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New Exhibitions in November

Jan van Eyck -- one of the greatest names in art history. Six centuries ago, he was at the forefront of a revolution in Flanders that saw the adoption of oil paint to create meticulously detailed, lifelike pictures. Now the National Gallery in London is offering you a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see all nine of his known surviving portraits together in one exhibition.  Van Eyck: The Portraits   runs from November 21 to April 11. The Portrait of a Man with a Blue Chaperon  will travel from the Brukenthal Museum in Romania to be there. We last saw it in Ghent in 2020, in a blockbuster van Eyck show that had to close early because of Covid . Tate Britain explores a creative partnership that lasted more than 50 years and its legacy in  Vanessa Bell & Duncan Grant: Inside Bloomsbury . In excess of 300 works, including paintings, textiles and furniture, will be in the show that runs from November 12 to April 11. And the studio that Bell and Grant shared until 1939 wi...
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Dispel the Winter Blues with a Trip to the Seaside

Summer's long gone now.... gone and just a memory Curling up in front of the fire with a good book, bingeing on a TV series box set or heading south is how you might normally try to get through the northern winter, but this year you could just go to Stockholm to dispel the chill.  Yes, Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, because there you can immerse yourself in the delights of the long summer days on display in To the Sea! The Beach as Borderland and Summer Dream  at the Nationalmuseum. Really, those Scandinavian coastlines are so tempting: What could be more attractive than A Stroll on the Beach at Skagen, at the very northern tip of Denmark?    Here are five ladies enjoying Skagen's almost endless strand and endless skies, as painted by Michael Ancher (husband of Anna ) in 1896. Luckily those hemlines were just off the ground, so as not to get dirty on the sand.  This very wide-ranging exhibition in Stockholm explores the growth of seaside tourism in Europe an...
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Pallant Landscapes : An Appreciation of the Countryside

For centuries, landscape was usually seen as a backdrop in history or religious paintings, but  British Landscapes: A Sense of Place  at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester shows how it evolved as a genre in its own right. And in particular, how artists in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries were not just reproducing a scene before their eyes but trying to convey in their pictures the emotions and feelings evoked by the land and countryside: the sense of the place, as  Pallant Director Simon Martin, who c urated this exhibition, aptly describes it. The show's not on for much longer, but here's a few of our impressions, and let's start with a painting that's a fine example of how an artist puts current events and concerns on canvas.   It was December 1916 when Mark Gertler painted this view of the South Coast Near Swanage . It looks so peaceful, the sea is smooth, the distant cliffs of the headland appear soft and even the nearby greenery is out of focus. But W...
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New Exhibitions in October

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...
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Symphonies and Nocturnes on Canvas

The  James McNeill Whistler  exhibition at Tate Britain is big, probably a bit too big, but it's packed with beautiful pictures and it's not in the least bit boring.  That's not surprising as Whistler led a colourful life, never shying from controversy and confrontation -- notably pursuing a high-profile libel case against John Ruskin  -- and he produced art that was groundbreaking, hugely influential and enormously atmospheric. Including, of course, probably one of the most recognisable paintings in art history, that of his mother in profile, dressed in black. It's in this show, and we'll be taking a look at it shortly.  But we start in Whistler's studio, where the artist has painted himself at work, palette and brush in his hands, and looking out directly at us, the viewers. This is the first picture you see in the show, and we're told that for Whistler, the studio was a place for public performance, as well as making art. So here he is, making a statemen...
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New Exhibitions in September

The Bayeux Tapestry  exhibition at the British Museum starts on September 10; it's already sold out for this year but booking for the rest of the run, from January 1 through to July 11, will open on October 21. If you've never seen this most breathtaking of historical artefacts, you may want to seize the chance before it leaves London next year for its permanent home in Normandy, which will have been renovated during its absence. At Southampton City Art Gallery, we're promised an extensive exhibition of British art from the first half of the 20th century, drawing on the museum's own substantial holdings and those of the Ingram Collection . Running from September 26 to February 21,  Art Then! British Painting, Sculpture and Drawing, 1910-1960  will feature artists including Barbara Hepworth, Gwen John , Paul Nash and Eric Ravilious.   There might not be much new on in London this month, but we'll always have Paris. Starting at the Musée Jacquemart-André with Time...
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