Opening and Closing in February

British Baroque: Power and Illusion is the title of the new exhibition at Tate Britain in London, devoted to the period between the restoration of Charles II to the throne in 1660 and the death of Queen Anne in 1714 and focusing on the magnificence of the art and architecture of the time -- by names such as Peter Lely, Godfrey Kneller and James Thornhill -- to convey status and influence. Many works, some from stately homes, will be on public display for the first time in this show running from February 4 to April 19.

And artworks from one very stately home, Woburn Abbey, which is being refurbished, will be going on show for almost a year at the Queen's House in Greenwich. Van Dyck, Gainsborough, Reynolds and Canaletto are all represented in Woburn Treasures at the Queen's House, which runs from February 13 to January 17, 2021. Also at the Queen's House, from February 13 to August 31, the three versions of the Armada portrait of Elizabeth I, one of them from Woburn, will be on display together for the first time ever in Faces of a Queen. There's no entry charge for either show.

Another free exhibition, this time at the National Gallery, features Nicolaes Maes, one of Rembrandt's most talented pupils, who's perhaps best known for his scenes of domestic life such as mistresses eavesdropping on their servants' goings-on but who made his fortune with portraits of the well-to-do. This is a co-production with the Mauritshuis in The Hague, where we saw the show last year. It's on in London from February 22 to May 31. 

A name probably unfamiliar to most is on the agenda at the Royal Academy from February 23 to May 25. The Belgian artist Léon Spilliaert (1881-1946) produced enigmatic and atmospheric pictures that appear to have a lot in common with those of Edvard Munch. This first solo show of Spilliaert in the UK will contain about 80 works.

The first major show in 20 years devoted to David Hockney's drawings starts at the National Portrait Gallery on February 27. David Hockney: Drawing From Life will comprise about 150 works and focus on Hockney's repeated depictions of a small group of sitters, including himself, over the course of five decades. Until June 28.

At Dulwich Picture Gallery, we go back to the years between the wars to investigate the phenomenon of British Surrealism, featuring Edward Burra, Henry Moore and many lesser-known artists, more than 40 in all in an exhibition with over 70 works. February 26 to May 17. It's the first show on the subject for 80 years.

Staying in the 1920s and 30s, how about a trip to the seaside? No need to watch out for seagulls, though; the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich is the inland venue for Art Deco by the Sea, a show with some 130 posters, paintings, fashion items and more illustrating how the sleek modern style became synonymous with leisure and pleasure. Take your bucket and spade from February 9 to June 14.

The best exhibition we saw in the whole of last year was Young Rembrandt in the old master's home town of Leiden, and now this engrossing show is coming to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford from February 27 to June 7. Rembrandt was by no means a prodigy; but from the awkward, inauspicious efforts displayed at the start of this show, by his mid-20s he had developed into a master of light and shade, a dramatic interpreter of the Bible and ancient myth and a much sought-after portraitist. See it all unfold in front of you.  

Jan van Eyck was a truly groundbreaking artist in early 15th-century Flanders. Nobody before him had been able to paint people and the objects that surrounded them so realistically, so tangibly. Only around 20 of his paintings survive, so the prospect of more than half of them being reunited for an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent is a truly mouth-watering one. Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution, which runs from February 1 to April 30, will also bring together about 100 works by followers and contemporaries from north and south of the Alps.

Anna Ancher is one of the most prominent of the Skagen Painters who worked at the northern tip of Denmark and played such a leading role in the country's art at the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th. The largest ever retrospective of her work, with a focus on her exploration of light, gets under way on February 8 at the Danish National Gallery in Copenhagen. It runs until May 24, after which it will go on show at the Skagens Museum in Skagen itself for the summer.

More surrealists now, and it's time to turn the spotlight on the women artists who were largely overshadowed in what was very much a male-dominated movement. The Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt is presenting no less than 260 works by 34 artists including Frida Kahlo, Dorothea Tanning and Leonora Carrington in Fantastic Women. It runs from February 13 to May 24 and then heads to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark in June.

And a bit more Hockney? If you're in northern Germany between February 1 and May 10, there's the chance to see David Hockney Works from the Tate Collection at the Bucerius Kunst Forum in Hamburg. Paintings on loan include that 1970s classic, Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy.

Ooh, another Claude Monet exhibition.... Monet: Places at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, just outside Berlin, focuses on the Impressionist's landscapes. However familiar you might be with Monet's paintings, reviews from the exhibition's previous stop in Denver suggest this is a pretty impressive show, with more than 100 works to admire. It's on in Potsdam from February 22 to June 1.

Britain's greatest animal painter will be at the Mauritshuis in The Hague from February 20 to June 1 for an exhibition entitled George Stubbs -- The Man, the Horse, the Obsession. This is a stripped-down version of the really excellent Stubbs show we saw in Milton Keynes last year, but it still includes the stunning painting of the racehorse Whistlejacket from London's National Gallery and the skeleton of perhaps the greatest racehorse of all, Eclipse, which Stubbs also painted. 

At the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, there's the chance to see how the Baroque era began, with 70 works on show in Caravaggio-Bernini: Baroque in Rome. It's on from February 14 to June 7, following a run in Vienna that drew good reviews.

Round the corner at the Van Gogh Museum, In the Picture looks at artists' portraits of themselves and their fellow painters in 75 works from the mid-19th century to the early 20th, with van Gogh, Munch, Gustave Courbet and Helene Schjerfbeck among those included. February 21 to May 24. 

Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art at the Belvedere in Vienna deals with a fascinating subject and contains some terrific works, but we have to say that when we caught the show in its earlier incarnation at the Barbican in London, we found the presentation extremely dull. Maybe the joint will get jumping during its Austrian run from February 14 to June 1.

A good-looking exhibition is coming up at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid examining Rembrandt and Amsterdam Portraiture 1590-1670. There are 80 paintings in this show, not just from Rembrandt but also from artists such as Bartholomeus van der Helst and Ferdinand Bol, some of which have never been loaned before. February 18 to May 24.

There's no doubting Olafur Eliasson's commitment to combating climate change and making the world a better place, but just how durable is his art? There was some wow! when we went to see Olafur Eliasson: In Real Life at Tate Modern in London last year, but we found that his reliance on surprising the viewer means his creations are rather less impressive on a repeat visit. And the crush of people didn't help, either. Now the show is on at the Guggenheim in Bilbao, from February 14 to June 21. Bound to be crowded at weekends and holiday periods, so time your visit carefully if you're seeking a more contemplative experience. 

We occasionally highlight exhibitions we've enjoyed in Europe if they're travelling on to North America, and we can thoroughly recommend Millet and Modern Art: From Van Gogh to Dalí, which opens at the Saint Louis Art Museum on February 16 and runs until May 17. We saw this show in Amsterdam late last year and found it hugely enlightening. Surely few other artists can have been as influential as Jean-François Millet. 

Last chance to see....

February 9 is the final day to catch Young Rembrandt at Museum De Lakenhal in Leiden before it heads to Oxford. Also closing that day is Play, Protest and Pelicans: A People’s History of London’s Royal Parks at the Garden Museum in London, an exhibition we found rather disappointing. And it's also the end of the tour for Harald Sohlberg -- Infinite Landscapes at Trondheim Kunstmuseum, which we enjoyed last year in London, a show that includes Norway's favourite painting, Winter Night in the Mountains.

Among the very best shows we saw in 2019 -- bettered only by Young Rembrandt, in fact -- was the one at the Museum Prinsenhof in Delft telling the story of Pieter de Hooch, an absolute master of the intimate household scenes that bring the Dutch Golden Age to life for us almost 400 years on. It ends on February 16.

Closing on February 23 is the small but very interesting look at the work of war artist and society portraitist William Orpen at the Watts Gallery, near Guildford.

Also ending the same day: Ivon Hitchens at the Djanogly Gallery in Nottingham, a free show about the all-but-abstract landscape artist that we really appreciated in Chichester last year.

And just to mention one final exhibition that ends on March 1: the absorbing examination of the Design of the Third Reich at the Design Museum in Den Bosch in the southern Netherlands, one of the shows that absolutely exceeded our expectations in 2019. It's been such a crowd-puller that the original run was extended for six weeks.

Images

Nicolaes Maes, Portrait of Margaretha de Geer (1583-1672), 1669, Dordrechts Museum, Dordrecht. © Dordrechts Museum

Rembrandt van Rijn, A Man in Oriental Dress (‘The Noble Slav’), 1632, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 

Jan van Eyck, Portrait of a Man with a Blue Chaperon, c. 1428-30, Muzeul National Brukenthal, Sibiu, Romania  

Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace, 1940, Collection of Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, Nickolas Muray Collection of Modern Mexican Art. © Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019
Skeleton of Eclipse, Royal Veterinary College, in front of George Stubbs's Whistlejacket, 1762, National Gallery, London (Exhibition view from MK Gallery, Milton Keynes)
William Orpen, Le Chef de l'Hôtel Chatham, Paris, c. 1921. © Royal Academy of Arts, London; Photo: John Hammond