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| Ambrose McEvoy The Ear-Ring ca. 1911 oil on canvas Tate, London |
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| Walter Sickert Brighton Pierrots 1915 oil on canvas Tate, London |
"Sickert spent much of the late summer of 1915 in Brighton as the guest of his patron, the painter Walter Taylor. For five weeks he regularly went to see the Pierrots perform on a small temporary stage erected on Brighton beach. . . . The twilight glow suffusing the audience and seafront in peach and purple is broken by the glare of phosphorous stage lights, the acid tints of which catch on the performers' clothes and faces. The juxtaposition of dying daylight with garish illumination and a depleted audience underscores the end of season atmosphere."
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| William Coldstream On the Map (Graham Bell and Igor Anrep) 1937 oil on canvas Tate, London |
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| George Warner Allen Picnic at Wittenham 1947-48 oil and tempera on canvas. mounted on panel Tate, London |
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| Robert Medley The Antique Room at the Slade - Niobe and Hermes 1952 oil on canvas Tate, London |
"This painting celebrates the room of plaster casts taken from antique sculptures which was used as a vital teaching tool in the Slade School curriculum. This Antique Room no longer exists. In 1952 Medley was a visiting teacher in the Department of Theatrical Design, while William Coldstream was Slade Professor of Fine Art. Easels and partly finished work by the students fill the foreground while the background is dominated by a cast of Praxiteles's 4th century BC Hermes with the Infant Dionysus. Medley attempted in this painting to experiment with interior space and the tension wrought by combining perceived reality with an imaginatively conceived composition."
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| John Minton Composition - the Death of James Dean 1957 oil on canvas Tate, London |
"During the 1940s Minton was regarded as one of the most talented artists of his generation, particularly for his skills as a draughtsman. Between 1948 and 1957 he taught at the Royal College of Art, where he advocated the tradition of figure painting. He had a charismatic but self-destructive disposition and possibly identified with James Dean, the Hollywood film star, who was killed in a car accident in 1955, aged twenty-four. By the early 1950s Minton's reputation was in decline. His commitment to figure composition seemed out-dated in the face of American Abstract Expressionism. The Death of James Dean was his last ambitious picture. He was found dead on 22 January 1957. The coroner's verdict was suicide."
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| David Hockney The Third Love Painting 1960 oil on panel Tate, London |
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| Michael Andrews The Deer Park 1962 oil on canvas Tate, London |
"The Deer Park was inspired by Norman Mailer's novel of the same title. For Andrews, the novel seemed to describe 'the world of Soho' whose clubs and bars he had frequented. Rather than illustrating the text, however, the painting creates a new, imaginary situation involving a cast of different characters. . . . The figures are all based on photographs of people from show business and literary worlds, past and present. They include Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot and the poet Rimbaud. The background is based on The Boar Hunt by Velasquez in the National Gallery, London."
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| William Roberts The Lake 1964 oil on canvas Tate, London |
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| Josef Herman Two Women Weeding 1965 gouache on paper Tate, London |
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| Peter Greenham Life Class 1979 oil on canvas Tate, London |
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| Christopher Le Brun Dream. Think, Speak 1981-82 oil on canvas Tate, London |
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| Laetitia Yhap Michael Balling-Up Old Net 1984 oil on panel Tate, London |
"Michael owned the net which he is seen working on. The process known as 'balling up' is described by Yhap: The whole business of making nets is intensive and repetitive. They are thousands of yards long and cost several hundreds of pounds in materials. When they are worn out it is often possible to cut out the 'inners' and save the 'wallings' (outsiders) and fit a new net between the lead line and the corkline. It means that this work is often done in summer when there is no fishing going on and it can be done in a leisurely fashion – a way of making use of long summer days."
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| Maggi Hambling Minotaur Surprised while Eating 1986-87 oil on canvas Tate, London |
"When asked about her strong and continuing interest in painting animals, Hambling recalled that the first exhibition that she ever attended, at the age of about four or five, was of paintings of bulls. The exhibition was held in a first floor room of a public house in her home town of Hadleigh, Suffolk. She was taken by her mother and remembered being 'amazed' by these paintings of bulls. The painter was Tony Stoney, a local farmer, who had painted portraits of bulls for her farming friends."
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| Paula Rego The Dance 1988 acrylic on paper, mounted on canvas Tate, London |
– all quoted passages based on notes by curators at the Tate in London