It's surely an anniversary the Tate has long been counting down to: JMW Turner was born in 1775, John Constable in 1776. To mark the 250 years of two of the country's greatest painters, Turner and Constable is on at Tate Britain from November 27 to April 12. Rivals with very different approaches to landscape painting, they were both hugely influential. More than 170 works are promised, with Turner's Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons and Constable's White Horse coming home from the US for the show. Before those two were even born, Joseph Wright of Derby had already painted his most famous picture, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump . It'll be part of Wright of Derby: From the Shadows at the National Gallery from November 7 to May 10, which is intended to challenge the view of Wright as just a painter of light and shade and to illustrate how he used the night to explore deeper and more sombre themes. Only 20 or so works, however, making it a disappo...
October sees the start of a series of exhibitions that promise to be exceptional, bringing together works of art that may never again be viewable in the same place at the same time. Museums and galleries across Europe aren't stinting on the superlatives. Two of the greatest artists of the Italian Renaissance come together at London's National Gallery for a show its director describes as "unprecedented and probably unrepeatable". Andrea Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini were brothers-in-law, and Mantegna's compositional innovations and Bellini's natural landscapes play a pivotal role in art history. With pictures loaned from around Europe and beyond, it runs from October 1 to January 27. Mantegna inspired Edward Burne-Jones , and Tate Britain is giving the late Pre-Raphaelite his first major retrospective in London for more than 40 years. Over 150 works aim to show how Burne-Jones developed into one of the leading European, and not just British, artists...