Robert Eagle Fine Art

30/01/2026

16/01/2026

Grab a slice of still life! This is Cakes (oil on canvas) currently on show with a score of works by Wayne Thiebaud currently at the Courtauld Gallery.

Thiebaud is often lumped together with Pop artists but his aims were different: he was looking for a new way of rendering still life. I’d only ever seen his work in magazines, and they are poor stuff compared with the real thing. I can assure you that the icing on Cakes is even more luscious than the real thing.

The other jpegs are:
2. close up from Cakes;
3. Boston Cremes
4. Pinball Machine
5. 6, 7. background blurbs

27/10/2025

18/08/2025

I’d never heard of Gaston Chaissac before seeing this exhibition in
an astonishing gallery that forms part of a former nunnery at Fontevraud in western France. Chaissac took his inspiration from the religious and magical art of tribes all over the world. Active in the 1950s and ‘60s he was egged on by more successful artists with similar interests, such as Jean Dubuffet, some of whose works are included on this show, as are a couple by Picasso. Chaissac claimed that he regularly met and conversed with Picasso in his dreams, and he wrote him scores of letters - though it seems that he never got a reply. Irrepressibly enthusiastic but remarkably self- deprecating, he would sign his letters with all kinds of self-mocking names, such as “Gaston Chie-en-sac” (tr Gaston Sh*tbag).

The gallery location too has a pretty wild history. Two English kings Henry II and Richard I, are buried here along with Henry’s queen, aka Eleanor of Aquitaine. During the French Revolution, after all the nuns had been massacred, the abbey was turned into a prison which it remained for a century and a half; its inmates included the notorious novelist and playwright Jean Genet. More recently it has become the home of a major collection of modern art.

Vaut le detour, as they say.

18/08/2025

I’d never heard of Gaston Chaissac before seeing this exhibition in
an astonishing gallery that forms part of a former nunnery at Fontevraud in western France. Chaissac took his inspiration from the religious and magical art of tribes all over the world. Active in the 1950s and ‘60s he was egged on by more successful artists with similar interests, such as Jean Dubuffet, some of whose works are included on this show, as are a couple by Picasso. Chaissac claimed that he regularly met and conversed with Picasso in his dreams, and he wrote him scores of letters - though it seems that he never got a reply. Irrepressibly enthusiastic but remarkably self- deprecating, he would sign his letters with all kinds of self-mocking names, such as “Gaston Chie-en-sac” (tr Gaston Sh*tbag).

The gallery location too has a pretty wild history. Two English kings Henry II and Richard I, are buried here along with Henry’s queen, aka Eleanor of Aquitaine. During the French Revolution, after all the nuns had been massacred, the abbey was turned into a prison which it remained for a century and a half; its inmates included the notorious novelist and playwright Jean Genet. More recently it has become the home of a major collection of modern art.

Vaut le detour, as they say.

12/08/2025

They are so arty around here that the local council has erected a sculptural device that puts a frame round your view of the countryside