The Art Exhibitions Blog

She was a highly successful artist in 17th-century Brussels, creating the sort of paintings you might have seen from Rubens or Van Dyck, but then she vanished from art history. It's only very recently she's been rescued from obscurity, her pictures rightfully reattributed.  Michaelina Wautier  comes to the Royal Academy in London on March 27 from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, offering the first opportunity to encounter her work on a large scale. On till June 21.  And while we're on the theme of new discoveries, we've made quite a few at the Dulwich Picture Gallery down the years. The latest arrival there is a completely unknown name to us, from the Baltic:  Konrad Mägi  (1878-1925), described as a pioneer of Estonian modernism. More than 60 of his works are being shown in the UK for the first time in an exhibition that runs from March 24 to July 12.  No introduction is needed for David Hockney, and he's taking over the Serpentine Gallery on March ...

For the Victorians, art wasn't just about what you could see on the canvas; it could also activate your other senses.  Scented Visions: Smell in Art 1850-1914 at the Watts Gallery near Guildford takes you on an olfactory journey back in time. And it's also a social-history lesson, showing the way art reflected how Victorian life was not just a bed of roses. In this picture, the actress Ellen Terry is holding an eye-catching red flower close to her nose, which we assumed was so that she could inhale the fragrance. It's the poster image for this show and a perfect way to promote an exhibition about smell. But, as the wall caption points out, the blooms are camellias, which have no scent; she's acting smelling, and she must choose between the camellias and the nobler values of the humble fragrant violets in her other hand, reflecting her choice to give up the stage for life as the muse of the great Victorian artist, GF Watts, 30 years older than her, and who painted this ...

We'll start this month at the King's Gallery in London, where more than 300 artworks and other objects from the Royal Collection will be on display from April 11 for  The Edwardians: Age of Elegance . Illustrating the tastes of the period between the death of Victoria and World War I, the show features the work of John Singer Sargent , Edward Burne-Jones , William Morris and Carl Fabergé, among others. On to November 23. More Morris at, unsurprisingly, the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow.  Morris Mania , which runs from April 5 to September 21, aims to show how his designs have continued to capture the imagination down the decades, popping up in films and on television, in every part of the home, on trainers, wellies, and even in nuclear submarines.... From much the same era, Guildhall Art Gallery in the City offers  Evelyn De Morgan: The Modern Painter in Victorian London  from April 4 to January 4. De Morgan's late Pre-Raphaelite work with its beautifull...

Winter is approaching in the French village of Giverny, the home of Claude Monet, and so the flowers are dying back in his glorious gardens, even those famous waterlilies in the lake that were such an inspiration for his paintings. But just down the road, at the Musée des impressionnismes, summer lives on, and the blooms are vibrant, celebrating the power of flowers in art. We called in to the museum just before Monet's Garden closed for the season, possibly the only people among the many hundreds of visitors in the village that day who'd gone to Giverny specifically to see the exhibition called Flower Power . We weren't disappointed; the curators have put together an opulent bouquet of painting, sculpture, photography and design.  The Musée des impressionnismes is, we suspect, a bit of an irrelevance to the great mass of tourists in Giverny determined to tick the footbridge over Monet's lily pond off their selfie photo list. But for the more discerning art-lover like y...