This year marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Claude Monet, the Impressionist par excellence, and unsurprisingly there's no shortage of Monet-related exhibitions, particularly in France, to mark the occasion. So if you want to fill 2026 with luminous, atmospheric landscapes and dreamy water lilies, we have some dates for your diary. We'll take the big shows in chronological order, which means crossing the border into Germany for the first of them. We can vouch for it that Monet on the Normandy Coast: The Discovery of Etretat at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt is an excellent exhibition; we saw it in Lyon late last year. Monet was fascinated by the chalk cliffs around the fishing village of Etretat with their eroded formations -- creating bizarre doors and needles -- and he produced a series of pictures showing the light and weather effects on the land and sea. There are 24 works by him on display; Monet's the star, but you'll also find dozens mo...
The big new show in London this month is Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance at the Victoria & Albert Museum, starting on February 11. Donatello created a revolution in sculpture in 15th-century Florence, and this show, with some 130 objects, includes much work that has never been seen in the UK before. It's the last in a series of interlinked exhibitions following shows in Florence and Berlin that were highly praised. On until June 11. The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford takes us to ancient Crete beginning on February 10 for Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth & Reality . The palace of Knossos was the centre of the Bronze Age Minoan civilization, and legend had it that an enormous labyrinth was built there to hold the Minotaur, a creature half-man, half-bull. This exhibition includes more than 100 objects that have never left Greece before as well as two immersive experiences. It runs until July 30. Curiously, the new show at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge is also about the a...