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'Too Bold to Have Been Painted by a Woman'

So the question to ask about the  Michaelina Wautier  exhibition at the Royal Academy in London must be: Is the hype about this recently rediscovered 17th-century woman painter justified? The answer: Yes, absolutely.  She really does merit acknowledgement -- and not just because we recognise a woman working in a man's world. Her art shows she was extremely talented, producing superb canvases covering a diverse range of subject matter. What's more, she painted very large pictures featuring male nudes, such as Bacchus, despite her contemporaries thinking that was not the sort of thing a female artist could do. And her portraits are wonderfully lively and lifelike. This is Martino Martini, an Italian Jesuit missionary who travelled to China in the 1640s. It was painted in 1654, when Michaelina was around 40. Martini, who was staying at the Jesuit College in Brussels, is depicted wearing traditional Chinese silk court attire and a hat of fur and feathers. A rather substantial...
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Opening and Closing in August

Let's start off this month with Hockney and Piero: A Longer Look at the National Gallery in London. This free one-room show, running from August 8, brings together two David Hockney paintings with a picture from the gallery, Piero della Francesca's The Baptism of Christ, that is depicted in both works. On until October 27.
The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford's new exhibition is Money Talks: Art, Society & Power, starting on August 9. This show aims to look at art on currency, and currency in art, bringing together notes and coins from history as well as work by artists from Rembrandt to Andy Warhol and Grayson Perry. It runs until January 5. 

Starting on August 24 is the last of the major exhibitions around Germany marking the 250th anniversary of the birth of Caspar David Friedrich. This one is on at the Albertinum and the Royal Palace in Dresden, where Friedrich lived and worked for more than 40 years. Caspar David Friedrich: Where It All Started is on until January 5. 
Heading north to Copenhagen now, for a show at the SMK, Denmark's national gallery, with the rather convoluted title Against All Odds -- Historical Women and New Algorithms. This exhibition, on from August 31 to December 8, looks at 24 women artists from 1870 to 1910 who left the Nordic countries to pursue their ambitions elsewhere in Europe. The Finn Helene Schjerfbeck is among the best known. And if you're attracted by that show, you'll also want to take the short stroll across the park to the Hirschsprung Collection for Women Visualising the Modern: Danish Art 1880-1910. That one is open from August 28 to January 12. 

Last chance to see....

You have until August 26 to get to Rottingdean, on the eastern edge of Brighton, for Prydie: The Life and Art of Mabel Pryde Nicholson 1871-1918. It's the first exhibition in over a century of the work of the wife of William Nicholson and the father of Ben Nicholson, in their former home, and entry is free. 
The new football season is just starting, but September 1 is the final day of Football: Designing the Beautiful Game at Wolverhampton Art Gallery. We saw the original version of the show at London's Design Museum in 2022. 

Images

David Hockney (born 1937), My Parents, 1977, Tate. © David Hockney; Photo: Tate, London
Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, around 1817, Hamburger Kunsthalle. © SHK/Hamburger Kunsthalle/bpk; Photo: Elke Walford
Mabel Pryde Nicholson (1871-1918), The Grange, c. 1911, Scottish National Gallery

 

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