What's On in 2023 -- Vermeer, Hals, Friedrich

What are the highlights of the exhibition calendar in Europe in 2023? How about the biggest Vermeer show ever? A Frans Hals blockbuster? Or a couple of exhibitions to mark the 250th birthday (in 2024) of the great German Romantic, Caspar David Friedrich? There's quite a bit of Klimt and Van Gogh, too. Here are some of our picks for the year ahead, in more or less chronological order. 

January

Opening the year at London's Royal Academy is the opportunity to experience some of the highlights of the most extensive collection of Spanish art outside Spain, from the Hispanic Society of America in New York. On show will be paintings by El Greco, Velázquez and Goya, as well as Joaquín Sorolla, along with much else besides. Spain and the Hispanic World: Treasures from the Hispanic Society Museum & Library runs from January 21 to April 10. 

There's a new venue opening in London on January 25: The Lightroom in King's Cross, and until April 23 it's showing David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away), an immersive experience using large-scale projection in which Hockney commentates on his constantly evolving picture-making process in a series of six themed chapters taking us through his career, with musical accompaniment. We thoroughly enjoyed our most recent show by the artist, Hockney's Eye at Teylers Museum in Haarlem a couple of months ago. 

A world away from Hockney are the paintings made by an insomniac with stomach ulcers after his night-time wanderings through the streets of Ostend. If you didn't make the lockdown-hit Léon Spilliaert show at the Royal Academy in 2020, there's a new chance to encounter the Belgian in a more expansive exhibition at the Hermitage in Lausanne from January 27. Léon Spilliaert: Avec la mer du Nord will be on until May 29. 

February

Gustav Klimt borrowed freely from a broad range of other artists, as we discovered at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam a couple of months ago. That show moves on to the Belvedere Museum in Vienna from February 3 as Klimt: Inspired by Van Gogh, Rodin, Matisse. Alma-Tadema and Singer Sargent are among the other inspirations to be encountered in a thoroughly engrossing display. Until May 29. 

One of 2022's most highly praised exhibitions, on show in Florence and Berlin, explored the work of the groundbreaking early-Renaissance sculptor Donatello. A version is now coming to London, with a run at the Victoria & Albert Museum from February 11 to June 11. Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance will include about 130 objects, some of them never seen in Britain before. 

The hottest ticket of the year may well be the Johannes Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which opens on February 10. They've assembled 28 of Vermeer's 30-odd paintings for this show, making it the biggest ever of his work (we saw one at the Mauritshuis in The Hague in the mid-1990s with more than 20 pictures, which was itself unprecedented). On until June 4. 

Over the same dates, you can also visit a complementary exhibition in the painter's home city on what life was like there in his time: Vermeer's Delft at the Prinsenhof Museum will include ceramics, tapestries and pictures by other Delft artists. The Prinsenhof puts on a good show: the Pieter de Hooch exhibition we saw there in 2019 was stunning. 

Meanwhile, the Mauritshuis will finally be staging an exhibition we've been anticipating for some time: a show about the little-known Jacobus Vrel, Forerunner of Vermeer. Vrel was active in the eastern Netherlands in the mid-17th century, and his small oeuvre includes some enigmatic genre scenes. He'll be in The Hague from February 16 to May 29 and then at the Fondation Custodia in Paris from June. 

March

Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism starts at Dulwich Picture Gallery in south-east London on March 31. It's the first UK exhibition of the leading woman Impressionist, and it will feature around 30 of her most important works, with about 20 by other artists, looking in part at the connection between her output and 18th-century painters such as Watteau. On until September 10. 

The National Gallery in London looks at the following generations of artists from March 25 in After Impressionism. The 100 or so works will range from Cezanne, Gauguin and van Gogh through Klimt, Matisse and Mondrian, taking in Expressionism, Cubism and abstraction. Lots of international loans are promised, and it's on until August 13. 

April

The biggest private collection of 19th-century German art is held in the Georg Schäfer Museum in Schweinfurt, in northern Bavaria, and that's the first venue for Caspar David Friedrich and the Harbingers of Romance, which is on from April 2 to July 7 before moving on to Winterthur in Switzerland. The Schweinfurt and Winterthur collections have 20 Friedrichs between them, and there'll be international loans as well in a show that will examine the influence on Friedrich of 17th- and 18th-century painting. 

A different type of 19th-century art at Tate Britain from April 6 in The Rossettis. Running until September 24, it will feature the largest display of the Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti's work in two decades as well as an extensive survey of the output of his wife Lizzie Siddal. The show will also look at the life and work of Dante Gabriel's sister, the writer Christina, and his relationships with his muses Fanny Cornforth and Jane Morris. Bound to be popular....

May

The Van Gogh Museum is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2023, and opening in Amsterdam on May 12 is an exhibition examining the final few weeks of Vincent's life, which he spent from May to July 1890 in Auvers-sur-Oise, north-west of Paris. Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise will include more than 50 paintings from his frenetic late output. It's on until September 3, re-opening later that month at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. 

The Pallant House Gallery in Chichester will be putting on an exhibition starting in May about Gwen John (1876-1939) and her life and work in London and Paris, taking in contemporaries such as Edouard Vuillard, Auguste Rodin and Paula Modersohn-Becker. Dates are yet to be announced, but a version of the show will be starting at the Holburne Museum in Bath in October. 

June

Germans do love a big exhibition, and there's an absolute whopper coming up at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin starting on June 23: Secessions -- Klimt, Stuck, Liebermann tells the stories of the Secession movements that emerged in Vienna, Munich and Berlin in the 1890s as adventurous artists broke with the art establishment. More than 200 works are promised, including 50 Klimts in collaboration with the Wien Museum. If you can't take it all in in one go, you can always return before it closes on October 22.

The Jacobus Vrel exhibition is due on at the Fondation Custodia in Paris from June 17 to September 17.

August

The Caspar David Friedrich show from Schweinfurt moves on to to the Kunst Museum in Winterthur from August 26 to November 19.  

September

The outstanding new show this month is Frans Hals at the National Gallery. It's set to be the biggest Hals retrospective in 30 years, promising 50 of the Golden Age painter's finest works, including major group portraits. This show runs from September 30 to January 21, 2024, after which it goes on to the Rijksmuseum. We're very much looking forward to this; we loved the exhibition on Hals's male portraits at the Wallace Collection in late 2021. 

At Dulwich, Rubens & Women will seek to dispel the view that the Flemish artist just painted one type of woman (a fleshy one?) with a range of work from across his career, featuring the role of female patrons, family members and great loves. Many works will be on show in the UK for the first time. September 27 to January 28, 2024.  

Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise is scheduled to be on at the Musée d'Orsay from September 25 to January 28, 2024.

October

More Van Gogh? Oh, go on. From October 13 at the museum that bears his name, Van Gogh along the Seine looks at why the river round Asnières just west of Paris was such a draw for painters in the 1880s. Not just Van Gogh, but others like Signac, Seurat and Bernard. On until January 14, 2024, this is a collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago, where it's running in 2023 from May 14 to September 4. Presumably Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte won't be heading to Amsterdam; it doesn't appear to have been shown outside Chicago since 1925. 

The Holburne Museum in Bath will be showing the Gwen John exhibition from October 27 to April 14, 2024. 

November

The Museum Barberini in Potsdam will be putting on the first show specifically to focus on Edvard Munch's landscapes, beginning on November 18. Edvard Munch: Transforming Nature runs until April 1, 2024 and will feature around 90 international loans.   

December

A big one to end the year: Caspar David Friedrich: Art for a New Age at the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, which starts on December 15. More than 100 of his most significant paintings and graphic works are promised in a show that the museum says will provide the most comprehensive panorama of his art for many years (though we can remember seeing a big Friedrich show at the Kunsthalle about 15 years ago). You can already book tickets for this exhibition, which is on until April 1, 2024. 

Images

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, The Duchess of Alba, 1797, The Hispanic Society of America, New York
Johannes Vermeer, Mistress and Maid, c. 1665-67, The Frick Collection, New York. Photo: Joseph Coscia Jr

Caspar David Friedrich, Chalk Cliffs on Rügen, 1818, Kunst Museum Winterthur. © Kunst Museum Winterthur
Gustav Klimt, Pallas Athene, 1898. © Birgit und Peter Kainz, Wien Museum, Vienna
Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, about 1817, Hamburger Kunsthalle, on permanent loan from Stiftung Hamburger Kunstsammlungen. © SHK/Hamburger Kunsthalle/bpk. Photo: Elke Walford