Robin Rae's work was that of an English romantic visionary, who loved the land and filled it with character. 'Walk to Paradise Garden,' (2001) is a picture one feels one could travel into; more impressive than the subtlety of structure and colour is the atmosphere generated.

William Rothenstein painted 'The Gardener,' during the 1930s while living in the village of Far Oakridge, in the English Cotswolds. In his memoirs, he wrote about his admiration for local craftspeople and the enduring rural traditions he discovered in Gloucestershire.

Edouard Vuillard's portrait (1912) is of Theodore Duret, heir to a firm of Cognac dealers, a collector, orientalist, and art critic; he was an early champion of Courbet, Manet, and the French Impressionists. He was also very fond of cats.

'Mevagissey, Cornwall.' (c1914) Like many female artists working at the beginning of the 20thC, Doris Zinkeisen’s work traversed the boundaries between fine and decorative art; she was one of the first artists to enter the Belsen camp in April 1945.

In 1882, Claude Monet spent seven months painting on the Normandy coast, working on as many as eight separate pictures in one day. This picture depicts the sailors' church in Varengeville at the precipice of a monumental cliff in the mid-morning sun.

'By Lamplight.' (1890) Highly acclaimed for her rich, luminous use of colour, Harriet Backer established herself as an artist in Munich and Paris before moving back to Norway where she opened an art school; her students included Nikolai Astrup and Harald Sohlberg.

After an exhibition of John Nash's work in 1922, a critic wrote: 'A painting by John Nash is like a sentence spoken by a gentleman, perfectly enunciated, quiet, complete, yet with a certain reserve about it as of things left unsaid.'

Edvard Munch was 18, a student at the Royal School of Drawing in Oslo when he completed this self-portrait in 1882, the first of many hundreds over the course of his life. For a painter interested in the mystery of identity, there was no richer subject than his ever-changing self.

Press release this morning: Mohammed Sami is a Turner Prize finalist. In his paintings 'the relationship between signifier and signified becomes an active agent.' It's crazy. It’s quite inventive. But I haven't a clue what it means. And there's more of this stuff to come.

Christopher Nevinson's view of London was painted early one morning in 1943 from the rooftop of the Dorchester Hotel in Park Lane, and looks south-east towards the Palace of Westminster.

After his capture by German troops in August 1914, Maurice Langaskens spent much of WW1 in internment camps where he produced numerous portraits of his fellow prisoners and scenes of daily camp life. 'The Grenadier André Coulemans (the Cellist),' is from 1917.

'In the Pub.' (c1950) Robert Taylor Carson documented a well travelled life in paint, from his early years in Belfast to travelling Ireland and to Europe. His subject matter is wide-ranging but an interest in people and their way of life is a common thread throughout his career.

Like his earlier work, 'The Large Turf,' Albrecht Dürer's 'Tuft of Cowslips,' (1526) is a masterpiece of realism, this is partly a matter of the attentive accuracy with which he paints each plant so they are seen in a state of natural disarray, confused, interleaved, entangled.

Thomas Pollock Anshutz is not an artist who dominates the pages of American art history. 'The Ironworkers' Noontime,' (1880) is his most famous picture, indeed his only famous picture. It has been derided over the years as formulaic and 'light,' given the industry it depicts.

A piece in the Guardian today focuses on the Irish game of road bowling; it reminded me of this work (1941) by Gabriel Hayes showing the game in action - it used to be confined to West Cork. share.google/6u9a5XNcui7J...

Fred Cuming was considered one of the finest landscape painters of his generation. Much of his work celebrates southern English coastlines; the sea and skies of Hastings, Rye or Camber as here, illuminated by dawn, dusk, or glowing moonlight.

Whatever a self-portrait tells you about its subject, it tells us something else, too. In this case, (c1914) this is how Klimt wanted the world to see him. He comes over as charismatic, self-effacing; his notorious sex appeal is absent. Or is it?

Bill Brayshaw, a former policeman, found fame as the dozing art gallery attendant after Harry Rutherford's portrait of him was used as the front cover of the magazine 'John Bull' in 1947. Walter Sickert later said Rutherford was his 'intellectual heir and executor.'

'The Boy at the Basin.' (1932) Painted while living in his Pimlico attic flat, William Dobell said his life in London was surrounded by a rich milieu of characters and was inspired to paint quickly, capturing glimpses of people in the comic style of William Hogarth.

William Orpen's radiant colours and his luscious textures celebrated not only wealth but sensuality, a quality deemed unnatural in the early years of the new century if you weren't Italian or French. This is his 'The Eastern Gown,' from 1906.

'Sunset, near Cley, Norfolk.' (1910) Like John Ruskin, Albert Goodwin responded to landscape with an almost religious fervour and understanding; he interpreted it with greater eclecticism in the style of Whistler, Ruskin’s great adversary in the field of aesthetics.

'Shop Window.' (1894) Isaac Israels derived inspiration from the many aspects of city life in Amsterdam, the shop is of the clothing store Bahlmann & Co. on the Nieuwendijk in the city - one of the first businesses in the city to have electric lighting.

Angel,' (1887) is both a portrait of Abbott Handerson Thayer's 11 year old daughter Mary and an allegory of hope and spirituality. Thayer scraped the paint with backs of brushes, scrapers, his fingers, and a paint tube to achieve the depth in the wings.

Studying in London in the 1930s was a financially lean time for William Dobell, though it allowed him to paint subjects that interested him and to mature both personally and artistically. This portrait of the artist Fred Coventry (1932) defines his maturing style of portraiture.

Dorrit Black is a significant painter in Australia for bringing a form of cubism to the country in the late 1920s. This picture shows the village of Mirmande in the Drôme Valley, France, where her mentor André Lhote founded a summer art school.

Sunsets were among Felix Vallotton's favourite subjects; most depict an area around Honfleur, the small town in Normandy where he regularly spent the summers starting in 1909. This sky was most likely observed from a hill, the so-called Côte de Grâce.

James Dickson innes painted 'A Corner of a Room,' (1908) in his Camden Town lodgings after returning to London from the Mediterranean town of Collioure. Together with Augustus John and Derwent Lees he later went on to form the Arenig School in north Wales.

Tom Roberts' picture (c1886) depicts two of his fellow Australian Impressionists, the artists Frederick McCubbin and Louis Abrahams at Box Hill, Damper Creek just outside Melbourne. The trio painted a number of works in the area.

'Flapper.' (1928) In 1904, Margaret Preston travelled to Europe from Australia and sought out the work of artists including Matisse, Cézanne, and the influences of oriental aesthetics. During this period she developed the ‘decorative’ style she carried through her entire career.

'The French Window.' (1942) There are so many ways of painting pictures within pictures. Blurring the image within the image, darkening it, making it faint; painting it in broad strokes. Here, Harley Griffiths makes his work more discernible to us than most artists do.

Part of the magic of Astride Maillol's portrait of Jeanne Faraill (1888) is her rather fierce expression and awkward stance. Maillol was a connoisseur of sitters with interesting faces.

It might not be a great piece of art but it has something about it. This particular door was painted by George Folingsbury at Schloss Hohenaschau a 12thC medieval ring castle in Aschau in Bavaria, Germany, in the 1870s.

Isaac Israels derived inspiration from the many aspects of modern city life in The Hague - from crowded streets to dance halls and fashion houses. Here, the painting is of the Wijnman Fashion Store from 1926.

'The Researchers.' (1970) An interesting addition to this work by William Roberts' is the inclusion of the pink-ish cover of 'Blast,' the short-lived magazine of the Vorticist movement which was referred to by its editor Ezra Pound as the 'great magenta cover'd opusculus.'

'The Mantelpiece.' (1939) Allan Gwynne-Jones's art training was interrupted by WW1, during which he received a DSO at the Battle of the Somme; he then taught at the Slade and the RCA. This work was painted at a Mrs Drysdale's farm at Finchingfield in Essex.

'Cupboard Love.' (1886) There is real living quality to this picture by Walter Osborne of a farmer's boy with his cat at breakfast; everyday scenes depicting people from small rural communities is a thread which runs throughout his work as a painter.

Sir Walter Russell painted dozens of portraits as good as 'Cordelia,' (1928) but unless you happen to search for his name you are unlikely to come across how well regarded he was as a portrait painter or the work he made. Time often proves unforgiving to many artists.

Pierre Bonnard painted this view of Paris from his attic studio in Montmartre in 1897. He depicted the rue Tholozé on a rainy evening with a horse-drawn carriage and dark figures under umbrellas hurrying past brightly lit shop windows - it is typical of his early style.

Charles Ginner's work was painted from one of the windows of his sister's house at Boscastle in Cornwall in the late summer of 1928. Views from windows were a distinctive theme in his personal artistic vocabulary.

The colour and sense of movement within Auguste Macke's wonderfully vibrant 'Hussars on a Sortie,' (1913) suggests the influence of Robert Delaunay, whose work he had first seen at the inaugural Blaue Reiter exhibition two years earlier.

In 1908, Sorolla travelled to Seville to paint the gardens of Real Alcázar. The palace, one of the greatest surviving examples of Mudéjar architecture on the Iberian Peninsula, was designed in a style inspired by Moorish taste and workmanship. This is one of the garden's ponds.

Of his roughly four thousand surviving drawings, Klimt’s preliminary studies are amongst the most remarkable, depicting an intimacy that could only be achieved through such a medium. His drawings were private, rarely exhibited, and almost never sold. This is from around 1900.

'In the Sun.' (c1910) Dudley Hardy worked as a book illustrator contributing to numerous magazines, including Punch and Illustrated London News. He was also a painter of genre and landscapes, exhibiting in most of the big name London galleries including the Goupil Gallery.

'The Orange Trees.' (1878). The image of an ordered world. Gustave Caillebotte's family country home was in the village of Yerres, about 20 kilometres southwest of Paris. In this work, his brother Martial is reading a newspaper, his cousin Zoé is leaning against a tree box.

'Still-life with coffee pot.' (1914) Like the work of his close friend and fellow Camden Town Group member Charles Ginner, many of Malcolm Drummond’s paintings show his interest in structure and form.

An international success for her pastel pictures, Janet Cumbrae Stewart often used fabric such as lace or silk to emphasise the smoothness of the skin of a female model. 'The Chinese coat,' made in 1919, is a superb example of her work.

Privileged this afternoon to see several portraits by Charles Sprague Pearce - he belonged to the generation of American artists who increasingly settled in France in the post-Civil War years. This work (1890) depicts the impeccably dressed sculptor, Paul Wayland Bartlett.

Pekka Holonen's 'Pioneers in Karelia,' (1900) was made during a period of promoting Finnish culture and art in response to Russian rule - it brought about a sense of national unity, emphasizing the beauty of the country and the stoicism of its people.

This morning has been spent looking at multiples of William Nicholson's still-lifes - it's been an enjoyable task, his act of observation is a deep, mysterious and beautiful thing. Mushrooms were a favourite subject, this work was painted in 1927.

Peder Severin Krøyer's work depicts his wife Marie in their garden at Skagen in June 1892, a picture that puts you on the spot. Like Monet, Krøyer can see colours and contrasts and radiances that most people can't.