Resources & Recommendations #24
Monday, 1 September 2025. Newsletter 24.
to listen
Corot’s Impressionist Lunchbox
Only nine times in his seventy-eight years did Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot paint on anything other than canvas, paper, and panel. On one occasion, offended by the crude wooden lunchbox carried by his friend Alfred Robaut, Corot had a new one constructed, which he decorated with a plein air painting, "Fraîcheurs matinales" ("Morning Freshness"). It’s a mini-masterpiece made all the more charming by its humble setting, a breezy landscape of trees and hills awash with sunlight and enlivened by one of Corot’s favorite motifs: a flash of red, the hat of a small figure coming over a rise. Host Ben Miller gets the story from the dealer who sold it, Jill Newhouse, and the collector who bought it, Ray Vickers.
to watch
Departing from our usual remit of pre-modern drawings but remaining within the broader ‘art world’, this month’s recommendation is a two-part BBC Two documentary on the rise and fall of Inigo Philbrick. Once heralded as the rising star of the contemporary gallery scene, the documentary charts his journey “from paradise to prison” in an art fraud worth $86 million. Now available on BBC Iplayer.
to read
‘Gas found in space could help repair damage to Old Masters, say researchers’: The Art Newspaper
Conservators discovered that lead white on these important works was deteriorating at an “alarming” rate. Could oxygen from the Earth's orbit be the solution?
