Visit the evocative Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller exhibition at the National Gallery in London and you could think it was sponsored by the Austrian Tourist Board, because these oil paintings so beautifully depict the magnificent Alpine scenery that has long attracted visitors. Those towering mountains with their craggy grey peaks, so high they're topped with a glacier, the rich green meadows, some above the treeline, others on lower slopes or down in the valleys where the rivers meander. It's all there. But look a little longer and you become aware that some things are missing; where are those familiar chairlifts, cable cars, broad ski pistes, railways and roads? There are only a scattering of houses; maybe just a few inns and hotels catering for the adventurous, for Austrian tourism is in its infancy. That's because Waldmüller was born in Vienna in 1793 and died near the Vienna Woods in 1865. Waldmüller: Landscapes , a free single-room display of just over a dozen paintings...
It's in the reign of King Henry VIII that English history seems to come to life, to become truly accessible. And part of that is down to the portraits of the royal family and the court by the German artist Hans Holbein the Younger, which retain an uncanny immediacy five centuries on. Holbein at the Tudor Court at the Queen's Gallery in London will display the largest group of Holbein's works from the Royal Collection in more than 30 years, including over 40 of his sublime portrait drawings, of sitters such as Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour and Thomas More. It's on from November 10 until April 14. More works on paper at the Royal Academy, but from well over 300 years later: Degas, Cezanne, Morisot , van Gogh, Monet and Toulouse-Lautrec are all represented in Impressionists on Paper , which assembles 77 exhibits to show how the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists transformed art through other media as well as painting. This one runs from November 25 to March 10. November ...