No one before had ever painted horses like George Stubbs. Not only did they look incredibly lifelike, he seemed able to capture their individual character -- a talent that ensured he could command extremely high prices for his work from wealthy and influential patrons. There's now a rare chance to appreciate the only one of the painter's outstanding lifesize equine canvases still in private hands in a small free exhibition, Stubbs: Portrait of a Horse , in Room 1 at the National Gallery in London. This is Scrub, eight times a race winner, who like the gallery's Whistlejacket belonged to one of those rich patrons, the Marquess of Rockingham, and he commissioned both pictures in about 1762. Scrub, again like Whistlejacket, was depicted not just as a racehorse, under the control of a jockey or stable boy, but in a grand manner, intended to serve as the steed in an equine portrait of George III, who had recently come to the throne. Other specialist painters would be u...
Impressionism shook up the world of art, but that was nothing compared to what followed. After Impressionism at the National Gallery in London, starting on March 25, aims to take us through the revolutionary period from around 1880 to the start of World War I, on to Expressionism, Cubism and Abstraction, with Cezanne, Gauguin, van Gogh, Klimt, Kokoschka, Matisse, Picasso, Kandinsky and Rodin; among more than 100 works, including loans from around Europe and the US, there'll also be unfamiliar artists like Broncia Koller-Pinell. Until August 13. However, if you're not quite ready for the Post-Impressionists just yet, how about the leading woman Impressionist, who's coming to Dulwich Picture Gallery on March 31? Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism will include more than 30 of her works, nine of them from the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, as well as looking at how she drew inspiration from 18th-century paintings by the likes of Fragonard, Watteau, Gainsborough and Reyno...