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...
You won't find a single work of art by Gustave Caillebotte in a British public collection. And yet he's one of the key figures in the Impressionist movement, whose 150th anniversary we're celebrating this year. But over in Paris, he's the subject of a big, big exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay; we jumped on the Eurostar to see it, and, even though Caillebotte: Painting Men was the most crowded show we'd been to in quite some time, we absolutely adored it. And let's start with perhaps the pièce de résistance. Even if you don't know Caillebotte at all, you may have seen this image before; there's something about it that encapsulates late 19th-century Paris, with its view of an intersection between the broad new streets pushed through by that radical city-planner, Baron Haussmann, lined by elegant new buildings. This was the modern city, the modern world. Paris Street; Rainy Day : a painting in which there's nothing really happening, and there...