The Story of Art – 2 May 2025

Blake continues to swirl and explode in my thoughts, thanks to Philip Hoare’s latest book. Add to that that recent days have been bathed in sunflower light, that it may actually be warm enough to melt a clock, that I have been reading Nick Makoha’s poetry collection about Jean-Michel Basquiat* and that we have not one but two events with art historian Franny Moyle coming up and it seems that we need to expand the art section.

With my unbiased and well-honed eye, I am quite confident in claiming that my six-year-old niece is an artistic genius. She drew a picture of me in the old shop which nods to her Gainsborough-esque portraiture abilities but with that touch of whimsy which makes it not out of place Blu-Tacked to the fridge. At a restaurant, when presented with a picture and colouring pencils, the supplied borders were not for her. No matter that she can use colour like Hockney. Instead she saw space in between for her own creations. An octopus would do better with a further eight tentacles. A starfish need not be shaped like a star. Move over Dadaists.

I’m excited to show her Small Stories of Great Artists written and illustrated by Laurence Anholt, a vivid book with stories told from the point of view of children who encountered Vincent Van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, Edgar Degas, and others, in order to introduce the artists’ works, reproductions of which adorn each page.

In the chapter on Monet, a girl is led by her dog Louey into magical gardens where she meets the painter planting bulbs, walks with him across a green bridge and rows with him in a pond filled with waterlilies.

It’s such an immersive and special book. Though I note the absence of Holbein, Vigée Le Brun, Turner and Constable, Ithell Colquhoun and the Dalís. Fortunately, there are no gaps on our shelves, primed as they are with the following.

• The King’s Painter: The Life and Times of Hans Holbein by Franny Moyle is itself a brilliant portrait of Holbein, painter of Anne of Cleves, Henry VIII, Thomases More and Cromwell and many others in the Tudor court. The book is a fascinating history of the man and the times; I am so pleased that a new paperback edition is coming out with stunning production values and the best endpapers I’ve ever seen. Franny will be signing copies and answering questions about Holbein in the shop on 10^th May from 11am. Meanwhile I will be there answering questions about flapjacks. (Yes, you may have another, while you question Franny about the subtle links to the Virgin Mary in Holbein’s portrait of Henry’s unfortunate fourth wife.)  
• Mrs Kauffman and Madame Le Brun also by Franny Moyle is out in September, when we will be hosting a talk on these two artists who met in Rome in 1790, discussed art and literature and became great friends. I have just dipped into Vigée Le Brun’s Souvenirs from a Memoir, meeting a painter recognised as extraordinary from the age of fifteen, so prolific as to author more than eight hundred works of art in her lifetime and so tireless that she continued painting even whilst in labour. 
• Turner and Constable: Art, Life, Landscape by Nicola Moorby aims to strip away the agreed upon fictions about these two oft-compared artists. Rather than focus on their apparent rivalry, Moorby notes their collegiate relationship and examines their paintings in the light of this, as well as their role in the rise of landscape painting in the Romantic age.
• Ithell Colquhoun: Between Worlds accompanies the Tate exhibition (moving from the world of St Ives to London shortly). Colquhoun was a surrealist fascinated by bodies, ecology and occultism and a short story and travel writer. (Her travels seem to involve encounters with faeries as well as landscapes and people.) I can’t wait to see the exhibition though living it through the book is an experience too: I imagine that walking around it is like being in a Buñuel film and a Leonora Carrington story combined.
• Surreal by Michèle Gerber Klein is a biography of Gala Dalí, the ‘Mother of Surrealism,’ a style icon, wife of Paul Éluard and then Salvador Dalí, and the businesswoman behind that extraordinary moustache. Just try calling her a muse. I dare you. Watch out for the lion snoozing on her lap.

From the surreal to the fictional, I so enjoyed The Artist by Lucy Steeds and The Homemade God by Rachel Joyce. Steeds’ novel imagines the life of a reclusive painter, a contemporary and competitor of Cézanne’s. The descriptions of arranging subjects for a painting are beautiful and the title transforms as the story progresses.

The Homemade God follows the four children of a highly successful, and risqué, artist failing to deal with the sudden death of their father. The relationships between the siblings – both loving and jealous – fill the story with such heart.

Surreal and fictional, Mr Distinctive by Olga Tokarczuk is really a work of art by Joanna Concejo with a story to illuminate it. Black Mirror meets Ovid meets Shaun Tan…

Finally, while I am not the biggest fan of spiders, particularly the sizeable, juicy one which has moved into my sitting room (that’s OK, I didn’t want to go in there anyway), I do appreciate the sun glinting through a good web of a morning. In Christie Bounsall’s picture book, Eve: The Weavin’ Vegan wants to bring more colour to the world. Abandoning a diet of flies, she turns to bright food so that she can spin in dazzling shades of green, purple, red and orange, thanks to broccoli, aubergines, tomatoes and baked beans… Delicious.

Tonight we host a private launch for The Sunshine Man by Emma Stonex, both a pacy thriller and a delicate story of family secrets and the assumptions we make about others. If you would like a copy signed and dedicated to you, do let us know, ideally before the drinks and the heat and the baked bean canapés go to our heads.

May your weekend be painted with sunshine and webbed with colour,
Lizzie

*Actually it’s about a hijacked plane landing in Entebbe, Uganda and the resulting bloodshed. But also Basquiat.