Laura Freeman, Author at Catholic Herald

Laura Freeman

Every word a painting

April 01, 2021

The Sleeve Should Be Illegal is a collection of 61 pen-portraits of works in the Frick Collection.

Albrecht Dürer – a traveller’s tale

March 01, 2021

The National Gallery’s sublime Albrecht Dürer exhibition gives Laura Freeman wanderlust

Watercolour: Closing a lid on the world

November 23, 2020

Gallery glory isn’t the point. The joy is in the sploshing

A Renaissance painter of thrilling tactility

November 22, 2018

Lorenzo Lotto’s works rivalled the extravagance of his sitters

‘The belief context has become much weaker’: an interview with Gabriele Finaldi

November 23, 2017

The National Gallery director on religious art, family singalongs, and the Marian painting that survived the Puritans

‘People don’t know what they are seeing’: an interview with Gabriel Finaldi

November 23, 2017

Gabriele Finaldi talks of the National Gallery as if it were a cathedral. Its doors are open, all are welcome, no fee is charged. The galleries – long naves of paintings – instil a change in visitors. “They become quieter,” he says. “They spend time looking. They perhaps don’t spend quite so much time talking.

An artist’s path from ball gowns to the Bible

August 31, 2017

“Ladies in hammocks,” fumed the art critic for the Spectator after an exhibition of James Tissot’s paintings in 1877, “showing a very unnecessary amount of petticoat and stocking, and remarkable for little save their indolence and insolence.” The critic for the Telegraph, equally uneasy about hammocks, was concerned for the artist’s moral health. The sooner

The risqué artist who found God

August 31, 2017

James Tissot was famous for his scandalous paintings before undergoing a dramatic conversion

A bird was never just a bird to David Jones

July 13, 2017

‘God save thee, ancient Mariner! From the fiends, that plague thee thus!— Why look’st thou so?’—With my cross-bow I shot the ALBATROSS. What a shot it is, as engraved by the poet-artist David Jones (1895-1974) for his illustrated edition of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The albatross is pierced through the breast by

Shall we ever see a thing as lovely as a tree?

June 26, 2020

The current mania for toppling statues might be more happily channelled into putting down roots. Spare us a new forest of old, cold, stone bodies and give us trees instead. Early one morning in the first week of lockdown after a night’s anxious unrest, I turned on the radio. Automatic pilot: tea, porridge, Roberts Revival.