We must confess that religious paintings are not our favourite subject, and we've tended to regard Spanish Catholic art as being, well, just a little too religious to cope with. So we approached the Francisco de Zurbarán exhibition at the National Gallery in London with a certain amount of trepidation. A degree of contrition is due.... Yes, there were monks, altarpieces and lots of saints, but we were blown away by Zurbarán's ability to depict textures and fabrics and to convey an intensity of feeling. It's an absolutely excellent exhibition, full of truly beautiful paintings. Such religious art was intended to bring the faithful closer to God, to bridge the gap between Heaven and Earth, in an age when many could not read. Zurbarán was a master at it. Let's start with a saint: Just take a look at the fabrics, trimmings and gems in this picture. And the garments are even more striking when you are stood in front of this nearly life-size figure. This is Casild...
Georges Seurat was on to something when he moved on from Impressionism to develop the radically different painting technique popularly known as Pointillism. He and his followers applied unmixed dots of pure colour to their canvases, separate little spots of paint that, the theory went, would come together in the eye of the viewer to create glowing, luminous pictures. Seurat died young, and Pointillism didn't really hang around for very long either. But it produced some gorgeous art, and 50 or so of its finest creations are gathered at the National Gallery in London in Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller's Neo-Impressionists . It's a glorious, light-filled, uplifting exhibition, and the most enjoyable show we've been to all year. "Art is harmony," Seurat said, and it's hard to argue with that in this show. These pictures are Helene Kröller-Müller's Neo-Impressionists, by the way, because more than half of them come from the Kröller-Müller Museum i...