By using this website you agree to our Cookie policy

April 2025

Vol. 167 | No. 1465

Art in Britain

Editorial

Boughton’s heavenly visions

Boughton in Northamptonshire is an improbable dream of a house. It is an essay in restrained French Classicism that was gently set into the English countryside in the late seventeenth century, encasing an older building (Fig.1). The house was chiefly the creation of the francophile Ralph, 1st Duke of Montagu (1638–1709), who served as Charles II’s ambassador to the court of Louis XIV. Its most splendid internal feature is the so-called Grand Apartment, which consists of a parade of impressive state rooms.

Editorial read more
Exhibition Review

The Great Mughals: Art, Architecture and Opulence

A once-in-a-lifetime event, this exhibition spans the century of the greatest grandeur enjoyed by the Mughal Empire, from 1560 to 1660. One of the largest centralised states in Early Modern history, it encompassed most of subcontinental India, far outstripping in size and resources both the contemporary Islamic empires of the Safavids and Ottomans, and in global terms it was rivalled only by Ming China.

Exhibition Review read more
  • Van Tromp’s Shallop, at the Entrance of the Scheldt (previously mistitled Van Tromp Returning after the Battle off the Dogger Bank)

    Turner’s ‘Staffa, Fingal’s Cave’: exporting ‘indistinctness’

    By Ian Warrell

    J.M.W. Turner’s ‘Staffa, Fingal’s Cave’ in the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, was the first of the artist’s oil paintings to reach the United States. The circumstances surrounding its transport and reception, as well as the artist’s involvement in this process, are fully revealed for the first time through a close study of the related correspondence in the New York Public Library.

  • The monarch of the glen

    ‘The monarch of the glen’: painting for the new Houses of Parliament

    By Stephen Duffy
    The discovery of a letter in which Edwin Landseer discussed his most famous commission, ‘The monarch of the glen’, along with a reappraisal of the known documentation associated with it, provides a fuller, more nuanced understanding of this key Victorian work in the context of the decorative programme of the Palace of Westminster, London.
  • RA lecture illustration of the colonnade at Burlington House

    The discovery of James Gibbs’s designs for the façade of Burlington House

    By William Aslet
    A reassessment of drawings by Gibbs in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, demonstrates that, as well as the stables, service wings and celebrated colonnade, the architect provided an unexecuted design for the façade of Burlington House, London – an aspect of the project with which he has hitherto not been connected. This discovery deepens our understanding of one of the most important townhouse commissions of eighteenth-century Britain and the evolving taste of Lord Burlington.
  • The Walpole miniature cabinet

    A serendipitous discovery: a lost Italian portrait from Horace Walpole’s miniature cabinet

    Among the portraits in Horace Walpole’s renowned collection at Strawberry Hill were a number of images of Bianca Cappello, a Medici grand duchess of some notoriety. Here the rediscovery of a late sixteenth-century Italian miniature once displayed in Walpole’s cabinet is discussed; long thought to depict Cappello, it is now attributed to Lavinia Fontana.
  • Diana Cecil, Countess of Oxford and Elgin

    The portraits of Alice Spencer, Countess of Derby, and her family by Paul van Somer

    By Edward Town,Jessica David

    Research into a portrait at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, has revealed the identities of twelve Jacobean portraits attributed to the Flemish painter Paul van Somer. The portraits were probably commissioned by Alice Spencer, Countess of Derby, and create a potent illustration of her dynastic heritage.