Michael Prodger

Some of the most talented artists of early 17th-century Rome were linked by violence as much as skill. Caravaggio was a murderer, Bernini had a lover’s face slashed when she (already married) betrayed him with his brother, Salvator Rosa was said to be part of a gang of thuggish brigands, and Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, who had a charge sheet as long as his arm, once tried to throw his sister off a roof and probably did succeed in killing someone else.

A distrust of politicians and a compassion for working people drove Honoré Daumier’s work

Sir Hugh Casson (1910-99) was the John Betjeman of postwar British architecture: the unthreatening, homely face of a sometimes difficult art form. Casson came to notice when, at the age of only 38, he was appointed Director of Architecture for the Festival of Britain. It was his charm and easy manner that enabled such uncompromising buildings as Leslie Martin’s Royal Festival Hall to be built.

His own career as an architect was successful if unspectacular, his most memorable building being the elephant house at London Zoo, which resembles a pachyderm-size cluster of oasthouses. Although Casson trained as a Modernist, his heart lay with traditional architecture and it was this that underlay commissions to design the interiors of the royal yacht Britannia as well as suites of rooms in Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace (he was also, supposedly, the man who taught Prince Charles to paint).

George Catlin both recorded and idealised the vanquished native Indian tribes of North America

For a literary grandee with striking features-all angled nose, chin and eyebrows-T.S. Eliot was much photographed but surprisingly little painted. Wyndham Lewis painted him twice, including one portrait that was rejected by the Royal Academy in 1938 for including a “phallic reference” in the background, but no other artist of note. In 1947 the young Patrick Heron tried his luck on the strength of his father and the poet being friends.