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...
Who could resist a trip to the seaside? Especially when you're tempted by this glamorous bathing beauty, luring you into the warm waters of the North Sea. Cromer, Cleethorpes, Scarborough or Skegness, so seductive in the 1920s and 30s, especially when you could travel there in comfort and speed on the London and North Eastern Railway. In our case, we took a rather more workaday Southern Railway train to Hastings, for Seaside Modern: Art and Life on the Beach at Hastings Contemporary. It's the perfect venue for an exhibition about the art of the seaside, right down on the front by the fishing boats and those black wooden sheds for fishermen's nets that it's built to blend in with. Fish and chips, ice cream and seagulls are all around. Oh, and the miniature railway runs right past the gallery. It was hot and sunny, it really was. Because it always is at the seaside, apparently. These railway posters from between the wars are your introduction to this fun show. As curato...