Recent stories of note:
“The wish list: objects at Tefaf Maastrict 2025 to suit every collector’s taste”
Aimee Dawson, The Art Newspaper
Starting tomorrow, in the Netherlands’ southern panhandle, TEFAF Maastricht will be in full swing. The annual international art fair is known as a hub for Old Master sales, and many American curators and collectors have undoubtedly already decamped there for the week, seeking treasures for their walls. In The Art Newspaper, Aimee Dawson offers some objects to keep an eye out for—or at least, for most of us, to admire from afar—including a sensitively painted Titian, a medieval French manuscript telling the legend of Alexander the Great, and ancient Egyptian carnelian amulets.
“Itch to Shine”
Freya Johnston, London Review of Books
Jane Austen is widely considered the quintessential novelist of courtship, but her writings rarely tell us what comes after engagement. Rory Muir’s newly released Love and Marriage in the Age of Jane Austen fills out this picture with a historical study of courtship, love, and marriage in late Georgian England, and Freya Johnston homes in on Austen’s personal courtship history in her review for the London Review of Books. Though Austen herself never married, her characters are not a little autobiographical: for example, suggests Johnston, Mr. Collins of Pride and Prejudice smacks of one of Austen’s own rather disappointing suitors, who had, according to Austen’s niece, “nothing but his size to recommend him.”
“The greatest paintings are always full of important unimportant things”
Craig Raine, The Spectator
A stray hair, a matchbox lying around, or a loose piece of paper: these kinds of extraneous details are what often make a painting all the more striking. So writes the poet Craig Raine for The Spectator, savoring the details of the Courtauld Institute’s current exhibition “Goya to Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection.” Twenty-five works, selected for a visit to London from the over two hundred held in Switzerland, reveal a collector who followed his tastes, which leaned Impressionist but favored a bit of everything rather than adhering to a theme. Raine delights in the eclectic exhibition’s details—Goya’s salmon skins “like silver-mesh watch-straps” and the “soft as mink” shadow of a mustache on a Renoir woman—and gives some delectable tidbits of his own, proffering snippets of poetry to pair with the works.
