What a lot of new exhibitions this October! We list well over 20 across Europe below -- many more than usual -- and have still had to leave out quite a few that we'd mention in most other months in order to keep this post to a reasonable length. Let's start at the Royal Academy in London with deep blue seas, cloudless skies, intense light and the heat of the sun. From October 2 to January 31, you can experience the excitement Renoir, Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso and many others felt while Painting the French Riviera . The exhibition features more than 160 exhibits from the 1870s to the 1960s, and a version of the show travels on to the Cleveland Museum of Art in March. Hmm, Renoir. Now perhaps seen as the most chocolate-boxy of the Impressionists, but without doubt the creator of some of the most recognisable images in French art of the late 19th century. Well worth stealing , and clearly the National Gallery is on to a winner with its Renoir and Love ex...
John Ruskin: a very Victorian figure in the history of art, but in many ways also a remarkably modern individual. A conservationist, a social commentator, a campaigner for the workers and the poor, and an early believer in the idea of gross national happiness. For Ruskin, a country's wealth was measured by the happiness of its people. It's the 200th anniversary of Ruskin's birth this year, and that's the spur for an exhibition at Two Temple Place in central London exploring his legacy. John Ruskin: The Power of Seeing gives us the flavour of a remarkable but contradictory man, in a show that draws strongly on the collection of the museum he founded with the aim of improving the wellbeing of the metalworkers of Sheffield, educating them and helping them escape the smoke of the industrial city. There's a Portrait of John Ruskin by Charles Fairfax Murray, painted in 1875, around the time the museum opened, that's one of the first things you see as you ente...