Since over the last few weeks, I, like everyone else, have spent much more time looking at museum collections online, I was very interested to read Andy Ellis’s analysis as to what works people have been actually looking at. Much of it is unsurprising. Lowry comes out on top. A picture of the naked Sappho is very popular. An image of the creepiest object in a Scottish museum comes third. But what seems obvious is surely a bit surprising: old-fashioned, nineteenth-century art is still much more popular, if this survey is anything to go by, than art of the last thirty years, including Thomas Lawrence’s absurd picture of Satan, which spent most of its life rolled up in store.
