'May Day, Central Park,' (1900) exhibits Maurice Prendergast's fascination with capturing picturesque crowds at leisure in his modernist approach to painting.

His subjects are a reflection of the new cultural developments in America and Europe which followed the Industrial

Painted in 1968, 'Landscape with Child and Dog,' encapsulates Fairfield Porter's mature style. We can see the same realist tendency found in Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper; all three were American realists who explored light and its effect on colour and form.

'St Mark's Square, Venice.' (1916) Mortimer Menpes was an Australian-born British artist who worked in part as an illustrator, and who was known especially for his etchings, which he studied under Whistler - Menpes would go on to be a central figure in the etching revival of the

John Anthony Park is most notably recognised for his impressionistic manner of handling colour and light, created by techniques he mastered in Paris - an influence which had a lasting impact on his colour palette, handling of paint and ability to capture light. The expert manner

'Seven Brussels Sprouts.' (1955)
Delicately painted with meticulous detail, Eliot Hodgkin captures the crisp waxy green beauty of a vegetable that in the year this work was painted was too often boiled to oblivion.

Harry Kernoff's vivid depiction of 'Naylors Cove, Bray,' (1940) shows why he has a firm place in modern Irish popular culture. He had come to international attention the previous year when he represented Ireland at the New York World’s Fair.

Many thanks to each of you who sent suggestions to what to include in a podcast. Starting this summer, I'll put something out once a month to see how it goes, included will be a spotlight on painters (well-known and less known) exhibitions, art reviews, talks with collectors, a

Edward Dickey's picture shows the construction of the Tyne Bridge (regarded as a prototype for the construction of Sydney Harbour Bridge) which links Newcastle upon Tyne and Gateshead; it was opened in 1928 and has become one of the defining symbols of the North East.

Dickey

'Gourds.' (1978) William Brooker enjoyed a long and successful teaching career, and among his students was Howard Hodgkin who described his mentor as 'the only real teacher I ever had ... he made one feel that painting was a very important occupation.'

David Cox (senior) was born on this day #BOTD in 1783, his most celebrated paintings of Rhyl in north-east Wales are the oils he made in 1854, at the age of 71, a year after suffering a stroke. 'Rhyl Sands,' is a surprising painting, reminiscent of Boudin or an early work by

'Sunlight, Walberswick, Suffolk' Peter Kelly's paintings display his mastery of light. His preference for a limited palette of muted tones occasionally warmed by brighter accents are reminiscent of the Dutch and Scandinavian Schools.

Kelly's works are invariably paintings of

Wyndham Lewis' study shows his wife Froanna. In the 1930s, his eyesight was declining as a result of an undiagnosed tumour pressing on his optic nerve, which might account for the prominence of red in his later work.

In this work from around 1913, Laura Knight depicts a group of travelling performers but look closer and you will see the figure in the blue coat and hat holding a monkey, is her close friend and near neighbour in Cornwall's Lamorna Valley, the artist Ella Naper.

Around this

In August of 1939, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth moved from London to St. Ives, in Cornwall, a small fishing village that would soon become an outpost of the British avant-garde movement. Staying there until 1958, they would be profoundly influenced by the Cornish landscape.

In William Dudley's painting of a cottage in Polperro, Cornwall (1909), the house is painted with near-obsessive precision. Brought up in a building household, Dudley knew all about the textures of brick, wood, and rendering, and he applied that knowledge assiduously.

'Lovers in a Wood.' (c1871) What John Atkinson Grimshaw achieves in his moonlight pictures, is a sense of romance, atmosphere, poetry, and mood made up of simple elements with a Pre-Raphaelite intensity and attention to detail.

A decade before this work was made, he befriended

Bryan Organ's 1971 portrait of Sir Roy Strong, then director of the National Portrait Gallery, sees him standing in front of John de Critz's 'The Somerset House Conference,  1604,' which commemorates the peace treaty between England and Spain in 1604 which brought an end to a war

'Spring in the Country,' (1941) is a classic example of Grant Wood's signature Regionalist style depicting the picturesque rolling hills of his native Midwest.

Regionalism emerged out of the confusion and suffering caused by the Great Depression of the 1930s, stirred by the

'On the Canal, New Hope.' Robert Spencer was an American painter who received a lot of recognition in his day for paintings depicting New Hope, Bucks County in Pennsylvania.

For some time, he trained with Daniel Garber and was influenced not only by his style, but his practice

A leading member of the Precisionist movement, Charles Sheeler employed his training in photography to create an art form that questioned the hard boundaries between representation and reality.

Painting both industrial and agrarian subjects alike, Sheeler’s unique fusion of