The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is reviving Pre-Raphaelites: Drawings & Watercolours , a show that closed after just five weeks last year due to the Covid pandemic. On from July 15 to November 27, this exhibition features more than 100 works from the museum's own outstanding Pre-Raphaelite collection; Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Holman Hunt and Millais are the big names. There are two new exhibitions coming to the Lightbox in Woking, a venue we always enjoy visiting. Starting on July 9, Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden are the stars of a collaboration with the Fry Art Gallery in Saffron Walden that looks at the story of the artists' colony at Great Bardfield in Essex; more than 30 paintings and drawings will be on display. The Ingram Collection & the Fry Art Gallery: 'Bawden, Ravilious and the Art of Great Bardfield' runs until October 9. The second show, beginning on July 16, sets 20 paintings, prints and drawings of Venice and England by Canaletto alongside wor
If Glyn Philpot had stuck to his very lucrative line in society portrait painting, the retrospective of his work at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester wouldn't have an awful lot to recommend it, frankly. But then, he probably wouldn't be getting a retrospective at the Pallant, and the reason to visit Glyn Philpot: Flesh and Spirit is to see the astonishing, unexpected pictures Philpot created in the late 1920s and 1930s when he said goodbye to the stuffed shirts and fancy frocks and embraced modernism with a vengeance. This is the first major Philpot exhibition in almost 40 years. How has his work sailed under the radar for so long? Among the first paintings that greet you in this show are a set of striking images of Henry Thomas, a former seaman from Jamaica who modelled for Philpot as well as working as a domestic servant for him. This image recalls the format of a Renaissance portrait or the head of a ruler on a coin, but it's a dignified black man, not a white king