Nature Hub

    From - BBC World News    By -  Lucy Davies   Edited by - Amal Udawatta Art Institute of Chicago/ Arthur M Wood/ Collection of Alice and Rick Johnson Blanche Hoschedé-Monet has barely been acknowledged in art history. But not only did she help her stepfather Claude, she created her own fine works – often of the same scenes as him. Haystack at Giverny, Poplars at the Water's Edge, Morning on the Seine. These painting titles bring only one name to mind – the great Claude Monet, whose flickering evocations of light and atmosphere are the cornerstone of Impressionism.  But while Monet painted these very subjects, the paintings belong to the oeuvre of his stepdaughter, and subsequently daughter-in-law, Blanche Hoschedé-Monet (1865–1947). She learned to paint at Monet's shoulder, and exhibited and sold her work through the leading Parisian dealers of the time. Her finest paintings suggest an artist of such flair that you wonder how she has ...

  From - BBC News  By -  Clare McHugh  Edited by - Amal Udawatta National Portrait Gallery With her award-winning Wolf Hall series of books, Hilary Mantel made sympathetic a figure long considered a historical bad guy. But as Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, the TV adaptation of her third and final novel, premieres in the US, the question is: did she also 'sidestep crucial matters'? Nearly 500 years after his death, Thomas Cromwell lives again, reborn in the popular imagination thanks to novelist Hilary Mantel, and her Wolf Hall trilogy. For decades, historians piled layer after layer of interpretation upon Henry VIII's astute chief minister, a key figure in the Reformation, when King Henry broke from the Catholic Church to establish his own Church of England. But now, with the emergence of Mantel's fictional Cromwell – so attractive, so splendidly presented – the real man is in danger of being buried forever. Going forward, Cromwell's name will likely call to m...