Susan Owens

Susan Owens is an art historian and curator. She is the author of 'Spirit of Place: Artists, Writers and the British Landscape' (Thames & Hudson), ‘The Ghost: A Cultural History’ (Tate Publishing) and co-author of ‘Christina Rossetti: Poetry in Art’ (Yale University Press)

The drugged-up doodles of Henri Michaux

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

8 April 2025

The artists who were obsessed with West Sussex

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

22 May 2024

The Victorians who were drawn to colour

The Ashmolean’s new show vividly demonstrates how strong colours became a mainstay of 19th-century art

23 October 2023

The landscape that shaped Gainsborough’s view of the world

The painter’s house in Suffolk now tells a compelling story about his formative influence

3 January 2023

The greatness of Constable’s lateness

In the decade before his death, John Constable developed a freer hand to follow new visions – to astonishing effect

22 November 2021

Sting in the tale – how Gustave Moreau added bite to La Fontaine’s fables

Rarely exhibited since their creation, the intense, jewel-like watercolours of the French symbolist make for exhilarating viewing

17 September 2021

Walter Scott conjured up a playground for painters – and they fixed his fantasy of Scotland in place

The novelist may be little read today, but his fiction inspired an enduring, Romantic vision of the past

4 August 2021

How to cope with Stendhal syndrome when it strikes

The mysterious affliction usually only assails art buffs in Florence – but with many museums finally set to reopen, will visitors start dropping like flies?

7 May 2021

The British artists who saw a world on their doorsteps

Landscape painting went local in 19th-century Britain, writes Susan Owens, as artists celebrated the miniature marvels they found close to home

7 February 2021

That’s the spirit – how the Romans imagined the dead

The various ways in which the ancient Romans depicted figures from the afterlife tell us much about contemporary preoccupations

5 June 2020