Five female artists explore the human body

Some months ago the Cambridge academic Professor Mary Beard presented a BBC television series titled The Shock of the Nude, in which she suggested that paintings by men of the female nude were all too often “soft porn for the elite”. Is she right or wrong?

Charles Duranty (1919-2006) was a poet who worked for a publisher, a job that he sometimes found a bit boring. So he set up an easel in his office and painted what he called “imagined landscapes”, inspired by the East Anglian countryside where he had worked as a land boy during WW2.

His landscapes are typically open countryside populated with tiny figures and steam engines.
Many of the titles are quite wonderful. Scroll down or go straight to his page for more details