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...
Vuillard, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Hammershøi: The British painter Harold Gilman seems to have to sucked up a whole range of continental European artistic influences and, in the second decade of the 20th century, distilled them into a series of intimate, often enigmatic, colour-filled pictures. He died in 1919, aged 43, in the Spanish flu epidemic that swept away millions around the world at the tail end of World War I. An appropriate anniversary, then, for an exhibition about Gilman at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, the first such show for 35 years. It's called Harold Gilman: Beyond Camden Town , because it focuses on the final decade of the artist's career, when he moved on from the rather more formal post-Impressionism of the Camden Town Group around the often very murky Walter Sickert. He continued to depict everyday subjects and apply his paint thickly but became, well, just a little bit more daring and experimental. At the start of this show there's a brownish...