Anyone who paints depictively, or likes to see their contemporaries do so, must feel besieged by intellectual doubts. It's been done better in the past, it's no longer relevant.
Art schools treat painting students as though they are pursuing some quaint craft.
To the beleaguered realist, then, news of a book from Julian Bell could sound like the cavalry. Bell's exhibition reviews in the Times Literary Supplement qualify him as one of the most perceptive and intelligent critics at work today. And furthermore, he is himself an exhibiting figurative painter of individuality and accomplishment. Bell sets out to offer not a history of art theory, however, but a personal apology for painting. Photography, which was invented in 1839, is traditionally blamed for the demise of depiction.