Review – Walter Sickert at Tate Britain: Smoke and Mirrors

★★★★☆: "Walter Sickert is probably one of the most exciting, idiosyncratic, maligned, misunderstood, and captivating artists that Britain has ever produced. His long life and career was made up of ambiguity and contradiction. A British artist born in Germany and trained by American and French painters, an aspiring actor who turned to painting as an alternative medium to tell his stories, and a man who revelled in changing the identities and titles of both himself and his works. The smoke and mirrors that surround his life are probably what led the crime-writer Patricia Cornwell to write an allegedly ‘non-fiction’ and dubiously researched book in 2002 that presented her case for Sickert being the almost mythical serial killer Jack the Ripper. The current retrospective of his works at Tate Britain (until 18th Sept) is mercifully without such slanderous assumptions and presents Sickert as an innovative and experimental painter with a long and varied career."

The Forgotten Cathedral: Byzantium comes to Westminster

"To paraphrase John Lennon, Westminster Cathedral isn't the most famous church in the world, it's not even the most famous church in Westminster. While millions of tourists a year flood through the ticket office of Westminster Abbey, keying numbers in the inexplicably sicky audio guides and gawping through the railings at ancient Kings and Queens, only five minutes down the road stands a neighbour who is seldom included on a pre-planned itinerary. Westminster Cathedral is halfway between Victoria Station and Parliament Square but it might as well be halfway between Venice and Istanbul."

Edwin Seward: The Man Who Built Cardiff

Occasionally an architectural style can be so dominant in a city that it becomes a kind of local vernacular. Bath is given its identity by the Regency Neoclassical, Bristol has its own variation on the Byzantine, Oxford is high-gothic and Coventry is mid-century modern. York is known by its warren of medieval streets and Aberdeen has its own particular granite solidity. Amongst all these, Cardiff, capital of Wales, must be the city of mongrel architecture, an architecture of eclecticism that takes from all styles and sources to make something utterly original, and it would seem this can be traced back to one man, Edwin Seward.