence, Renoir, Tissot and Zorn, side by side with the paintings that inspired them, and how to choose your own.
Flirtation in art: ten courtship paintings from parlours and taverns
A serenade by the stove, a needle being threaded, a whisper over a beer. Ten paintings of courtship in everyday life, from Bavaria to Venice.