The revolution won't happen overnight, but it's coming. And it will take place in 1874, when the rebels who'll become known as the Impressionists hold their first exhibition in Paris. To see how the Impressionists got there, and what they were rebelling against, we've come to Cologne, and the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, for an utterly enjoyable exhibition about the art of the 1860s and 70s that found official approval from the French state and from the traditionalist critics -- and the art that didn't. The show is entitled 1863 Paris 1874: Revolution in Art -- From the Salon to Impressionism , and this is the striking image that greets you as you enter, a painting that we've never seen before (it belongs to the Spanish central bank ) but which seems to sum up the entire topic for you in one go. The Catalan artist Pere Borrell del Caso actually created this trompe l'oeil in 1874, completely independently of the Impressionists. It wasn't originally called
The Dutch Golden Age wasn't just Rembrandt, Hals and Vermeer. A little further inland from the North Sea, the painters of Utrecht -- Dirck van Baburen, Hendrick ter Brugghen and Gerard van Honthorst -- pursued a very different course, echoing the drama and light effects pioneered in the far south of Europe by Caravaggio. That's the theme of Utrecht, Caravaggio and Europe at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht from December 16 to March 24, with 60 loans from across Europe and the US. Caravaggio's Entombment of Christ from the Vatican can be seen for the first four weeks of the exhibition. At the Petit Palais in Paris, there are two shows that are a little out of the ordinary. The strange dream-like images of late 19th-century Belgian Symbolist Fernand Khnopff are the subject of a major retrospective in an exhibition subtitled The Master of Enigma. Even odder are the drawings of Jean Jacques Lequeu , who died in poverty in 1826 having created his own architectural fantasy wo