Ruskin: a visitor’s first view of St. Mark’s, Venice

…beyond those troops of ordered arches there rises a vision out of the earth, and all the great square seems to have opened from it in a kind of awe, that we may see it far away;-a multitude of pillars...

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Ruskin remembering clouds

I remember once, when in crossing the Tête Noire, I had turned up the valley towards Trient, I noticed a rain-cloud forming on the Glacier de Trient. With a west wind, It proceeded towards the Col de Balme, being followed...

Ave Atque Vale by Swinburne

Swinburne heard mistakenly that Baudelaire had died, and produced the following poem 'In Memory of Charles Baudelaire'. Baudelaire died in Paris, on the 31st August, 1867 at only aged 46. Nous devrions pourtant lui porter quelques fleurs; Les morts, les...

Highgate Cemetery

When Highgate Cemetery opened in 1839, it looked very different to the green ivy-covered gothic (small g) evocation that it is now. Back then, as The Penny Magazine wrote: the landscape was manicured and formal with ‘parterres of sweet-scented flowers,...

Matisse in the Studio at the Royal Academy

The current Royal Academy exhibition, Matisse in the Studio, has hit a cord with many critics: The knick-knacks that became great art – The Telegraph[1] The RA's new exhibition beckons us into the hedonistic cocoon of the artist's studio, where...

Burne-Jones: the Hidden Humourist

This 2011 book is a lovely little dip into the more private world of Burne-Jones through his correspondence caricatures. It is essentially, an expanded and refreshed reprint of Letters to Katie: the parameters having been widened to include more text...