So the question to ask about the Michaelina Wautier exhibition at the Royal Academy in London must be: Is the hype about this recently rediscovered 17th-century woman painter justified? The answer: Yes, absolutely. She really does merit acknowledgement -- and not just because we recognise a woman working in a man's world. Her art shows she was extremely talented, producing superb canvases covering a diverse range of subject matter. What's more, she painted very large pictures featuring male nudes, such as Bacchus, despite her contemporaries thinking that was not the sort of thing a female artist could do. And her portraits are wonderfully lively and lifelike. This is Martino Martini, an Italian Jesuit missionary who travelled to China in the 1640s. It was painted in 1654, when Michaelina was around 40. Martini, who was staying at the Jesuit College in Brussels, is depicted wearing traditional Chinese silk court attire and a hat of fur and feathers. A rather substantial...
Let us take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of Ostend, in the company of an insomniac artist with stomach ulcers. Things appear odd at night, eerie lights down deserted streets and along the promenade, when everyone else in the Queen of Belgian seaside resorts has gone to bed. Welcome to the world of Léon Spilliaert at the Royal Academy in London, the latest in the RA's spate of exhibitions featuring European artists you've possibly barely heard of but who are rather big names in their home countries. Spilliaert was born in Ostend in 1881, and though he moved away to Bruges to study and later to Brussels and Paris, it's his home town that seems to have inspired his most intriguing pictures. He worked mostly using a wash of Indian ink, with occasional pastel and coloured pencil, to produce often haunting, otherworldly images. Here in Dyke at Night, Reflected Lights , the town is asleep, apart of course from the solitary wandering artist. There...