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...
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 for nearly two decades, it's on until February 27. It's been put together in collaboration with the Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum in Aachen, and the version that was on display there over the past few months had excellent reviews in the German press.
Dürer died in 1528. At about the same time, the Spanish were just setting out on their conquest of the Inca Empire centred in modern-day Peru. Starting on November 11 at the British Museum, Peru: A Journey in Time looks back at 4,000 years of the history of the country before the Spaniards arrived. It examines the beliefs and cultural achievements of the civilisations that lived there and their legacy on subsequent generations. With many artefacts on loan from Peru, the show runs until February 20.
The new exhibition at the V&A is Fabergé in London: Romance to Revolution. Starting on November 20, the show will look at how the Russian goldsmith Carl Fabergé came to international prominence, winning patrons among the Russian imperial and foreign royal families, and how he came to set up a branch in London in 1903. Highlights will include a selection of the fabulous Easter Eggs crafted for the Romanovs in the years before the Tsar was deposed by the Russian Revolution. Until May 8.
And one final show this month in a rare London-only list: Paul McCartney has a new book coming out in November recounting his life and career through his lyrics, and to coincide with the publication, there's a free display in the British Library from November 5 of a selection of highlights from the words and photographs. Paul McCartney: The Lyrics runs until March 13.
Images
Albrecht Dürer, Saint Jerome, 1521, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon. © Instituto Portugues de Museus, Minstero da Cultura, Lisbon
Fabergé, The Moscow Kremlin Egg, 1906. © The Moscow Kremlin Museums
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