There are no rules, and even less justice. Death takes everyone without discrimination. Sometimes it is accidental - like Signorelli, who fell from scaffolding. Sometimes it is expected, as with the diabetic Cezanne, who wrote "I am old, sick, and I swore to die while painting". But often, researching a painter's death is an easier task than determining which of their works is truly their 'last'. Paintings tend to be dated by year and not month, inciting much debate among art historians. This...

A new book by Angela Harding, author of A Year Unfolding

Living for Art is the life story of the eminent Dutch collector, art dealer, researcher and author Frits Lugt (1884-1970). Between 1901 and 1915 he worked for an Amsterdam auction house, which flourished thanks in no small measure to his efforts. In 1915 he started to collect paintings, drawings, prints and antiquities on his own account. While he collected great masters like Rembrandt, Dürer, Rubens, Van Dyck and Watteau, he did not neglect other artists and acquired some outstanding works ...

Throughout his life, Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) was considered an exceptional artist by contemporary art lovers. In this highly original book, Ernst van de Wetering investigates why Rembrandt, from a very early age, was praised by high-placed connoisseurs like Constantijn Huygens. It turns out that Rembrandt, from his first endeavours in painting on, had embarked on a journey past all the 'foundations of the art of painting' which were considered essential in the seventeenth century. In h...

Nonagenarian Japanese artist is simultaneously one of the most famous and most mysterious artists on the planet. A wild child of the 1950s and 1960s, she emerged out of the international Fluxus movement to launch naked happenings in New York and went on to become a doyenne of that city's counter-cultural scene. In the early 1970s, she returned to Japan and by 1977 had checked herself in to a psychiatric hospital which has remained her home to this day. But, though she was removed from the wor...

A stunning visual biography of one of Japan's most famous historical artists, this book beautifully illustrates the story of Katsushika Hokusai.

Listening to the Voice of the Heart is an invitation to revisit your self-image, values, and to recognize your hidden desires, your secret dreams. At the same time, it brings the romanticism of one who inhabits their own dream and recognizes their weaknesses without dwelling in them.

It is an appeal to sensitivity, whether in artistic creation and appreciation, or in attention to affection and the beauty of everyday life.

I hope that by diving into these thought pills each reader can revisit ...