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Showing posts from October, 2026

Tales of the Unexpected in Southampton

There are some familiar names and familiar paintings in  Art Then! British Painting, Sculpture and Drawing, 1910-1960 at Southampton City Art Gallery, but it's the unfamiliar that makes it especially worth the trip to a venue you might not normally consider for an exhibition. This show provides an excellent overview of art trends in this country in the first half of the 20th century. And it's free!  Southampton has a very good collection, but we often get the feeling that a lot of interesting works are in store behind closed doors. Pleasant surprises await when they finally see the light of the day, in this case in combination with a selection from the extensive Ingram Collection of modern British art. In all, there are more than 100 works by over 100 artists, demonstrating how the British reacted to the latest developments in art on the Continent. So let's start with a couple of hidden gems from the Southampton treasure trove, first of all a Landscape that really stoppe...
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New Exhibitions in November

Jan van Eyck -- one of the greatest names in art history. Six centuries ago, he was at the forefront of a revolution in Flanders that saw the adoption of oil paint to create meticulously detailed, lifelike pictures. Now the National Gallery in London is offering you a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see all nine of his known surviving portraits together in one exhibition.  Van Eyck: The Portraits   runs from November 21 to April 11. The Portrait of a Man with a Blue Chaperon  will travel from the Brukenthal Museum in Romania to be there. We last saw it in Ghent in 2020, in a blockbuster van Eyck show that had to close early because of Covid . Tate Britain explores a creative partnership that lasted more than 50 years and its legacy in  Vanessa Bell & Duncan Grant: Inside Bloomsbury . In excess of 300 works, including paintings, textiles and furniture, will be in the show that runs from November 12 to April 11. And the studio that Bell and Grant shared until 1939 wi...
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Dispel the Winter Blues with a Trip to the Seaside

Summer's long gone now.... gone and just a memory Curling up in front of the fire with a good book, bingeing on a TV series box set or heading south is how you might normally try to get through the northern winter, but this year you could just go to Stockholm to dispel the chill.  Yes, Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, because there you can immerse yourself in the delights of the long summer days on display in To the Sea! The Beach as Borderland and Summer Dream  at the Nationalmuseum. Really, those Scandinavian coastlines are so tempting: What could be more attractive than A Stroll on the Beach at Skagen, at the very northern tip of Denmark?    Here are five ladies enjoying Skagen's almost endless strand and endless skies, as painted by Michael Ancher (husband of Anna ) in 1896. Luckily those hemlines were just off the ground, so as not to get dirty on the sand.  This very wide-ranging exhibition in Stockholm explores the growth of seaside tourism in Europe an...
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Pallant Landscapes : An Appreciation of the Countryside

For centuries, landscape was usually seen as a backdrop in history or religious paintings, but  British Landscapes: A Sense of Place  at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester shows how it evolved as a genre in its own right. And in particular, how artists in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries were not just reproducing a scene before their eyes but trying to convey in their pictures the emotions and feelings evoked by the land and countryside: the sense of the place, as  Pallant Director Simon Martin, who c urated this exhibition, aptly describes it. The show's not on for much longer, but here's a few of our impressions, and let's start with a painting that's a fine example of how an artist puts current events and concerns on canvas.   It was December 1916 when Mark Gertler painted this view of the South Coast Near Swanage . It looks so peaceful, the sea is smooth, the distant cliffs of the headland appear soft and even the nearby greenery is out of focus. But W...
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