You may have noticed that it's the 250th anniversary of John Constable's birth this year, while JMW Turner was born 250 years ago last year and Thomas Gainsborough's 300th birthday falls in 2027. Put them all together and you get Gainsborough, Turner and Constable: Inventing Landscape at Gainsborough's House in Sudbury, Suffolk. This show, running from April 25 to October 11, explores the emergence of English landscape painting through three of its greatest exponents, and it features mostly rarely seen works from private collections -- including Turner's Abergavenny Bridge , which hasn't been on public display since 1799! Meanwhile, the show that's just been on at Gainsborough's House -- Love & Landscape: Stanley Spencer in Suffolk -- transfers to the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham, Berkshire, starting on April 4. On till November 1, the exhibition explores the pivotal role the time Spencer spent in Suffolk had on his career. You can read he...
Got any plans for the first month of 2021? Zoom call? Vaccination? An exhibition? Well, here's a few that are scheduled to open, if the authorities allow. London's first big-name show of the year is at the Royal Academy. Francis Bacon: Man and Beast looks at how the boundaries between humans and animals are so often distorted in Bacon's violent pictures. Bacon was fascinated by the subject of animal movement throughout his career. This exhibition is scheduled from January 30 to April 18. The previous lockdown meant the curtain failed to go up in November on Noël Coward: Art & Style at the Guildhall Art Gallery, but the show is now slated to begin its run on January 14. The exhibition, including previously undisplayed material, is being staged to commemorate the centenary of Coward's West End debut as a 19-year-old playwright. The writer of Brief Encounter and Mad Dogs and Englishmen had a huge impact on fashion and culture in the...