Art

The theft of the most famous painting in the world on August 21st, 1911, created a media sensation.

Though superb works of art in themselves, the wildlife paintings of Francis Barlow are full of rich metaphors that shed light on the anxieties and concerns of a Britain emerging from the horrors of civil war, says Nathan Flis.

The English caricaturist James Gillray died on June 1st, 1815. Cartoon historian Mark Bryant explores the work of the man who invented the art of political cartooning, and asks what effect his drawings had on one of their targets.

The Britain that emerged victorious from the Second World War was impoverished, bomb-damaged and ration-weary. The Festival of Britain of 1951 (the year of History Today‘s launch) was designed to herald a brighter future, celebrating the British people’s ingenuity. Though most of its architecture has long disappeared, the cultural legacy of the festival remains strong.

Almost none of the large outdoor artworks commissioned for the 1951 Festival of Britain has survived. Alan Powers discusses one that did, a mural by John Piper, which returns to London’s South Bank this month.

Richard Almond describes how some rare wall paintings help shed light on medieval hunting.

As a major new exhibition on the Aesthetic Movement opens at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Richard Cavendish explores Bedford Park, the garden suburb inspired by the movement’s ideals.

Jacqueline Riding examines how a 19th-century painting, created almost 150 years after the Jacobite defeat at Culloden, has come to dominate the iconography of that event.

Jan Gossaert made his name working for the Burgundian court and was among the first northern artists to visit Rome, writes Susan Foister, curator of 'Jan Gossaert's Renaissance', the only exhibition in more than 45 years of works by this archetypal ‘Old Master’.

In our series in which historians look back on the changes that have taken place in their field in the 60 years since the founding of History Today, Daniel Snowman takes a personal view of new approaches to the study of the history of culture and the arts – and of music in particular.

Nothing captures the past like a drop of perfume, says Roja Dove, connoisseur and curator of a recent survey of the history of perfume, as he sniffs out the fragrances that characterised their age.

Though they originated in China, it was in the capitals of early modern Europe that fireworks flourished. They united art and science in awesome displays of poltical might, as Simon Werrett explains.

Painter of genius, gifted courtier and much-travelled man of the world, Rubens reached England in 1629, charged with the delicate task of furthering an entente between the Spanish government and Great Britain. C.V. Wedgwood shows how he enjoyed the conversation of his youthful host, whose fine aesthetic taste he shared, but shrewdly judged the weakness of King Charles I’s diplomacy.