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Showing posts from October, 2021

New Exhibitions in February

Georges Seurat devised the Neo-Impressionist painting technique popularly known as Pointillism. He didn't live long and left only a small body of work, of which seascapes were a recurring motif; a couple of dozen paintings and drawings from summers spent on the northern coast of France will be brought together for  Seurat and the Sea   at the Courtauld Gallery in London from February 13 to May 17. Lucian Freud gained recognition as one of the greatest of British portrait painters for his intensely observed works, often of nudes. From February 12 to May 4, the National Portrait Gallery is putting on  Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting , which will be the first exhibition in Britain to focus on his creations on paper, some of which have never been on public display before.   Ramses and the Pharaoh's Gold  is a travelling exhibition of treasures from Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities: 180 of them, with the coffin of the long-lived Ramses II among highlig...

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Opening in November

William Hogarth -- now there's a painter you think of as British through and through, flag-wavingly so. Just look at a painting such as  'O the Roast Beef of Old England' . So an exhibition entitled  Hogarth and Europe at Tate Britain in London has something of a curious ring to it. Starting on November 3, it aims to show how Hogarth's portrayal of a rapidly changing British society in the mid-18th century was echoed by painters on the Continent, such as Francesco Guardi in Venice, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin in France and Cornelis Troost in Holland. Until March 20.  For an early pioneer of pan-European art, look no further than Albrecht Dürer. Dürer's Journeys: Travels of a Renaissance Artist at the National Gallery from November 20 follows the master painter from Nuremberg on his trips to the Low Countries and across the Alps, spreading his own reputation and exchanging ideas with his Dutch and Italian counterparts. The first major Dürer exhibition in the UK fo...

The Two Faces of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Rossetti's Portraits -- well, up to a point. There are some gorgeous paintings by Dante Gabriel Rossetti of his favourite sitters and his muses that are the star attractions of this show about the Pre-Raphaelite at the Holburne Museum in Bath.  But amid all the big hair and the pouting red lips, just how many really are portraits, giving you an insight into the characters of the women he's depicted? And how many are those idealised visions of enigmatic women Rossetti seemed to specialise in, those ladies of the town with the kiss of a snake that LS Lowry found so attractive.  For example, here's Alexa Wilding, one of Rossetti's most frequent models, though, for once, apparently not one of his love interests. She's posed as  Monna Vanna , the vain woman, a painting originally entitled Venus Veneta , representing the Venetian ideal of female beauty. Staring into the distance, resplendent in a billowing, ornate gown and fingering her fantastic fan and her coral neckl...