The White Cliffs of Dover, Beachy Head and the Seven Sisters, the Needles and Durdle Door -- the southern English coastline has plenty of spectacular chalk and limestone features, but just across the Channel the French have got something equally if not more stunning: the chalk cliffs at Etretat. Surrounding the bay of what was once a small fishing village, three natural arches and a 70-metre freestanding needle of chalk are a breathtaking sight (we were there a couple of years ago), and they're now a huge tourist attraction. But even before the tourists got there, some of the most famous names in French art had discovered a motif of which they rarely tired; as Normandy Tourism puts it: "Nature has carved unusual shapes out of the white cliffs in Etretat, and as a result, this picturesque spot attracted many Impressionist painters, who sought to capture the cliffs on canvas." Etretat, Beyond the Cliffs: Courbet, Monet, Matisse is devoted to those depictions of the white...
We'll start off this month by going back to Tuscany in the early 14th century, to the beginnings of modern western European painting. Duccio and Simone Martini were among those in the city of Siena reinventing art. There are more than 100 exhibits in Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350 , which runs from March 8 to June 22 at the National Gallery in London. The show was previously on at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and reviews were generally very good. There's a second show opening later in the month at the National, and it's quite an exotic one, devoted to a 19th-century Mexican artist whose work has not been shown in Britain before. José María Velasco: A View of Mexico , running from March 29 to August 17, features sweeping landscapes by a painter who was interested not only in the natural world but in the rapid modernisation of his country. Just around the corner at the National Portrait Gallery, there's a rather more conventional draw: Edvard Munch ...