The Making of a Collector: 21 November 2026 – 14 March 2027
The Jillian and Arthur M. Sackler Wing of Galleries | Burlington House
In the late 1930s, Peggy Guggenheim launched an art gallery in Mayfair that shocked the conservative tastes of the British art establishment. This exhibition revisits the gallery that helped redefine London’s contemporary art scene.
2 October 2026 – 31 January 2027: Main Galleries | Burlington House
The story of how the Côte d’Azur dazzled modern art’s great innovators.
To Monet, it was like “swimming in blue air.” To Braque, a “joyful revelation.” Derain compared its cerulean hues to “sticks of dynamite….primed to discharge light.”
The radiance of the French Riviera left an indelible mark on artists. It roused the imaginations not only of the 19th and 20th centuries’ greatest painters – among them Picasso, Matisse, Cezanne, Renoir and Klein – but giants of literature, cinema and fashion, whose works helped define the carefree glamour and eternal romance of the Côte d’Azur.
The Keeper’s House by José Pizarro
A hidden gem with 150 years of history at the heart of the RA, once the residence of the Academy’s Keeper, now reimagined by José Pizarro as an elegant Spanish dining experience. Open to Friends, Members and their guests.
The November 13 issue of the Times Literary Supplement marks 300 years since Gulliver’s Travels first appeared in October 1726 and sold out within a week. Claude Rawson, a leading Swift scholar, takes the measure of the satire in his essay “Yahoos and Houyhnhnms,” and Sophie Gee’s “Gulliver in Twickenham” reviews the story of how Swift joined Alexander Pope and John Gay while writing his classic. In “Embroidered history,” Levi Roach visits the British Museum’s crowd-pulling Bayeux Tapestry exhibition and examines how the narrative of the Norman Conquest was shaped. The issue also brings the TLS Books of the Year 2026, in which contributors choose their favourites.
Fiction ranges from France to Norway’s forests.
The historian Richard Vinen’s “Watching the detective” reviews Philippe Jaenada’s L’Inconnue du quai de Javel, this year’s Goncourt-winning meditation on an unsolved murder, and Alice Blackhurst’s “Queen Margot’s allure” weighs a new Pléiade edition of Marguerite Duras. Beejay Silcox’s “Time-maxxing” considers a “mighty work of miniature” about connection, attention and hope, while Frances Wilson’s “Reality is sentences” explores the autofictional trilogy of a Finnish queer icon. Norway looms large: Lauren Kane’s “Among the pines” finds mourning, dreaming and theosophy in the country’s south, and Catherine Taylor’s “Mind and matter” follows an Oslo intellectual turned forest outlaw. Sukhdev Sandhu’s “How it goes” checks into a mysterious guesthouse where time seems to stand still.
The arts revisit giants.
Sarah Watling’s “Art for our sake” reviews a stage portrait of John Maynard Keynes, the economist who helped found the Arts Council, and the competing influences that shaped him. In “A giant of East and West,” Karolina Watroba weighs a new film about the Nobel laureate Thomas Mann, a novelist claimed by many cultures at once. Sue Roe’s “Moving in motes of light” savours Renoir’s open-air pleasures as the National Gallery brings his figures to London, and Harrison Stetler’s “Voices from Vichy” reviews a director’s film about the downfall of his great-grandfather in the Vichy years.
America’s fault lines come under scrutiny.
The sociologist David Garland’s “Out of hand” tallies the price Americans pay for their gun culture. D. K. Renton’s “Exit the workers” considers why America’s liberal elite has failed to find a new FDR, and Michael S. Roth’s “Grooming gazillionaires” examines how Stanford University has embraced shortcuts to riches. Together they sketch a nation wrestling with violence, inequality and the lure of quick money. Widening the lens, Benjamin Smith’s “Drug of choice” traces how the opium trade shaped the modern world.
Lives and poems turn personal.
Two memoirs open the Lives pages. Norma Clarke’s “A final bequest” reviews one about learning the truth about one’s parents, while Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s “Not-so-grand House” relishes a funny account of a frugal upbringing. In the Afterthoughts column, Nicola Shulman pursues “The elusive Dr Brookner,” the art historian and Booker-winning novelist Anita Brookner, and her knack for hiding in plain sight. The issue also carries two new poems: Victoria Chang’s “Fledge: Postscript” and Shane McCrae’s “The soldier.”
In Brief covers still more ground.
The eight short reviews range widely: Alev Adil on an inheritance of recipes and idioms, Nicholas Clee on a philosophical investigation into a campus murder, Hassan Akram on Robert Louis Stevenson’s romantic life and Roger Domeneghetti on football’s contradictions. Terri Apter reads a memoir interweaving motherhood and mourning, Douglas Smith follows the Nobel family through escape, industrial success and revolution, Eliza Tracey revisits the bookshelves of Wigtown, and Katherine Harvey surveys the scenes that most frightened medieval viewers. Crossword 1623 completes the issue. Read the full issue on the TLS website.
The December 3 issue opens with “The Next Generation” by Fintan O’Toole, the Review’s advising editor, who credits the American left with a historic election win achieved by tying the affordability crisis to Republican corruption. The whole Democratic Party, he argues, should learn from it. Later, Mark Danner‘s “The Tightrope Walker” asks how Trump turned a failed coup into a tale of his own martyrdom. He reviews Mary Clare Jalonick’s oral history of January 6th, Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis’s account of a Justice Department cowed by politics and fear, and Michael Wolff’s All or Nothing.
Violence leaves lasting scars.
In “Collateral Damage,” David Shulman, a Hebrew University scholar and longtime activist with the Arab–Jewish group Ta’ayush, considers NAZA. In Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s documentary, Israeli soldiers frankly voice remorse over their part in the Gaza war. Helen Epstein and Aminu Abubakar‘s “Interview with a Bandit” hears from one of the many Nigerians driven to violence by years of corrupt government. And in “The Executioner’s Song,” Piper French reviews Pamela Colloff’s To Catch the Devil. It is the Gulf Coast story of a notorious jailhouse informant whose lies sent an innocent man to death row, and of the officials and institutions that encouraged him.
Fiction crosses borders and centuries.
Caroline Moorehead‘s “Home and Away” introduces Fausta Cialente, an Italian émigré who lived much of her life in Egypt and wrote of restless women and girls drawn to flight. Her A Very Cold Winter appears in Julia Nelsen’s translation, introduced by Claudia Durastanti. Michael Gorra‘s “Nightmares of History” reviews The Newer World, which completes Sebastian Barry’s trilogy, begun with Days Without End, about Americans swept up in nineteenth-century violence. Kristen Roupenian‘s “We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Change” explores how Jane Schoenbrun’s book Public Access Afterworld and film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma blur reality and fantasy.
Art and archives take center stage.
Jed Perl‘s “Masters of Their Craft” tours shows at the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, the Grand Palais and the Fondation Louis Vuitton devoted to Michelangelo and Rodin, Renoir, late Matisse and Calder. For 150 years, he argues, Paris was modern art’s great workshop. Susan Tallman‘s “Seeing Through the Lightness” finds Brice Marden’s famous equanimity, in Gagosian’s survey I Am Plane Image, looking less inevitable and more like a hard-won balancing act. Darryl Pinckney‘s “Arthur Schomburg’s Legacy” marks the Schomburg Center’s centennial in Harlem, celebrating the collector whose books seeded one of the world’s foremost archives of Black history and literature.
Big ideas get a second look.
Trevor Jackson‘s “The Cost of Monetizing Everything” reviews Nick Chater and George Loewenstein’s It’s On You and The Price of Happiness by Cass R. Sunstein, co-author of Nudge. Behavioral economists promised rational policy, but Jackson finds a corporate push behind their nudges, which, as Chater and Loewenstein argue, shifted blame for systemic problems onto individuals. Clare Carlisle‘s “Reverence for All of It” takes up Steven Nadler’s Spinoza, Atheist. She asks whether a thinker branded a heretic in seventeenth-century Europe, for treating God and nature as interchangeable, should be called an atheist today.
Twelve paintings, one century, and the man who painted time
Twelve paintings by Claude Monet, 1868–1922. All are in the public domain.
On 5 December 1926, Claude Monet died at Giverny, aged 86, in the house where he had lived for more than forty years. A century later, the twelve paintings in our gallery show how one man taught the world to look at light instead of things.
It begins with a sunrise. In 1872 Monet painted the harbour at Le Havre in quick strokes: grey-blue mist, ghostly cranes and a small orange sun that seems to burn through the canvas. When he showed Impression, Sunrise at the first independent exhibition in 1874, the critic Louis Leroy mocked it in a review headlined “Exhibition of the Impressionists.” The insult stuck, and a movement had its name.
Earlier still, in The Magpie, he had painted snow in blue, violet and cream. The Salon jury rejected it in 1869. Then came the sunlit years at Argenteuil. In Poppy Field and Woman with a Parasol, the figures are his wife Camille and their son Jean, painted so quickly that the wind seems to move through the brushwork. In The Gare Saint-Lazare, Monet turned modern Paris into weather, making locomotive steam as beautiful as clouds.
In the 1890s he made his boldest discovery: the subject hardly mattered. He painted stacks of wheat near his home at every hour and season, then more than thirty views of Rouen Cathedral’s façade, its stone dissolving from dawn grey to noon gold. In London, working from St Thomas’ Hospital across the Thames, he painted Parliament as a dark silhouette against a burning sky. A building, a field or a river was only the occasion. The true subject was time.
At Giverny he built his own subject. He diverted a stream, dug a pond, planted water lilies and crossed it all with a Japanese bridge, then painted that garden for the rest of his life, some 250 canvases of lilies in all. On 12 November 1918, the day after the Armistice, he wrote to his friend Georges Clemenceau offering the nation water-lily paintings as a monument to peace. They were installed at the Musée de l’Orangerie in May 1927, five months after his death, in two oval rooms that surround visitors with water and sky.
The true subject was time.
The final picture in our gallery is the strangest. Cataracts had clouded Monet’s sight, and in The Japanese Footbridge, painted around 1920–22, the bridge almost disappears into blazes of red, ochre and blue. Critics once dismissed these late works as the failings of an old man. In the 1950s, as Abstract Expressionism rose in New York, they were rediscovered as visions of the future. Joan Mitchell later spent her last decades in Vétheuil, in a house overlooking the one Monet had rented in the late 1870s.
Paris is marking the centenary. Monet: Painting Time is at the Orangerie through January 25, and From Monet to Hockney is at the Musée Marmottan Monet, home of Impression, Sunrise, through January 31. Take the gallery above as an invitation. A hundred years on, Monet’s light has not finished changing.
The Gallery
Impression, Sunrise, 1872 · Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris
The Magpie, 1868–69 · Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Poppy Field, 1873 · Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Woman with a Parasol – Madame Monet and Her Son, 1875 · National Gallery of Art, Washington
The Gare Saint-Lazare, 1877 · Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer), 1890–91 · Art Institute of Chicago
Rouen Cathedral, 1894 · One of more than thirty views of the façade
Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies, 1899 · The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The Houses of Parliament, Sunset, 1903 · National Gallery of Art, Washington
Water Lilies, 1906 · Art Institute of Chicago
Water Lilies, 1914–26 · Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris
The Japanese Footbridge, c. 1920–22 · The Museum of Modern Art, New York
See it in Paris
Monet: Painting Time · Musée de l’Orangerie · through January 25, 2027
From Monet to Hockney · Musée Marmottan Monet · through January 31, 2027
The Burlington Magazine: The latest issue features the upcoming 150th anniversary of Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery in 2027, honors the career of late Victoria and Albert Museum jewelry curator Richard Edgcumbe, and reviews the monumental realism and modernist influence of nineteenth-century French painter Gustave Courbet.
Liverpool 2027
The Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool will be 150 years old in 2027. It was named after the local brewer Andrew Barclay Walker (1824–93), who donated £20,000 for the creation of the gallery. It opened in September 1877 and welcomed over 300,000 visitors during the next four months. Walker was not a collector of art but appears to have displayed an aesthetic sensibility through the high standards he insisted on for the design of his public houses. read more
Richard Edgcumbe (1951–2026)
A gifted curator who specialised in jewellery, Richard Edgcumbe pursued a successful career at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and notably published on gold chasing in the eighteenth century. read more
I, Gustave Courbet
Gustave Courbet (1819–77) was arguably the most important artist in nineteenth-century France. Over almost four decades, he created paintings of monumental achievement and innovation in all genres and changed how art was exhibited and sold – mostly in Paris, the capital of the international art world. He launched an aesthetic of realism that emphasised painterly facture and set the stage for modernist art in the decades that followed. read more
Super-Beast: The Mysterious Life of Saki By Oliver Soden
In some ways all you really need to know about Hector Hugh Munro (1870–1916) can be gleaned from the short story ‘Sredni Vashtar’, first published in the Westminster Gazette in the summer of 1910. Conradin – Munro’s heroes nearly always have these hifalutin names – is a sickly small boy quartered on a tyrannical guardian called Mrs de Ropp. Denied much in the way of freedom or material comfort, in particular the hot buttered toast he craves, Conradin makes a fetish out of a savage polecat-ferret hidden in the garden shed, worships it as a god and looks to it for vengeance.
Here in the World
Letters: 1944–1959 By Albert Camus & Maria Casarès (Edited by Béatrice Vaillant, translated from French by Sandra Smith & Cory Stockwell)
What an amazing behemoth of a book! I’ve been lugging it around for weeks. Nearly a thousand letters: the intimate correspondence of Albert Camus and Maria Casarès. When they first met in Paris – on D-Day, 1944 – Camus had already published L’Etranger (1942; The Outsider). Born and raised in Algeria, he was in Paris when the Second World War broke out, and later joined the French Resistance. Camus’s wife, Francine Faure, a mathematician and pianist, remained in Algeria. Maria Casarès was originally from Galicia, the daughter of an exiled former prime minister of Spain, Santiago Casares Quiroga. In 1944, Casarès was already known as an actress, having played the titular role in J M Synge’s Deirdre of the Sorrows. She later starred in Les Enfants du paradis (1945), Cocteau’s Orphée (1950) and La Lectrice (1988), among other films and plays.
Talk to the Animals
Minds I’ve Met: From Denying to Embracing the Inner Lives of Animals By Frans de Waal
Some years ago, a prominent animal-behaviour scientist hosted a colleague at his field station devoted to the study of chimpanzees. Talking together on top of the observation tower, the pair glanced at the apes but mostly stayed absorbed in conversation. Then a female chimpanzee named Thai began to scream and hit herself in dramatic fashion. In response to her outburst, other chimpanzees rushed to embrace, hold and kiss her.
The Healers – Jason Baldes on Restoring the North American Buffalo
Returning the buffalo to its ecological role as a keystone species, bringing back plant and animal biodiversity, is in itself healing. We take care of the buffalo, the buffalo takes care of the land, and both take care of us. By Leath Tonino
Aage eighteen, Jason Baldes, a member of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe, traveled with his father, a US Fish and Wildlife Service biologist, from the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming to the Serengeti Plain of East Africa. In addition to lions and zebras and hyenas, Baldes witnessed the migration of 1.5 million wildebeests—one of the planet’s last remaining examples of a huge population of terrestrial mammals roaming freely over the land. “That was the light bulb moment for me,” he says today, reflecting on his decades of effort as an ecologist and activist. Watching the beautiful and awe-inspiring spectacle, he understood that the mega herd represented a mere fraction of the number of bison—or buffalo, as Baldes prefers to call them—that would have been visible in North America a few short centuries ago, when they numbered in the tens of millions and inhabited the majority of the continent.
In popular tradition General Custer was the last to die, though there is no way to know the final sequence of events. He reportedly had been shot twice: once in the left temple and once just below the heart. ByCharles Hood
The first time US Army general George Armstrong Custer died was on Sunday, June 25, 1876, a centennial year in Anglo-European America. He died in the late afternoon along with 267 other soldiers, civilians, and Native American scouts in the Little Bighorn Valley of Montana. These deaths took place during what are now called the “Indian Wars,” although for most of American history it’s hard to think of a time when there wasn’t an Indian war.
The Seventh Cavalry, which Custer led, had split into multiple columns, and all came under attack, though only Custer’s portion—made up of five out of eleven total companies—was wiped out completely. That outcome was more or less inevitable, given that Custer had misjudged the size of the coalition of Lakota, Dakota, Sioux, and Northern Cheyenne his two-hundred-odd men were facing. Or maybe he hadn’t wanted to admit to himself that he was up against a combined force of at least a thousand, and perhaps as many as three or even five thousand, depending on which source you asked. Once the battle started, there was no way Custer and his men would not all be killed. The only question was whether they would die before or after they had used up all of their water and ammunition.
I walked back to my sister’s room and stood in the doorway and listened to her breathe. Maybe some of those seahorse facts weren’t even true. ByLaura Maylene Walter
As Israel’s assault on Gaza grew worse and worse, Joe Biden and his advisers acted as though they had no option but to offer their unconditional support. Why couldn’t they see the destruction they were enabling? By Ben Rhodes
Mary K. Simkhovitch, the founder of Greenwich House, believed in the radical idea that housing should be made as livable for the working class as it was for the middle class. By Vivian Gornick
A forensic study of a rape survivor from 1473 Dijon reveals a legal process surprisingly accepting of imperfect victims and contradictory testimony. By Erin Maglaque
‘To win the Senate, the Democrats need to hold on to the one Michigan seat (out of two) that is up for grabs, and have chosen a new candidate, Abdul El-Sayed, a moderate leftist in European terms, a “communist loser who hates Jews and Israel” according to Trump, “very, very evil”, per J.D. Vance.’ By James Meek
‘The superego – and its precursor, conscience – refers to the part of us that has no curiosity about ourselves. It’s the saboteur of curiosity about ourselves. And that part of us, like a narrow-minded fascist, has only one project: to destroy our pleasures in being alive by trying to kill our curiosity (or by making us frightened of our curiosity, which amounts to the same thing).’ By Adam Phillips
‘Israel’s automated targeting system allows for the responsibility for “industrialised annihilation” to be shared between coders, operators, legal officers who pre-set the level of collateral damage, officers who approve the strike, officers who choose the bomb and the pilots or drone operators who launch it. “I am just a small screw in the system,” one of the interviewees says, quoting Eichmann’s defence during his trial in Jerusalem. The system that begins with a phone number being put into a computer system ends with an entire family crushed under the rubble.’
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
