In December 1953 a 27-year-old Leon Kossoff attended the exhibition Russian Emigres in Paris, at the Redfern Gallery in London, which included four works by the late expressionist artist, Chaim Soutine. This was the first time he had seen one of the late oil painter’s works in the flesh. 

RJ Kitaj was taught drawing by Percy Horton, who was taught by Walter Sickert, who was taught by Edgar Degas. Is it fanciful to see the connection between the French master and the American artist?

Kitaj, who spent his formative years in England, had a big influence on British pop art, and never stopped experimenting with style, form and medium, but he was, above all, an exceptional draftsman: the critic Robert Hughes called him ‘better than almost anyone else’.

Alex Leith is with Roberta Travers, of Piano Nobile, in front of the haunting self-portrait of Jean Cooke, completed in 1954, which opens the gallery’s new show about the painter, Seascapes and Chalk Caves.

Is it my imagination, or can you still smell the oil paint?

The Scottish-born artist Peter Doig moved back to England in 2021 after 20 years living in Trinidad, and this fine exhibition of twelve large canvases represents work that he has since created – or in most cases finished off – in his East London home-cum-studio.

Lowry painted scores of football-related paintings, but was generally more interested in the fans, than the players. His paintings weren’t about the centre-forward thwacking the ball past the despairing dive of the keeper: they were about the common purpose of the crowd.

‘My paint brush always gives a tremor of pleasure when I let it paint a flower’, wrote Winifred Nicholson, in her 1969 essay The Flower’s Response.

Margaret Thatcher famously called him ‘That man who paints those dreadful pictures’ and Francis Bacon’s work, always full of existential anguish, certainly divided critics throughout his five-decade career, his shocking images simultaneously intriguing and repulsing his viewers.

When the abstract painter Trevor Bell died in 2017, many mourned the passing of ‘the last of the St Ives Modernists’.

Until March 27 Willoughby Gerrish is holding a show of Gerald Laing’s work at Thirsk Sculpture Garden in Yorkshire.

In a recent interview with ROSA Magazine (Review of Sussex Arts), Sue Tilley, one of Lucian Freud’s regular sitters, called the artist “a monster, but a humorous monster”.

We’d like to wish you a very merry Christmas, with this season’s-greetings card created by David Jones in December 1926, a very rare wood-engraving print, courtesy of Dominic Kemp in association with Austin/Desmond Fine Art. It is a proof of a card Jones was asked to design, but was never used.

‘Alberto painted as an Italian operatic tenor sings, that is with a passionate theatricality and always con brio.’ So wrote artist and lecturer David McClure, about his compatriot and near-contemporary Alberto Morrocco, one of the leading figures of 20th-century Scottish art.

The latest exhibition at Candida Stevens’ eponymous Chichester gallery, Water & Ways, is subtitled ‘an exhibition of artworks inspired by Sussex, post war and contemporary’. It acts as an interesting counterpoint to the big autumn show at Pallant House Gallery, just down the road, entitled Sussex Landscape: Chalk, Wood and Water (see ‘Bill Brandt’s geological nudes’, below).

One day Stanley Donwood will be written about without mention of the fact that he has been responsible for all Radiohead’s album-cover artwork since they started. Although not in this piece. Not yet.

Before his death, in 1974, the post-impressionist landscape painter Edward Seago wrote in his will that one third of the paintings stored in his studio in Norwich should be destroyed. Luckily for the world, Seago was a prolific artist, and around 19,000 watercolours and 300 oil paintings remain.

You might say the collage artist and photographer Nigel Henderson was well connected.His Bohemian mother set up Peggy Guggenheim’s London gallery in 1938; through her he met Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy, and saw his early collage work exhibited alongside that of Picasso, Braque and Gris.

Lucian Freud and John Craxton met at art college in 1941 when they were 19 years old, and they were soon living together, painting together, and drinking together, enjoying what there was to enjoy in wartime London, both exempt from military service.

Simon Casson went to the National Gallery, aged ten, and stood in front of a Titian. He hasn’t been the same since.

If Adrian Heath’s audacious attempt to escape from Stalag 383 in Bavaria in 1942 had succeeded, British abstract art might have taken a different course. As it was, he was captured, and put into solitary confinement, where he experimented with abstract techniques (there wasn’t much to draw). Once out, he met fellow-POW Terry Frost, and encouraged him to develop his artistic style.

In his 1967 book The Company I Have Kept, the poet and author Hugh McDairmid called his friend William Johnstone (1897-1981) ‘the bad boy of Scottish art’ and ‘not only the most important but the only important living Scottish artist’.