"There were no pictures on the walls of the rented rooms my mother and I lived in when I was a child. But there were pictures on the school walls, details of exhibitions and the lives of great painters in
Everybody’s Weekly
, and, when we could afford it, we would treat ourselves to a trip to the nearest city and its travelling exhibitions of prints, which was how I saw most of Van Gogh that wasn’t at school.” Above all,
Pictures from an Exhibition
celebrates the mind’s eye, which is its own exhibition gallery: transforming Darlington Station into an upturned ship’s hull or a mauled pigeon into a still life, and glorying in the lives, loves and creations of painters from Veronese to Anselm Kiefer.