If you were asked to name a Mexican painter, you'd probably initially think of Frida Kahlo. Then, maybe, Diego Rivera. But the first historical Mexican artist -- indeed the first from Latin America -- to get an exhibition at London's National Gallery in its 200-year existence is José María Velasco. No, we didn't know anything about him either, so we were keen to see the show. And what you discover in José María Velasco: A View of Mexico is certainly exotic, though not perhaps in the way you're expecting. Velasco, born in 1840, was trained in a tradition of European landscape painting, and while some of the pictures you see at the National Gallery have an air of the Old World, this one definitely doesn't: The cactus is spectacular enough, with its green branches reaching into the blue sky above the hills beyond, but it's only when you notice the man in the shade beneath it that you realise how immense this plant really is. This is a painting that...
It's a motif that recurs in art down the centuries, going back to ancient times: a woman at a window. A new show at Dulwich Picture Gallery in south-east London builds an exhibition on the theme around its own Girl at a Window by Rembrandt with more than 40 works going right up to the present day, though don't expect Vermeer or Caspar David Friedrich . Reframed: The Woman in the Window runs from May 4 to September 4. We've seen Edvard Munch in Oslo at the old Munch Museum and the old National Gallery, but we've never been to the significant Munch collection at KODE in Bergen, collected during the painter's lifetime by the industrialist Rasmus Meyer. Eighteen works from the collection, dating from the 1880s and 1890s, will be on show at the Courtauld Gallery from May 27 to September 4 in Edvard Munch: Masterpieces from Bergen . Will this be as popular as the Van Gogh Self-Portraits show at the Courtauld, which finishes on May 8 but is completely sold out? A fre...