‘I can’t tell you how delicious this country is,’ wrote a 23-year-old John Craxton to his friend Elsie ‘EQ’ Nicholson, from Athens, on May 20, 1946. ‘…the lovely hot sun all day & at night tavernas: hot prawns in olive oil & great wine & the soft sweet smell of Greek pine trees. I shall never come home. How can I?’.

1936 was quite a year for Eileen Agar. In the spring she was visited in her studio by Roland Penrose and Herbert Read, who, to her surprise, declared her a surrealist and selected two paintings and five objects for inclusion in the International Surrealist Exhibition they were organising at the New Burlington Galleries in Mayfair, running from June 11 to July 4.

“I’m very interested in the whole set-up of the American influence in this country,” states the 24-year-old Derek Boshier, rather earnestly, in Ken Russell’s seminal BBC documentary Pop Goes the Easel, made and broadcast in 1962. “In the infiltration of the American way of life. It’s through advertising… that this infiltration has come through”.

“I don’t find men very interesting to look at,” Chantal Joffe told the Telegraph a few years ago. She doesn’t feel the same way about women: her subject matter is almost always portraiture of female figures. She paints her mother, she paints her daughter Esme, she paints herself, unflinchingly (in 2018 she produced a self-portrait every day of the year), and she paints friends, and friends’ children, such as Scarlett and Lola (pictured) who have featured in her work since they were toddlers…

A strange thing happened at the private view of Long & Ryle’s solo exhibition of the paintings of Kate Montgomery, in Pimlico on Wednesday evening (June 29th). The wine was flowing, and there was a convivial atmosphere, as the Brighton-based artist, up for the evening, held court. But, in any photographs taken of the party, there won’t have been many faces in shot: just lots of backs of heads. I’ve never been to an art opening at which so many people spent so long looking at the art.

Donald McGill… meet Roy Lichtenstein. Deborah Azzopardi paints sexy, saucy, cartoonish scenes in bright colours on large canvases.

Women pull their tops over their heads; louchely lean their long stiletto-tipped legs out of convertible sports cars, and put their fingers in front of their full lips, as if to whisper ‘Shhhh! Let’s keep this our little secret.’

On February 9th, 1965, The Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show for the first time, in front of a record live TV audience of 73 million Americans, starting their set with All My Loving, and ending it with She Loves You. Beatlemania had crossed the Atlantic.

Alistair Grant, who died in 1997, left a huge body of work behind him. His estate and archive is represented by the Eastbourne-based gallery Emma Mason British Prints, which will be presenting at the British Art Fair for the first time this Autumn, and showing a number of his prints and paintings. Most of the pieces Grant produced for The Rebel have disappeared, alas, so don’t expect to see any of his Hancock works, such as Ducks in Flight around the Eiffel Tower, Exhaust Fumes on a Wet Thursday Night, or Sodium Light on a Left Buttock.

If there’s one place where mankind can claim victory in the struggle to tame and colonise nature, it’s got to be the Cotswolds. Which is probably why the ‘Beast of Burford’ – a black panther supposedly on the prowl in Oxfordshire – has become such a popular local legend. The painter John Lendis has made the Cotswolds his home, after spells abroad and is fond of inhabiting his landscapes of the area with repeated motifs: of foxes, angels and Landrover Defenders.  

How long do you need to take in the 1,613 works in this year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, co-ordinated by the genial octogenarian water-colourist David Remfry?

A big welcome to the Fine Art Society, exhibiting for the first time at the British Art Fair this Autumn.

One can safely assume that Laura Knight’s Baiting Lines, Staithes (c1900) was not painted on a Sunday.

Interview with first-time exhibitor at British Art Fair, Simon Shore of Stow Art House.

In 1923 the author David ‘Bunny’ Garnett introduced Stephen Tomlin to the Bloomsbury group. Tomlin, nicknamed ‘Tommy’, was a 22-year-old sculptor: intelligent, good looking and very, very charming. He was also bisexual and incurably promiscuous, hence the title of this exhibition at Philip Mould’s Pall Mall gallery (borrowed from a recent biography by Michael Bloch and Susan Fox, which has enjoyed a republication to coincide with the show).

Bloomsbury Stud: The Art of Stephen Tomlin, Philip Mould & Company, until August 11.

Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson’s rehang of Tate Britain, revealed to the public on May 23, has been much derided in the press. The Guardian called it ‘vacuous, worthy and dull’; the FT suggested a ‘hectoring’ and ‘self-righteous’ tone to the labelling. But there are, to be fair, many positives to come out of it, and one is that the British pop artist Richard Hamilton has been given his own room.

To use the parlance of the time, the Welsh artist Ceri Richards (1903-1971) ‘had a good war’, though it didn’t start off terribly well.

Jonathan Clark Fine Art Gallery represent Richards’ estate, and studies made in situ in the foundry are displayed in their current exhibition, hence the ‘Furnaces’ in its title. The ‘Feathers’ refers to the garments worn by the costermonger Pearly Kings and Queens, who had inspired the artist when he was living in London: wartime sketches of these flamboyant figures, also on show.

Emily Young, ‘Britain’s greatest living land sculptor’ (FT), talks about having a friendship, even a marriage, with every bit of stone she works with, whether that’s Onyx or Speleothem, or Jaisalmer, or Quartzite, or Calacatta, or Lapis or Alabaster.

Two interconnected shows opened at Pallant House Gallery on May 13, both in their different way concerned with what might be described as ‘the female gaze’.

Osborne Samuel have named their latest exhibition of the work of Keith Vaughan – their fifth since 2007 – Image and Anxiety.

The Mayfair gallery has gathered over 80 works from major private collections, and paintings from their own inventory, including all eight of his lithographs, and the show – which enjoyed a crowded private view on May 10 – is illustrated with two cabinets full of Vaughan’s notebooks, letters, photographs and journals.

King Charles, it turns out, is a very competent artist. A series of 16 of his paintings – made when he was Prince of Wales, between 1992 and 2000 – were made into lithograph prints, in a limited edition of 100, by the late Stanley Jones at the Curwen Studio, with proceeds going to the Prince of Wales Charitable Fund.