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Very Rich Hours in Chantilly

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...
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Opening and Closing in February

London's Courtauld Gallery has just reopened after renovation, and its first big exhibition,  Van Gogh: Self-Portraits ,   starts on February 3. This show -- the first to cover the full range of Vincent van Gogh's self-portraiture -- will bring together around half those he created over his short career: 16 of them, from his time in Paris in 1886 to his stay in the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in September 1889. It runs until May 8. At Tate Modern they're tackling another popular subject, surrealism, in the shape of  Surrealism beyond Borders , which starts on February 24. The Tate says previous stories of surrealism have focused on Paris in the 20s -- not in our exhibition-going experience -- and that this one will rewrite the history of the genre, reaching across 50 years and looking at art in centres from Buenos Aires to Seoul. This show comes from the Met in New York; the New Yorker called it "deliriously entertaining", though the Wall Street Journal sai...
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The Knight Who Was Made a Dame

Laura Knight's paintings are full of strong women -- in many senses of the word. And though to us in the early 21st century, many of her pictures may appear at first glance somewhat conventional, Knight was an artist who 100 or so years ago not only broke sharply with convention, including in her subject matter, but who also broke through the glass ceiling to reach the very top of her male-dominated profession.  Laura Knight: A Panoramic View  at the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes is a splendid, thoroughly enjoyable, often surprising and rather uplifting exhibition. The curators have brought together more than 160 works from all corners of the country -- from Bolton and Blackpool, Perth and Dundee, Falmouth and Canterbury, from some towns that we didn't even realise had art galleries.  Knight was born in 1877, and when she trained as an artist, she wasn't allowed to join life-drawing classes because she was a woman. But change was rapid in the 20th century, and in the mid-19...
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He Paints Horses, Doesn't He?

George Stubbs was the greatest painter of animals in British art. There's probably not much doubt about that. Just how much effort he put into achieving that status is demonstrated in an excellent exhibition, George Stubbs: 'All Done from Nature' , in the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes. We'll get back to Stubbs very shortly, but just in case you're thinking Milton Keynes is an odd place to go for a big art show, you'd be wrong, because the MK Gallery has recently been extended and boasts an impressively large exhibition space -- and an ambitious programme. This is the first big Stubbs overview in three decades, and the curators have assembled pictures from a wide range of lenders, the sort you tend not to pop into for a look at their paintings, like the Jockey Club and the Royal Veterinary College. Oh, and there's Whistlejacket , too, Stubbs's most famous, most impressive achievement. You can see Whistlejacket there on the back wall, released from h...
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