Leeds

Venice again! I spotted this luminous painting of the lagoon on the walls of the Leeds City Art Gallery, where, in a room dominated by high Victorian bombast and sentimentality, it stood out like a good deed in a naughty world. The work of John William Inchbold, a favourite of Ruskin's, it was undoubtedly the picture I would have taken home with me, given the chance. But there were other goodies to be seen on this brief visit, including several by John Atkinson Grimshaw (a Leeds man), that master of moonlight and urban crepuscule, Lady Butler's high-impact depiction of the charge of the Scots Greys at Waterloo (read all about it here), and William Orpen's The Studio [below], a virtuoso exercise in light and shade, which, seen close to, turns out to be composed of surprisingly dry dabs of paint. 

John William Inchbold was also the painter of that magical evocation of the light of early spring, A Study in March [below], which hangs on the walls of the Ashmolean.

As for Leeds itself, a city I hadn't visited in many years, I was greatly impressed, particularly by the architecture – a magnificent array of Victorian work, including fine shopping arcades and grand municipal buildings, and plenty of good stuff from the twentieth century (particularly the Thirties), with only a scattering of the usual ugly multi-storey blocks from more recent times. I was even impressed by a modern shopping arcade, Victoria Leeds, which looked to me like seriously good architecture, but maybe I'm going soft. I'll stop here.