February and March 2009

Details 830

All three winners this week were friends of mine. Giovanni di Paulo is not the most well known of painters.

Details 831

One of my friends won this one.

Details 832

On the left here is this week's puzzle (Sunday, March 8th)

This proved to be a very difficult detail to track down. I had a fruitless search and I suspect many others will have, too.

We shall see. (On Sunday, there will be a million right answers as the painting is well known and has been recently publicised by Barack Obama who says it is his favourite as it hung on his grandmother's wall. It was by Watts and titled "Hope".)

Mr Lubbock sometimes goes from the familiar  to the obscure, although it could be that the image above is also well known and I just do not recognise it. 

As expected, there was a very large number of correct answers to the Christmas Details competition. Well, it is Christmas.

The Competition puzzle for 924 was as seen on the left: I suggest that it was one of the most tedious details to find. However, I did eventually discover that it was painted by Thomas Couture.

The week after that was an exceptionally easy detail - a knee from the Stonebreakers by Courbet. The winners will be published this week, but I should imagine that there would have been a bagful of correct entries.

This week's, 926, was in a different catergory, though. It was a real poser:

I thought it might be an engraving by Mantegna, but in the end it turned out to be by an artist I had never heard of: Girolamo da Treviso. It is a bizarre piece of political satire, a 16th century anti Roman Catholic picture showing the Four Evangelists Stoning the Pope.

This answer won't be published until a week tomorrow: 8th February.

This blog may not be continuing for too long as I think the Independent on Sunday will be taken over or "fold" fairly soon. It is losing readership hand over fist and is too London centred.

Christmas Details 2008

This is the easiest competition for a number of years. I wonder how many correct entries there were? We shall see on 18th January.