Pastoral love: nine paintings of lovers in fields, woods and hay
Under a red parasol by the wheat, in a haystack, on a bench in a birch wood. Nine paintings of country love, from Daphnis and Chloe to the Black Forest.
Art Stories
Stories behind the art: extraordinary artworks, the stories they hold, and ways to make them yours.
The history of tarot, from Renaissance cards to the reading deck
Tarot began as a card game at the courts of fifteenth-century Italy. Here is how it became the deck we read today.
Rodolphe Bresdin: entering the impossible forest
Two woodland prints reward a slower gaze. Explore Bresdin’s branches, tangled lines and luminous openings, then find your own way into the forest.
What Makes Fable Fable
An archive with a long memory. Artists at Vaxholm Fortress. Original technology, made personal.
Birds, flowers and gold: the world of Kanō Mitsunobu
A closer look at Japanese screen painting, seasonal movement and the gold ground in Birds and Flowers, attributed to Kanō Mitsunobu and Kanō Shōei.
How Fable turns an engraving into a colour edition
From reviewed scene extraction to individual image review: how Fable prepares an engraving for a contemporary colour interpretation.
Rococo romance: ten paintings of swings, gardens and gallant couples
Fragonard's swing, Boucher's shepherds, and the painters of the 1880s to 1920s who dreamed of powdered wigs and silk. Love in the eighteenth-century manner.
The history of the Christmas card, in twelve Victorian cards
In 1843 a busy civil servant had too many letters to write and asked a painter friend for help. Fifty years later Britain was posting millions of Christmas cards. Here is how it happened, card by card.
Samuel Palmer’s In a Shoreham Garden: a world of extraordinary light
Step into In a Shoreham Garden: blossom, a narrow path and a tiny figure transform a familiar place into a visionary world.