Journal

How Japanese prints changed Western art

Flat colour, bold cropping, everyday subjects: what Whistler, Cassatt, Bonnard and Arthur Wesley Dow took from Hokusai and Hiroshige, told through works and museum texts.

Painting the moon: night scenes from Grimshaw to Munch

How painters and printmakers in England, France, Norway, the United States and Japan turned moonlight into atmosphere, poetry and mood. Every fact comes from the museums that hold the works.

The true stories behind 10 spooky paintings

A ghost in a paper lantern, a skeleton on a racetrack, witches at their cauldron: the real stories behind ten frightening pictures, told with the museums' own texts.

Women alone: paintings of solitude, 1868-1907

A woman at a café table, at a window at night, reading in a field, ironing in a cramped Paris flat: how painters from Paris to Copenhagen and Oslo showed women on their own, and what the museums say about these scenes.