HeyJaredThe Bigger Picture: Your Favourite Art History Podcast
Professional Art History podcast hosted by Dr Peter Tuka, which uncovers The Bigger Picture of the world we are a small part of. Each episode zooms in on one great work of art and tells the story behind it in a simple and engaging manner. There is always more than meets the eye.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 7
- Latest publication
- Sep 29, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 6, 2026
Latest episodes
The Art of Standing Together: Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (opens the original)
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Why does Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People still feel so powerful nearly two centuries after the July Revolution of 1830? In this episode of The Bigger Picture , we step onto the barricades of Paris to uncover the history, symbolism and political controversy behind one of the world’s most iconic paintings. Discover how Delacroix transformed revolution into a masterpiece of Romanticism, how Liberty became both a classical allegory and a living woman of flesh and blood, why the paintin
Why are they Naked? Jacques-Louis David and the Intervention of the Sabine Women (opens the original)
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In this episode of The Bigger Picture , Dr Peter Tuka explores Jacques-Louis David’s monumental Neoclassical masterpiece The Intervention of the Sabine Women , now in the Louvre, Paris. From the legendary abduction of the Sabine women and the dramatic intervention of Hersilia, to David’s obsession withAncient Greek sculpture, heroic nudity, Roman history, and classical ideals of beauty, we unpack why this strange and spectacular painting became one of the defining images of French Neoclassicism.
"I Am a Mother and an Artist": Mierle Laderman Ukeles & Maintenance Art (opens the original)
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In this episode of The Bigger Picture , Dr Peter Tuka explores Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ groundbreaking 1973 performance Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside , a defining work of Maintenance Art performed at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. Through the simple but radical act of scrubbing the museum’s entrance steps, Ukeles challenged the boundaries between art and everyday labour, artist and cleaner, public culture and invisible care work. This episode looks at how Ukeles transforme
At the Edge of the Frame: Degas’ The Rehearsal and its Beautifully Bad Composition (opens the original)
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This episode of The Bigger Picture explores Edgar Degas’ The Rehearsal (c.1874), one of the most fascinating paintings of 19th-century French art, now in the Burrell Collection in Glasgow. Why does Degas fill the centre with empty floorboards, crop dancers in half, tilt the room, and make the whole composition look almost badly framed? In this episode, we look at how Degas used the visual language of early photography, snapshot composition, Japanese ukiyo-e prints, and the modern world of the Pa
To See and Be Seen: Mary Cassatt’s In the Loge (1878) (opens the original)
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In this episode of The Bigger Picture , Dr Peter Tuka explores Mary Cassatt’s In the Loge (1878) , a powerful Impressionist painting of modern Paris, theatre culture, and the politics of looking. Set inside a nineteenth-century opera box, Cassatt’s masterpiece opens a fascinating discussion of Haussmann’s Paris, the Palais Garnier, bourgeois society, spectatorship, the flâneur, Charles Baudelaire’s “painter of modern life,” andthe gendered experience of public life in the modern metropolis. Thro
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