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...
There's a really rather good exhibition of paintings by Doreen Fletcher on at the Nunnery Gallery. Who's Doreen Fletcher, you ask? And where's the Nunnery Gallery? We're in Bow in east London, and we're looking at townscapes, virtually all of them of the local area. This is Doreen Fletcher: A Retrospective , and this weekday lunchtime it's quite full of visitors, many of them from the East End, and clearly delighting in recognising landmarks that in some cases are now just history. Doreen Fletcher has been painting the streets of east London since the 1980s, though she stopped working in the early 2000s for lack of recognition before resuming a couple of years ago after being rediscovered. And justifiably so. She paints in a fairly precise documentary style that's full of detailed observation. Her pictures are by no means devoid of people, but they certainly don't play a central role. They might be in a car or at a bus stop, rarely taking cen...