"No One Really Knows‪"‬

Starting from accounts of the artists' lives and characters, and the circumstances of their times, and using their own written works, letters, public lectures and interviews, a picture emerges of their theories of art, and how those theories depended partly on their personalities and partly on current ideas.

So a range of theories emerges, from classical Renaissance ones, to Romantic ones to modernist ones.

The chapters are : Hilliard and Artificiality ; Hogarth and Everyday Life in London ; Reynolds and Perfect Balance ; Constable as Mr Punch ; Holman Hunt The Maniac ; William Morris : The Artist as Socialist ; Whistler : Art for Art's Sake ; Wyndham Lewis and Violence ; Bacon and Tragedy ; and Hockney: 'Photography is Dead, Long Live Painting'.

The 'No One Really Knows" of the title refers to what Bacon said when an interviewer asked him what made a painting.