The Secrets of Painting  The Hidden Art of the Masterpiece from Prehistory to Today  By Lachlan Goudie  Publication: 2 April 2026  384pp, 220 illustrations, 24.6 x 18.6 cm, £38.00 hardback This is a serious pleasure to read. The Secrets of Painting by Lachlan Goudie doesn’t make things difficult, and it doesn’t dilute what it knows. It holds a line between the two, and that’s precisely why it works. From the outset, it draws you in without forcing anything. You keep reading, and more importantly, you keep looking. Lachlan Goudie writes with a clarity that is harder to achieve than complexity. There’s no sense of knowledge being withheld, nor any attempt…

My Heart is This: Tracey Emin on Painting By Martin GayfordThames & Hudson256 pages The Body That Keeps Painting At one point in My Heart is This, Tracey Emin says something that quietly shifts how you read the rest of the book. “Painting saved my life,” she tells Martin Gayford. It is the kind of sentence that might sound theatrical if it appeared on its own. But within the rhythm of their conversation, it doesn’t land that way. Emin says it while describing the period after her cancer diagnosis in 2020, when the routines that structure an artist’s life — the studio, the work, the ordinary sense of time passing…