Opening and Closing in September

Which exhibition are we most looking forward to this month? It has to be Frans Hals at the National Gallery in London, which starts on September 30. It's the first major retrospective of the great portraitist of the Dutch Golden Age in three decades, and it will assemble around 50 of his works, including a couple of his large-scale group portraits of militiamen from the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. A must-see, particularly if you missed the fantastic show focusing on Hals's male portraits at the Wallace Collection a couple of years back. All that swaggering loose -- or even louche -- brushwork is on display at the National Gallery until January 21, before transferring to the Rijksmuseum in February and then the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin in July. 

Hals was originally from Antwerp, and it was in the Flemish port city that his close contemporary Peter Paul Rubens spent much of his life and career. The new exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery is entitled Rubens & Women; your first thought might be of a clutch of fleshy nudes, but the curators aim to dispel that stereotype with a broad range of pictures, including religious works and family portraits. The show includes more than 40 paintings and drawings, many appearing in the UK for the first time. On from September 27 to January 28. 

Many images of women from a provocative contemporary artist will be on show at Tate Britain from September 28 in Sarah Lucas: Happy Gas. Lucas was one of the generation of Young British Artists who came to the fore in the 1980s and 90s and is known for her visual puns and often bawdy images, with her signature soft sculptures made of stuffed tights. This exhibition looks back at her career with more than 75 works and runs until January 14.

Think of the 19th century as drab, with images such as Queen Victoria only wearing black after Prince Albert died? Think again. Industrial and scientific advances produced new dyes that opened up a whole range of exciting hues, as you can discover in Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion & Design at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, starting on September 21. Vivid clothing, fabrics and accessories are accompanied by paintings from artists including Turner, Whistler and Ruskin. It's on until February 18.

At Charleston Farmhouse, near Lewes in East Sussex, you have the chance to see a selection of early drawings by David Hockney, including work made in California in the 1960s and 70s. David Hockney: Love Life is on from September 23 to March 10. 

Summer may be almost over, but Flower Power will keep the Musée des impressionnismes in Giverny blooming through the rest of the year. This show, running from September 29 to January 7, features more than 100 exhibits looking at the significance of flowers across cultures and through history. There'll be a big section on the Impressionists, naturally, with Monet, Manet, Caillebotte and Cezanne on display. 

In many museums, there are works of art that may once have been stolen: on colonial expeditions, by Napoleon's troops, by the Nazis from Jewish owners. Loot -- 10 Stories at the Mauritshuis in The Hague explores the history of some of these objects, including a Rembrandt self-portrait now in the museum's own collection, with the aid of virtual-reality headsets. The exhibition runs from September 14 to January 7 and it's due to move to the Humboldt Forum in Berlin at some point in 2024.

The cityscape was a significant genre in the Dutch Golden Age, and Haarlem, with its towering cathedral, was a popular subject. Views of Haarlem at the Frans Hals Museum is the first exhibition dedicated to such pictures and brings together work by artists including Gerrit Berckheyde, Jacob van Ruisdael and Jan van Goyen. It's on from September 22 until January 7. 

The Brueghels (or Bruegels) are a bit confusing. There are the Pieters and Jans, the Elders and the Youngers, and in fact there were five generations of them, often reworking popular pictures by their predecessors, including the very best, the father of the dynasty, Pieter the Elder. Now the Noordbrabants Museum in Den Bosch in the southern Netherlands has assembled 80 paintings and prints from across the decades to tell the full story of perhaps the art world's longest-running family business. Brueghel: The Family Reunion convenes on September 30 and will last until January 7. 

Let's head north now to Ordrupgaard, near Copenhagen, where from September 20 you can see Anna and Michael Ancher: Together and Apart. The couple were key figures in the Skagen art colony at Denmark's northern tip at the end of the 19th century, sometimes painting together. Michael became renowned for his pictures of heroic fishermen, while Anna was a precursor of modernism with her works filled with light and colour. On until January 7. 

In 1892, Edvard Munch had his first solo exhibition in Berlin, and even though his art shocked many, he came back to the city again and again over the next 15 years to work; there were about 60 Munch shows in the German capital before the Nazis took power in 1933. The Berlinische Galerie has brought together around 80 Munch works, as well as pictures by other artists, to explore the relationship between the artist and a city fascinated by Nordic culture. Edvard Munch: Magic of the North is on from September 15 to January 22, and is being staged in conjunction with the Munch Museum in Oslo. 

Just a decade or so after Munch was shocking the Germans, the Fauvists -- the wild beasts -- were scandalising conservative art circles with their bold experiments in the use of colour. Matisse, Derain and Friends at the Kunstmuseum in Basel takes an in-depth look at the work of the new Parisian avant-garde from 1904 to 1908. Dufy, Braque and van Dongen are among the other artists represented in a show that encompasses around 160 works. Starts September 2 and runs through to January 21. 

And finally just outside Basel, at the Fondation Beyeler, there's an exhibition devoted to Georgia's most famous artist, Niko Pirosmani (1862-1918), featuring around 50 major paintings. It's on from September 17 to January 28. 

Last chance to see.... 

The sparkling exhibition about Berthe Morisot and her interest in 18th-century British and French art closes at Dulwich on September 10. If you can't make it, the show reopens at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris in mid-October. 

On until September 17 at the Fondation Custodia in Paris, a show piecing together what little is known about the enigmatic Dutch Golden Age painter Jacobus Vrel. When we saw this exhibition at the Mauritshuis in the spring we discovered that his work was sometimes passed off as being by Vermeer. 

You still have till September 24 to catch The Rossettis at Tate Britain. We can't really recommend it; we found it sprawling, confused and a bit of a slog, even though some of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's paintings are very beautiful. American readers with a taste for Victoriana and the Pre-Raphaelites will find it on at the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington from October 21.

Images

Frans Hals (1582-1666), Portrait of a Man in a Slouch Hat, about 1660, Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister. © Photo Scala, Florence/bpk, Bildagentur für Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte, Berlin
Ramon Casas (1866-1932), A Decadent Young Woman, After the Dance, 1899, Museu de Montserrat, Catalonia
Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525/1530-1569), The Beggars, 1568, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre)/Gérard Blot
Henri Matisse (1869-1954), Intérieur à Collioure (La Sieste), 1905, Gabriele and Werner Merzbacher Collection, on permanent loan to Kunsthaus Zürich. © Succession H. Matisse/2023, ProLitteris, Zurich
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), Bocca Baciata, 1859, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts