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New Exhibitions in November

It's surely an anniversary the Tate has long been counting down to: JMW Turner was born in 1775, John Constable in 1776. To mark the 250 years of two of the country's greatest painters, Turner and Constable  is on at Tate Britain from November 27 to April 12. Rivals with very different approaches to landscape painting, they were both hugely influential. More than 170 works are promised, with Turner's Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons  and Constable's White Horse  coming home from the US for the show. Before those two were even born, Joseph Wright of Derby had already painted his most famous picture, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump . It'll be part of Wright of Derby: From the Shadows   at the National Gallery from November 7 to May 10, which is intended to challenge the view of Wright as just a painter of light and shade and to illustrate how he used the night to explore deeper and more sombre themes. Only 20 or so works, however, making it a disappo...

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Opening and Closing in May

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 free exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge brings together more than 100 works from its own collection as well as from the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Fondation Custodia in Paris for True to Nature: Open-Air Painting in Europe 1780-1870. Constable, Corot and Turner were among the artists who sought new ways of depicting the natural world as travel became easier and equipment more compact. On from May 3 to August 29. 

The Tudors: Passion, Power and Politics at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool presents the five Tudor monarchs from Henry VII to Elizabeth I and the people around them -- some of the most recognisable characters in English history, including Thomas Cromwell and William Shakespeare -- through around 100 objects, many from the National Portrait Gallery. The exhibition runs from May 21 to August 29; a smaller version of this show has been on at the Holburne Museum in Bath. 
The Pallant House Gallery in Chichester has the first major exhibition to feature British artist Glyn Philpot (1884-1937) in almost four decades. Glyn Philpot: Flesh and Spirit will show how the painter moved from society portraits in the Edwardian era to a more modernist style, including sensitive depictions of black sitters, among them the actor Paul Robeson. This one is on from May 14 to October 23. 

From May 17, the Belgian pointillist Théo van Rysselberghe is the subject of a show at Singer Laren in the Netherlands. Théo van Rysselberghe: Painter of the Sun will encompass his society portraits, land- and seascapes and nudes. It runs until September 4. 

At the Pompidou Centre in Paris, they're offering a comprehensive look at Weimar Germany, though with close to 900 artworks and documents on show it does sound a little overwhelming. Germany / 1920s / New Objectivity / August Sander features paintings and drawings by George Grosz, Otto Dix and Jeanne Mammen, among others, as well as August Sander's photographs of Germans of all classes in People of the 20th Century. In Paris from May 11 to September 5, and then the show moves on to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art north of Copenhagen in October. 

On in Denmark before then: Krøyer and Paris, starting on May 13 at the Skagens Museum at the northern tip of Jutland. This celebrates the work of one of the leading Skagen painters, P.S. Krøyer, alongside French art that inspired him, with Courbet, Caillebotte, Monet and Sisley among those represented, in a show that continues until September 18. 
It's the 300th anniversary of the birth in Venice of Bernardo Bellotto, nephew of Canaletto and painter of many fine city views, particularly of Dresden, where he worked for Frederick August, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland. Enchantingly Real at the Zwinger in Dresden has Bellotto's cityscapes on display from May 21 to August 28. 

Last chance to see....

There's no charge to get into a small display at the National Gallery in London to see what all the fuss was about over Thomas Gainsborough's Blue Boy, once the most expensive picture in the world. Until May 15, after which he flies back home to California.  

The best art exhibition we've seen so far this year is Whistler's Woman in White: Joanna Hiffernan at the Royal Academy, which ends on May 22. Some gorgeous art, intelligently presented. Tickets are still available. 

Images

Tom Hunter, Woman Reading Possession Order, 1997, from the series Persons Unknown, courtesy the artist
Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, Queen Elizabeth I ('The Ditchley Portrait'), c. 1592. © National Portrait Gallery, London
Peder Severin Krøyer, Summer Evening on Skagen Sønderstrand, 1893, Skagens Kunstmuseer, Skagen, Denmark. © Skagens Kunstmuseer
James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Symphony in White, No 1: The White Girl, 1862, National Gallery of Art, Washington

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