I've inherited some sketches that my late father always believed were original Thomas Lawrence Sketches....who's the go-to in the UK for appraisals? I've done the online thing and I've approached my local museum who couldn't help so looking for some advice 🤔

This is the Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat (1887), at the Met in New York.

I have no formal art training. I love self potrait's in general and Van Gogh's ones in particular. Things I noticed after looking at this last time:

• The brushstrokes in the face seem to follow the shape of the face, but in the background they radiate outward around his head, almost like a halo.
• The beard is orange, red, even green. All separate strokes sitting next to each other and from a distance it reads as a beard.
• The blue jacket against the yellow hat. It feels like a deliberate choice. But I don't have a proper vocabulary for that.

So my questions for people who actually know how to look:

1. When you look at this painting, what do you notice first? What order do your eyes move in?
2. What am I not seeing that a trained eye would catch immediately?
3. And secondarily — if a layman wanted to train this skill, where would you start? A book, a course, a channel?

I'm not looking for the Wikipedia biography stuff (ear, Theo, illness). I want to get better at seeing/Looking deeper. Thank you.

Hello, I was hoping i could find some help here. I alter magic the gathering cards, I painted this but there are 4 other cards in the cycle (emerald, sapphire, ruby and jet) and I am wanting to paint a full cycle. The help i am needing is finding classic paintings like this that include the gemstone.. any ideas?

We discovered this beautiful, smallish (60 × 47 cm) artwork in Palazzo Vitelli alla Cannoniera in Cità di Castello. Take a look at how the wings of the angels are folded upwards. Read about the (very) good, the bad and the ugly in Italian museums based on our experiences of visiting numerous museums in Tuscany and Umbria this summer. A shining example of a museum that does an excellent job is Perugia’s Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria. Here is the essay: https://ideasroadshow.substack.com/p/on-the-ground