Francesca Whitlum-Cooper

A focus on Caravaggio's last work, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, telling the story of an empowered female saint. In early May 1610, Caravaggio finished painting The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula. Two months later, he was dead, having been disfigured in a brawl and become ill while trying to return from exile to Rome. Caravaggio is one of the most...

The second book in the “Discover” series, this illuminating study explores Liotard’s little-known The Lavergne Family Breakfast (1754), widely regarded as a pastel masterpiece. Jean-Etienne Liotard’s The Lavergne Family Breakfast, acquired by the National Gallery in 2019, is one of the Gallery’s most important eighteenth-century pictures and one of the artist’s largest and most ambitious pastels. Last exhibited in 1755,...

Dedicated to Francisco de Zurbarán, one of the greatest painters of seventeenth-century Spain, this publication celebrates the drama and power of his distinctive body of work. Francisco de Zurbarán is, alongside Diego Velázquez and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, one of the three great painters of seventeenth-century Spain. His works are celebrated for their startling naturalism, directness, and deep emotional power. He...

I was transfixed by Portrait - HANNAH ROTHSCHILD ‘Imaginative, absorbing, very moving’ - MICHAEL PALIN 'Quietly beautiful, deeply felt' - JOANNE BURN Between 1898 and his death in 1916, the Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi painted more than two dozen pictures of his wife, Ida, seen only from the back. This is her story, told from the front. Copenhagen, 1898. Danish...