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...
Monet, Pissarro, Sisley -- names calculated to get the crowds flocking to Tate Britain for Impressionists in London . Legros, Dalou and Carpeaux -- well, probably not, but you'll be seeing more of them than you might have bargained for if you go to this rather misleadingly named exhibition. The show's subtitle is French Artists in Exile 1870-1904, which probably gives a rather better sense of what you are going to see. The story starts with the flight of artists and dealers to London in 1870-71 amid France's military defeat by Prussia and the bloody suppression of the popular uprising that was the Paris Commune. The scene is well set in the first room, which introduces us to the devastation and carnage behind the exodus. Claude Monet crossed the Channel to avoid conscription while Camille Pissarro's house was used as stables by the Prussians. There are a few works from that early period on display -- the relative lightness of a Monet view of the Thames contrasting w...