She was a highly successful artist in 17th-century Brussels, creating the sort of paintings you might have seen from Rubens or Van Dyck, but then she vanished from art history. It's only very recently she's been rescued from obscurity, her pictures rightfully reattributed. Michaelina Wautier comes to the Royal Academy in London on March 27 from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, offering the first opportunity to encounter her work on a large scale. On till June 21. And while we're on the theme of new discoveries, we've made quite a few at the Dulwich Picture Gallery down the years. The latest arrival there is a completely unknown name to us, from the Baltic: Konrad Mägi (1878-1925), described as a pioneer of Estonian modernism. More than 60 of his works are being shown in the UK for the first time in an exhibition that runs from March 24 to July 12. No introduction is needed for David Hockney, and he's taking over the Serpentine Gallery on March ...
Which exhibition are we most looking forward to this month? It has to be Frans Hals at the National Gallery in London, which starts on September 30. It's the first major retrospective of the great portraitist of the Dutch Golden Age in three decades, and it will assemble around 50 of his works, including a couple of his large-scale group portraits of militiamen from the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. A must-see, particularly if you missed the fantastic show focusing on Hals's male portraits at the Wallace Collection a couple of years back. All that swaggering loose -- or even louche -- brushwork is on display at the National Gallery until January 21, before transferring to the Rijksmuseum in February and then the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin in July. Hals was originally from Antwerp, and it was in the Flemish port city that his close contemporary Peter Paul Rubens spent much of his life and career. The new exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery i...