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Gone but No Longer Forgotten -- the Women of Ghent

How was it that all but a few women artists became excised from art history? It wasn't as if there weren't plenty of them around, making stunning paintings, and lots of money, particularly in the Low Countries in the 17th and 18th century. Art history is of course now being rewritten, to rescue the forgotten from oblivion. To find out what happened and how the record is being put right, you should go to Ghent to see Unforgettable: Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600-1750 at the Museum of Fine Arts.  Michaelina Wautier is a case in point: a woman who could compete on her own terms with the Baroque masters of the southern Netherlands, but whose work was disregarded or attributed to men until the last couple of decades. Wautier may well be the biggest rediscovery among forgotten women painters in recent years -- she's got an exhibition of her own on now at the Royal Academy in London -- and one of her pictures is among the stand-out works at this show in the heart ...
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Opening in April

If you enjoyed Claude Monet's views of Westminster in Impressionists in London at Tate Britain, your next destination is clear: Monet and Architecture just up the road at the National Gallery from April 9 to July 29. It's a new way of seeing Monet's work, the National says: the first exhibition looking at the great Impressionist's career through the buildings he painted, with more than 75 pictures together for the very first time.
There's another blockbuster of a French-themed show coming at the British Museum: Rodin and the Art of Ancient Greece opens on April 26 and can be seen until July 29. Rodin was captivated by the Parthenon sculptures when he saw them in 1881, and 100 years after his death, his work including The Thinker and The Kiss can be seen alongside them in a new light, the museum says.

It's the season to get into the garden. So it's the perfect time to be inspired by the paintings of Cedric Morris, not only a botanist who cultivated 90 new irises but also the teacher of Lucian Freud. Two venues in London celebrate this rather forgotten painter simultaneously in Artist Plantsman at the Garden Museum and Beyond the Garden Wall, showing his landscapes, at Philip Mould in Pall Mall. Both run from April 18 to July 22.
But there's no getting away from Monet. A new show at the Orangerie in Paris looks at the links between his late work and Abstract Expressionism in the US. The Water Lilies: American Abstract Painting and the Last Monet starts on April 13 and is on until August 20.

Images

Claude Monet, The Doge's Palace (Le Palais ducal), 1908. (c) Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, Gift of A. Augustus Healy
Sir Cedric Morris, May Flowering Irises No. 2, 1935. (c) Philip Mould & Company, Courtesy the Cedric Morris Estate

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