While not exactly fulfilling its title, The Story of British Art is nonetheless an interesting series of articles, accompanied by an image slideshow, on artists from (or related to) British history by Guardian art writer Jonathan Jones.

While I don’t always see eye to eye with Jones, I always find his articles worth reading, and he usually has something interesting to point out about the artists he covers.

The individual articles have larger images, many of which can be enlarged. The slideshow is somewhat the opposite — starting with close-up crops that can be zoomed out to reveal a smaller image of the entire work with a control at the upper left of the image.

(Images above: John Constable, Hans Holbein, William Blake, (unknown), Hans Holbein, Joseph Wright, Lucian Freud)

In the apparent dichotomy of “dog people” and “cat people”, I’m in the latter camp.

Dogs can be nice enough, but they always seem a bit too eager to be what humans want them to be. Cats are to me more fascinating. Having a cat as a pet seems more like sharing your house with a wild animal that has decided you can be of some use to it and deigned to allow you to share its company.

Both, of course, have a long history of domestication, and both have been subjects for artists.

I also very much like women as subjects for art, and women seem particularly likely to be fond of cats.

A Flickr user who goes by the pseudonym “Huismus” has assembled a nicely varied and nicely chosen set of paintings that feature women and cats. (The selections are even more varied than my choices above might indicate.)

The set is also well annotated with the names of the artists and titles of the works. “Huismus” has a number of other Flickr sets devoted to art.

(Images above: Giovanni Boldini, Helene Allingham, Ivan Kramskoi, John Sloan, Marguerite Gérard, Edouard Manet, Phillip William Steer, Max Lieberman, Francesco Bacchiacca, Zinaida Serebriakova, John White Alexander)

[Via Making a Mark]

Nicholas Roerich was a Russian painter, set designer and philosopher. He was also trained as a lawyer and was an amateur archeologist.

Roerich’s work shows the influence of Russian and Nordic folk tales, iconography, his interest in eastern religion and his travels in India, Tibet and Mongolia.

Roerich was also known for his efforts to protect art from the ravages of war, notably his creation of the “Pax Cultura”, for which he was nominated several times for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Roerich was prolific, creating over 7,000 works in oil, gouache and tempera, as well as a series of stage sets, some monumental, for the Ballets Russes.

The Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York is dedicated to his work, houses about 200 of his paintings. The museum has a collection of his works online.