Jean Ghika, Head of Jewellery, Europe, is the Bonhams rock star, says Lucinda Bredin
Tension was rising in the room an hour before the sale. A huge blue diamond ring was the last lot on offer in April's Fine Jewellery sale at Bonhams. During the past ten years, fewer than 30 blue diamonds of more than five carats have ...
Trelissick in Cornwall is filled with family memories, wonderful objects and a historic collection of Spode. Lucinda Bredin meets Will Copeland, whose family has lived in the house for four generations
While he was sailing his yacht on the River Fal in spring 1913, Leonard Cunliffe caught sight of a glorious neo-classical mansion set on a hill surrounded by parkland ...
The last Russian Empress ordered an ornate cigarette case from her favourite jeweller as a present for her husband. Vanora Bennett traces the connection between the House of Fabergé and the doomed dynasty
On an April day in 1897, as the melting ice of the Neva beside St Petersburg's Winter Palace cracked and slid downriver to the Gulf of ...
Constable made hundreds of on-the-spot sketches throughout his career. Timothy Wilcox looks at the way drawing informed his life and art
Constable famously wrote that "painting is another word for feeling". He might equally have said, "drawing is another word for thinking", for it is through his drawings -- hundreds of them, mostly made in the pocket sketchbooks that he always ...
Salvador Dalí loved to shock, but his prints based on botanical illustrations show the whimsical side of his imagination, says Ian Irvine
Salvador Dalí venerated Velázquez and even toyed with the idea that he might be his reincarnation. But while he undoubtedly belongs in that great tradition of Western painting, as the last of the old masters, he was also ...
The world's greatest-ever racing driver, the Argentine Juan Manuel Fangio seemed invincible. Richard Williams charts his course to the top step on the podium
It is hard to imagine a modern racing driver being kidnapped at gunpoint by a revolutionary group looking for publicity. But that's what happened, just over half a century ago, to Juan Manuel Fangio ...
Nikolai Konstantinovich Roerich always claimed The Rite of Spring, – the ballet that caused a riot at its premiere by the Ballets Russes a century ago – was his idea. (Its composer Igor Stravinsky begged to differ.) But Roerich certainly had a hand: he wrote the libretto, and designed the original sets and costumes, which, with their pagan head-dresses, shapeless shifts, cross-gartered ...
James Bradburne, the director of Palazzo Strozzi, tells Lucinda Bredin why when working in Florence, you need a Machiavellian touch
This is a city of oppositions," says James Bradburne, the Director General of the Strozzi Foundation, who is giving a vivid description of the 'challenges' of working in a city in which everyone is probably descended from Machiavelli. He leans ...
The 7th Duke of Wellington (1885-1972) did not expect to inherit the title. He was, after all, a younger son of the 4th Duke. But when the 6th Duke (his nephew, 'Morny') died at the Salerno landings in 1943, Lord Gerald Wellesley, as he had been known, took the title and the ducal homes: No. 1, London (Apsley House) and ...
Self-taught and from Yorkshire, Atkinson Grimshaw became an artist the hard way. Jane Sellars looks at his brilliant career and sometimes tragic life
The woman with the umbrella hesitates on the corner of the rain-swept street, her umbrella lifted in the act of opening; she is in Glasgow, by the Clyde, with the ships' masts towering above her into the ...
In 1963, Fred Williams's You Yangs Landscape 1 was greeted with incomprehension. Fifty years on, John McDonald discovers the artist constructed an entirely new vision of the world
Upon returning to Australia in 1957, Fred Williams astounded his friends by declaring: "I'm going to paint the gum tree." After five years in England, applying himself to a stale ...
Ghent in East Flanders is known for its mediaeval centre. Yet Jan Dalley discovers contemporary art among the history
"Now you can't argue with that – for a castle," said my companion, as we stood in front of Ghent's 12th century Castle of the Counts. It has turrets, a portcullis and part of a moat, and it's so ...
Some people enjoy collecting empty bottles, others have a passion for wine labels. These are the lucky ones. For most wine collectors the agonising question hangs over every bottle in the cellar: to drink or not to drink? For unlike almost any other collectable item except maybe fireworks, the enjoyment of a bottle of wine leads to its destruction. I ...
Christopher Le Brun, the President of the Royal Academy, is entranced by the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini
I first visited the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini when I was still a student. I had been reading Adrian Stokes's books The Quattro Cento, so I knew something of the history of the place, but what I didn't know was how ...
