Did you enjoy the BBC's programme about Turner's sketchbooks? So did I, but a lot that they told you about him was simply wrong. There was a strong narrative about Turner as a working-class artist who had to battle against the prejudices of the Royal Academy. This was supported by Tracy Emin (who is, by the way, herself a Royal Academician) but it's the opposite of the truth.

Flaming June. Frederick Leighton was an accomplished and successful Victorian artist who built himself an imposing studio home in Kensington, now a museum. He was popular and sociable and an energetic president of the Royal Academy, but he was thought to be aloof and lacking intimacy and his home is odd. Frederick, Lord Leighton, the only British artist to be ennobled.

I've moved the travel accounts here to a new blog, Rough Track, where I'll continue to add new stories, and I'll concentrate here on visual arts. G. K. Chesterton said two interesting things about travel, which express ideas that I share: "The traveller sees what he sees; the tripper sees what he has come to see." "The strangest country I ever visited was England."

Nous continuons notre visite de la Sicile avec un arrêt dans la petite ville de Caltagirone. On vient ici en grande partie pour la Scala Santa Maria del Monte, un escalier monumental de 125 marches, très droit, qui relie la place principale à l’église du même nom. Chaque contremarche est décorée de tuiles de céramique […] Caltagirone & Piazza Armerina

As well as the usual bottle of wine in our room at L’Albero Nascosto in Trieste there was a notice telling us that hotels.com take 18% commission and that the best way to support small hotels like …

We’ve come by bus to the little hill town of Raito on the Amalfi coast to see the ceramics museum in the Villa Guariglia (above). The roads are steep and every time Google tells us we’r…

Ritual humiliation: the head from the Berlin Lenin monument on display in the Spandau Citadel. I got interested in the destruction of art after Colston-Must-Fall in 2020, the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol, a local benefactor who made money from the slave trade. Vandalizing statues became a habit. Then Just Stop Oil, a group of climate protestors, started to attack paintings in art galleries — Van Gogh’s…

We had a bumper crop of apples this year. Our Ribston Pippin (above) usually sulks but it gave us more fruit than we could manage and we had to think of something to do with it. What about that puff pastry we've had in the freezer for months? We found a recipe that added apples to frangipane in a tart, so we could try that.

The custom of sending colourful Rosh Hashanah (new year) cards, often featuring greetings in Yiddish, was widespread in Jewish communities in Europe and America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but with the advent of modern mass communications - first the telephone and then email and social media - the exchange of these cards declined and the tradition has almost completely disappeared. Here is a selection of attractive old Rosh Hashanah cards. A Happy New Year!

This intriguing portrait of a young man, painted in Venice in the 18th century was sold at Sotheby's last year. It raises a host of questions, chief among them: who was the sitter? The inclusion of a porcelain cup and saucer is very significant, for such an attribute was at the time included in portraits to display the owner's great wealth and exceptional taste.

Trump's taste is fascinating at several levels. First he's rich and thinks it's important to flaunt your wealth if you have it, but the gold decorations in the Oval Office are plastic stick-ons from Temu sprayed with gold paint. Even Ceaucescu's palace was decorated in real gold. Second, we have learned from Bourdieu that good taste is the taste of the ruling class, that it's an aspect of cultural capital and that it's a way of enforcing class distinction.

The post office at La Spezia: make sure you are in the right queue. I knew you could get stamps at a tobacconist’s in Italy for your postcards – you looked for the shop with the big &#8…

The interchange station on the French-Italian border has one of those superb station buffets, which I wrote about a while ago because it's decorated by a rather fine mural extolling manual labour. There's no information about it anywhere (I didn't ask at the station) and nothing on the internet. Then I looked again at one of my pictures and found I'd overlooked the signature. Something d'Arezzo, nineteen forty-something, but nothing discoverable about such an artist.

Edward Burra is known for a few paintings from the 1920s and 1930s, when he was a promising young artist fresh from the Royal College of Art with a lively take on the Jazz Age, someone it was possible to shoehorn into the Surrealist movement. We know The Snack Bar (above) from Tate Britain's permanent collection, but nearly everything in Tate's current Burra exhibition is unfamiliar.

Derek Guy, the menswear writer, explains why some men in the USA think that only women and gay men can take an interest in clothing and interior design, and they make an aggressive display of not caring how they or their homes look. As it's also a British thing, I'm copying his posts from X.

William of Orange landing at Brixham, Torbay, 5 November 1688. Jan Wyck. Royal Collection, Greenwich. I had a colleague, a graduate, who thought the leader of the Glorious Revolution was Oliver Cromwell and the people who opposed him were called Jacobins. So much does the average Englishman know or care about history, but in Ireland they’re still fighting the battles of 1690 and Loyalists are marching today and tomorrow, 11th and 12th July, for William of Orange.

The 18th century violin was allegedly stolen on 18 February from The Marquess Tavern in Islington.