Michael Prodger

1 week ago | apollo-magazine.com | Michael Prodger

From the May 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here. The walls of the National Gallery have always felt generously stocked, leaving barely a pause in the progression from one of the world’s great paintings to the next. Nevertheless, in global terms, the collection, however choice, is a small one: the Louvre has some 5,500 paintings, the Prado 8,000, while the Hermitage in St Petersburg groans under 17,000. So the 2,300 pictures housed at Trafalgar Square seems paltry by comparison.

2 weeks ago | newstatesman.com | Michael Prodger

According to Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, the discoveries of America and a passage to the East Indies by Columbus and Vasco da Gama were “the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind”. What wasn’t recorded quite so diligently were the disasters, privations, deaths and sheer haplessness that accompanied the 16th-century voyages into the unknown.

2 weeks ago | newstatesman.com | Michael Prodger

JMW Turner baffled his contemporaries. At the beginning of his career he was a prodigy, a preternaturally gifted tyro who joined the Royal Academy Schools at 14, and at 15 became the youngest painter ever to have a picture accepted for the RA Summer Exhibition. But at the end of his career his peers found his paintings incomprehensible. All those wafty emanations of light, colour and atmospherics had no precedent and no explanation.

1 month ago | thecritic.co.uk | Michael Prodger

This article is taken from the April 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10. The sample is too small to make it anything other than a curious fact that many painters who were also poets have often been marked by a non-standard psychology.

1 month ago | newstatesman.com | Zuzanna Lachendro |Michael Prodger |Kate Mossman |Zoe Huxford

“Call me Ishmael”, the opening line of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick,commands the reader. In her exciting feminist reimagining of the classic, the 2020 Goldsmith’s Prize shortlisted author Xiaolu Guo instructs the reader to call the narrator Ishmaelle. Guo’s plot follows a similar trajectory to the original. The cast is slightly changed; Captain Ahab becomes Captain Seneca and rather than sailing on the Pequod, Ishmaelle finds herself on the Nimrod.