Joy of the day one and all.

Sink Me, if it ain't The Ornate Drawing Room

Welcome to Art for the Common Man:

A series of edifying and yet concise introductory essays on the worlds's finest practitioners of the Arts, explained in the kind of language even your servants could understand. Note, however, that we refer not to the noble arts - boxing, racing, gambling etc., but to the Fine Arts - the daubing of paints, the ceaseless chipping at blocks of marble and the like, in a futile effort to render the sublime immutable. Now see here, of course you need to know about it, old boy,! Why a  rudimentary knowledge of such things is an absolute essential component of any gentleman's armoury, when engaging in discourse with a lady of quality.

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Further, each chapter of Art for the Common Man  is exclusively produced for The 18th Century Club by an eminent expert in the field, giving you unparalleled access into the minds of these supremely gifted work-shy bohemian dilettantes.

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Part One - John  Atkinson Grimshaw by Albert Thanoz of Bean University, Sheffield.

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Part Two - Vincent Van Gogh, by Dr. Edam Clogsja, Unfettered Professor of Expressionism, Rotterdam School of Art.

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Part Three - Henry Moore, by Sir Effing Reet-Barnsley, K.E.S.

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Part Four - John Millais, by Marjorie Daley-Mail

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Part Five - Dante Gabriel Rossetti by  Sir Arthur Ian Legends, Oxford.

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Part Five

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Dante Gabriel Rossetti by  Sir Arthur Ian Legends, Oxford.

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Not just a painter, but a poet and renowned pasta chef to boot, he was privately known to John Ruskin by the touching sobriquet Alphabetti Rossetti, and indeed, did not his languid brush strokes coil like linguini amid the rich sauce of Symbolism? And who amongst us today can say they've ever snatched a fistful of crumpled manuscripts from the dead hand of their exhumed first wife, without picturing Beatrice, swathed in greens, redolent of oregano and basil, enraptured?

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Dante Gabriel Rossetti - he couldn't really paint hair.

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Part Four

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John Millais, by Marjorie Daley-Mail, best selling author of  Siddal Sassoon  - hair and beauty secrets of the Victorian Super Models.

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Art's all very well, but a great hostess needs to be pretty and charming as well as just educated. Nobody likes an ugly brainbox. So, just for the ladies, here's my tip for this season's freshest way of staving off those 6.5 tell tale signs of aging:

Keeping all your clothes on, lie down for several hours in luke warm water with some twigs floating in it. It's that easy, and I guarantee you'll look simply fabulous.

And for that gaunt and haunted look that modern man finds so appealing; why not get consumption?

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John Millais- PreRaphaelite Correctness, gone mad.

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Part Three

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No.3 Henry Moore, by Sir Effing Reet-Barnsley, K.E.S.

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Well you see, it isn't simply a case of the contours themselves, so much as the contours juxtaposed against the space they inhabit. This frisson, this, if you will, mating of the marble and the very air which surrounds it, evokes both the sensual and maternal, the virginal and the fecund, on such a scale, yet with such a profound intimacy, that it remains unchallenged within the realm of public art to be put up outside municipal office buildings since 1973. 

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Henry Moore - clearly, never seen a naked woman in his life.

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Part Two

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 No.2 Vincent Van Gogh, by Dr. Edam Clogsja, Unfettered Professor of Expressionism, Rotterdan School of Art.

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The soul of man encapsulated in the luminosity of the sunflower or the field of wheat? What know you of this, you pampered bourgeois scum? The sky, I tell you, blue as the paint-smeared lips of a starving genius, blue as the barrel of a shotgun in a field of yellow corn! Yellow, I say! Yellow, blue and yellow, and the crows like black beads of death, like the filthy lies from the lips of a whore in a Arles brothel, as Gaugin plunges for the razor. Yellow.

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Van Gogh - mad as a bleedin' hatter, or what?

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Part One
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 No 1. John  Atkinson Grimshaw by Albert Thanoz of Bean University, Sheffield.

Moonlight. Filtered moonlight. Bleak. A lone figure against a Victorian urban backdrop. The sea. Moonlight. A figure. Moonlight….Moonlight...Translucent blue Moonlight. Trees. Silhouettes in………………. Moonlight.


Urban. Filtered. Figure. Moonlight. Yorkshire.

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Atkinson Grimshaw - 'he went t' foot of his own stairs'.