Susan Owens is an art historian and curator. Her latest book, Constable’s Year: An Artist in Changing Seasons, is published by Thames & Hudson. Her previous books include The Story of Drawing (Yale) and Imagining England’s Past (Thames & Hudson).
The artist’s ‘candlelight’ paintings marry the pursuit of knowledge with wonder and suspense
The painter abandoned his father’s corn business to pursue his artistic training – but it was his real agricultural knowledge that set him apart from his contemporaries
The artist’s mescaline trips in the 1950s and ’60s led to extraordinary acts of creativity, when he tried to pin down their effect on paper
Blake, Constable and Ivon Hitchens all feature in Alexandra Harris’s account of a place she knows well, but it’s the more obscure figures who really shine
The Ashmolean’s new show vividly demonstrates how strong colours became a mainstay of 19th-century art
The painter’s house in Suffolk now tells a compelling story about his formative influence
In the decade before his death, John Constable developed a freer hand to follow new visions – to astonishing effect
Rarely exhibited since their creation, the intense, jewel-like watercolours of the French symbolist make for exhilarating viewing
The novelist may be little read today, but his fiction inspired an enduring, Romantic vision of the past
The mysterious affliction usually only assails art buffs in Florence – but with many museums finally set to reopen, will visitors start dropping like flies?
