As for when, who, where and what form the musical may take, we’ll have to wait and see, as Lloyd Webber continues: “And, more than that, I can’t really tell you, for the simple reason that I am going away next week to write it.”

Woman Begging with Two Children — the eponymous painting from whose distinctive indigo fabric the entire group took its name — has entered a public collection. The @Pinacoteca_Zuest has received this canvas as a generous donation from the Fondazione Dr. Joseph Scholz (Zürich), ensuring that a work of remarkable art historical significance is now accessible to all. [...]

It was around this very composition that Gerlinde Gruber first assembled and published the group in 2006–2007, before Galerie Canesso presented The Master of the Blue Jeans. A New Painter of Reality in Late 17th-Century Europe in Paris and New York in 2010–2011 — an exhibition that brought this anonymous master to international attention and firmly established his place in the history of art, and in the history of the Blue Jeans fabric.

To see the painting that gave a name to an entire body of work enter a museum is, for us, the most fitting outcome imaginable.

This Residency will support an early-career researcher with a strong interest in Scottish art to undertake in-depth curatorial research on a work, or group of works, from the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation’s collection. The successful applicant will make significant use of the PMC’s Archives & Library during their research, as well as the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation’s collection and network, and be given academic and curatorial support from both institutions. They will then develop a proposal for a display suitable for the PMC’s Display Room.

This spring, the gallery presents Elizabeth I: Queen and Court, an exhibition exploring how portraiture shaped one of Britain’s most iconic reigns. Featuring outstanding Tudor works drawn from private collections, the exhibition includes the earliest surviving life-size, full-length portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, alongside portraits of some of the key figures from her close circle of courtiers and confidantes. These rarely seen paintings reveal how portraiture functioned as a tool of power and was used to project authority, secure allegiance, and, in rare cases, register dissent.

The Cultural Work of the Early Modern Dutch Portrait examines how portraits of Amalia van Solms, Princess of Orange (1602–1675), functioned as active cultural agents that connected people across time and space, participating in domestic, national, and international politics throughout the seventeenth century.

This interdisciplinary study reveals how portraits served as powerful tools beyond mere facial records, actively negotiating relationships, building bridges, engendering communities, soothing egos, evoking memories, and constructing fame. Through engaging with gender studies, collecting and display history, Dutch art history, architectural history, and reception theory, the book challenges assumptions about what portraits accomplished, for whom, and in what spaces. By focusing on Amalia van Solms as a case study, readers gain insights into how portraits functioned as links in larger social chains and discover the sophisticated cultural work these images performed. The study promotes a collaborative, interdisciplinary approach that clarifies early modern women’s contributions to seventeenth-century art, architecture, and politics while revealing the remarkable capacity of portraits to shape social and political landscapes.

Painted to celebrate the marriage of Sir Reginald Mohun to Dorothy Chudleigh in 1602, the painting marks the first occasion in British art that wife and husband were depicted together at full length. This innovation frees space for the newlyweds to express mutual affection through their body language, and they take the opportunity to tenderly intertwine their arms.

Moreover, the format puts the sitters’ fashionable clothes on full display. The circular pendant on Dorothy’s dress appears to be porphyry, an extremely hard stone embodying love’s endurance. The material was mined locally to the Mohuns’s home and the workshop that produced this portrait in the South of England.

The University of St Andrews and The National Gallery, London, are pleased to announce a fully funded 4-year Collaborative Doctoral Studentship starting in September 2026 under the AHRC’s Collaborative Doctoral Partnership (CDP) scheme.

Since its foundation in 1903, the Burlington Magazine has played a pivotal role in the British art world. This PhD will use the newly acquired and catalogued Burlington Magazine Archive at the National Gallery to make a significant and original contribution to our understanding of the art world and its development in twentieth-century Britain. The student will have the opportunity to shape their own research area in relation to the diverse areas covered by the Burlington, including histories of art history, the art market, museum history, and publication.

The project will be jointly supervised by Dr Sam Rose (St Andrews), Dr Jack Hartnell (National Gallery), and Dr Nicholas Smith (National Gallery). 

The present work is essentially a curated on-screen exhibition consisting of about a hundred and sixty contemporary and posthumous portraits of Sir Francis Bacon.

The exhibits are arranged chronologically in five categories: paintings, engravings, statues, medals and ephemera. There are no page numbers as such, however, each work is numbered to facilitate cross-referencing between the portraits. This is essential because, with only a few exceptions, all of the many posthumous works were derived from portraits made during Bacon's life-time.

The simple raison d'être behind this selective compilation of the portraits of Francis Bacon is that it needed to be done, however inadequately. Four hundred years after his death, Bacon's writings are in wider circulation than ever. For anyone reading about or researching his life and works, especially Baconians, this online gallery hopes to provide a convenient and more or less comprehensive guide to his most significant portraits. The process of selection was based on several criteria. A handful of artists were impossible to research due to the absence of any available information about them or their work and had to be deleted from the inventory. Certain engravings of Bacon's image are so numerous and often so similar to each other that a representative selection had to be made. Visual appeal was not necessarily a criterion of selection, however some images have been culled on admittedly subjective aesthetic grounds.

UCL History of Art is seeking to appoint a full-time Lecturer (Grade 8) specialising in art and visual cultures, c.1300–1700. The successful appointee will have a relevant PhD and a track record of publications and research excellence in their field. They will join a thriving department with close links to London’s museums and gallery networks and a university with a vibrant and diverse research culture that is consistently ranked one of the top ten universities globally.

The National Portrait Gallery holds the world’s most significant public collection of Tudor and Jacobean paintings. Between 2007 and 2012, its transformative research project ‘Making Art in Tudor Britain’ generated unprecedented heritage-science data on 120 portraits from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. A central element of the project was the taking of paint samples, mounted as cross-sections, to investigate paint composition and structure. However, images and detailed metadata from these cross-sections are not currently in formats suitable for broad dissemination.

The missing piece: sharing cross-sections from the ‘Making Art in Tudor Britain’ project is a research initiative supported by Heritage Science Data Service Small Grants Programme. You will take a key role delivering the project, with responsibility to identify cross-sections produced during the original research; extract relevant metadata from the reports; re-photograph samples; review and align metadata with the new images; and prepare the full dataset for sharing with HSDS for wider dissemination.

Marguerite Gérard was among the most accomplished artists of her time, celebrated for her intimate depictions of domestic life and her nuanced exploration of women’s roles during a period of profound transformation in France. Influenced by 17th-century Dutch genre painters such as Gabriel Metsu, her work is distinguished by its refined detail, subtle storytelling, and delicately blended brushwork. In I Was Thinking of You, these qualities are brought into dialogue with the fluidity and expressive brilliance of Fragonard.

Executed à quatre mains, the painting is a rare and compelling example of the artistic collaboration between Fragonard and his sister-in-law Gérard, who lived and worked within his studio. Their combined hands produce a work of remarkable harmony, uniting Fragonard’s spirited handling with Gérard’s precision and sensitivity to create a composition of great elegance and intimacy.

One of the two teenage boys featured in the portrait is of African heritage, representing an very early full-length depiction of a black figure in English art.

The rare nature of the portrait has inspired a major research project with the National Portrait Gallery to identify both the boys.

The painting, which has been at Penshurst Place since at least 1743, will go on display at the gallery in London from September.