Poets and Lovers at the National Gallery review – a wonderful show of a wonderful artist - 5/5 This is a chance to see the best works from the last years of the great artist’s life

Visitors will be ‘blown away’ by the masterpieces—but there are intriguing and little-known stories behind many of the loans

Every painting is a "gamble, an experiment, a chucking of artistic caution and convention to the mistral wind". You can feel the "churn" of his brush strokes; indeed, in parts, the impasto is as thick as a bead or a button. The colours are "perverse" with fields alight with "cobalt and saffron".