Skip to main content

Very Rich Hours in Chantilly

It is a once-in-a-lifetime experience: the chance to see one of the greatest -- and most fragile -- works of European art before your very eyes. The illustrated manuscript known as the  Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry contains images that have shaped our view of the late Middle Ages, but it's normally kept under lock and key at the Château de Chantilly, north of Paris. It's only been exhibited twice in the past century. Now newly restored, the glowing pages of  Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry are on show to the public for just a few months. "Approche, approche," the Duke of Berry's usher tells the visitors to the great man's table for the feast that will mark the start of the New Year. It's also your invitation to examine closely the illustration for January, one of the 12 months from the calendar in this Book of Hours -- a collection of prayers and other religious texts -- that form the centrepiece of this exhibition in Chantilly.  It's su...
Post a Comment

Subscribe to updates

Opening and Closing in July

Not long now till the Olympics start in Paris, but the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge is looking back to the last such event in the French capital, the Chariots of Fire Games of 1924. Paris 1924: Sport, Art and the Body will use a range of media -- painting, fashion, film, photography and more -- to examine how tradition and modernism came together to shape the future of sport. July 19 to November 3, and entry is free. 

Elsewhere in East Anglia, Gainsborough's House in Sudbury stages the first major exhibition in 40 years of the work of Cedric Morris, perhaps best known as a teacher of Lucian Freud at his art school in Suffolk and as a breeder of irises. We saw a couple of smaller-scale Morris shows in London back in 2018, but this one aims to take a deeper and broader view of Morris and his artistic and romantic partner, Arthur Lett-Haines. Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris & Arthur Lett-Haines is on from July 6 to November 3. 
The record for the most valuable work by a British female artist was recently broken by the surrealist Leonora Carrington. Newlands House Gallery in Petworth, West Sussex, will open an exhibition on July 12 focusing particularly on the later stages of Carrington's very long career and featuring many works never previously seen in the UK. Leonora Carrington: Rebel Visionary runs until October 26. 

Let's stay in Sussex for another British woman artist. Mabel Pryde Nicholson was the wife of William Nicholson, and they lived at The Grange in Rottingdean from 1909 to 1914. Her achievements have been overshadowed by her husband's, and an exhibition of her paintings at her former home will be the first for more than a century. Prydie: The Life and Art of Mabel Pryde Nicholson will be on at what is now the Grange Gallery from July 20 to August 26. 

Up to Edinburgh for the paintings of the Irish-born artist Sir John Lavery -- one of the Glasgow Boys -- recording his travels across the British Isles, Europe and beyond throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. An Irish Impressionist: Lavery on Location has already been seen in Dublin and Belfast, and it'll be on at the Royal Scottish Academy from July 20 to October 27. 

If you missed the shows of Frans Hals's remarkable Dutch Golden Age portraits in London or Amsterdam, there's a final opportunity to see the full range of his paintings at Berlin's Gemäldegalerie from July 12. There will be around 75 pictures on display by Hals and his contemporaries from Haarlem, demonstrating his apparently effortless loose brushwork -- such an inspiration to the painters of the late 19th century. Frans Hals: Master of the Fleeting Moment runs until November 3.

Last chance to see....

Over the top? Certainly. But Tate Britain's exhibition on John Singer Sargent and Fashion is well worth visiting, if you can get down to Millbank before it closes on July 7. 

And if you can make it over to Cologne before July 28, you can see one of the shows we've most enjoyed this year, looking at the art the Impressionists produced 150 years ago, and what they were rebelling against, in 1863 Paris 1874: Revolution in Art at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum.

Images

Cedric Morris (1889-1982), Summer Garden Flowers, 1944, Philip Mould & Company, London
Frans Hals (1580-1666), The Lute Player, before 1623-24, Musée du Louvre, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre)/Mathieu Rabeau
Pere Borrell del Caso (1835-1910), Escaping Criticism, 1874, Banco de España Collection, Madrid. © Photo: Banco de España, Madrid
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What's On in 2025

What will be the exhibition highlights of 2025 around Britain and Europe? At the end of the year, Tate Britain will be marking 250 years since the birth of JMW Turner and John Constable with a potential blockbuster. Meanwhile, the Swiss are  making a big thing  of the 100th anniversary of the death of Félix Vallotton  (a real favourite of ours). Among women artists in the spotlight will be Anna Ancher, Ithell Colquhoun, Artemisia Gentileschi and Suzanne Valadon. Here's a selection of what's coming up, in more or less chronological order; as ever, we make no claim to comprehensiveness, and our choice very much reflects our personal taste. And in our search for the most interesting shows, we're visiting Ascona, Baden-Baden, Chemnitz and Winterthur, among other places.  January  We start off in Paris, at the Pompidou Centre; the 1970s inside-out building is showing its age and it'll be shut in the summer for a renovation programme scheduled to last until 2030. Bef...
Post a Comment
Read more

Carrington: You've Met Leonora, Now Discover Dora

Carrington: She only wanted to be known by her surname, unwittingly posing a conundrum for art historians, curators and the wider world a century later.  Because it's another somewhat later Carrington, the long-lived Surrealist and totally unrelated, who's recently become Britain's most expensive woman artist. But today we're at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester to see an exhibition not about Leonora but about Dora Carrington. She hated that name Dora -- so Victorian -- but with Leonora so much in the limelight (and the subject of a  recent show at Newlands House in Petworth, just a few miles up the road), the curators at the Pallant didn't have much option, so they've had to call their retrospective  Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury .  Leonora was a bit of a rebel, as we found out in Petworth. Dora too. But we ought to respect her wish. Carrington, then, has been a bit neglected recently; this is the first show of her works in three decades. And while ther...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Highs and Lows of the Nahmad Collection

It's widely referred to as the world's most valuable private art collection : the one assembled over decades by the Nahmad brothers, dealers Ezra and David . Worth an estimated $3 billion or more, it's said to include hundreds of Picassos. Some 60 works from it are now on display at the Musée des impressionnismes in Giverny as  The Nahmad Collection: From Monet to Picasso . Intended, apparently, to demonstrate how art developed from the early 19th century through Impressionism and on to the start of the modern era, towards the liberation of colour and form, this is an exhibition that ends up coming across as somewhat incoherent. We're not really told much about the Nahmads or their collecting choices -- and as you search the Internet, things become slightly mysterious: Is Ezra alive or dead? The art, presumably, is supposed to speak for itself, but it's a rather eclectic, if not confusing, selection; some of the works are fantastic, some are distinctly ho-hum.  Let...
Post a Comment
Read more