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Opening and Closing in September

Are you ready? London's National Gallery says you're going to "be blown away by Van Gogh's most spectacular paintings in our once-in-a-century exhibition", Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers , which is on from September 14 to January 19. The show brings together "your most loved of Van Gogh’s paintings from across the globe, some of which are rarely seen in public," according to the museum. Given Vincent's prolific output and the plethora of Van Gogh shows, such hype may be a little overblown. Note that tickets are already selling well, and standard admission costs £28 before Gift Aid.  Still, the Van Gogh show may provide more bang for your buck than Monet and London -- Views of the Thames in the rather small exhibition space of the Courtauld Gallery (for which standard tickets are £16). Claude Monet stayed in London three times from 1899 to 1901, painting the Houses of Parliament, Charing Cross Bridge and Waterloo Bridge. He showed the pictures in Paris,
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Opening and Closing in July

Not long now till the Olympics start in Paris, but the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge is looking back to the last such event in the French capital, the Chariots of Fire Games of 1924. Paris 1924: Sport, Art and the Body will use a range of media -- painting, fashion, film, photography and more -- to examine how tradition and modernism came together to shape the future of sport. July 19 to November 3, and entry is free. 

Elsewhere in East Anglia, Gainsborough's House in Sudbury stages the first major exhibition in 40 years of the work of Cedric Morris, perhaps best known as a teacher of Lucian Freud at his art school in Suffolk and as a breeder of irises. We saw a couple of smaller-scale Morris shows in London back in 2018, but this one aims to take a deeper and broader view of Morris and his artistic and romantic partner, Arthur Lett-Haines. Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris & Arthur Lett-Haines is on from July 6 to November 3. 
The record for the most valuable work by a British female artist was recently broken by the surrealist Leonora Carrington. Newlands House Gallery in Petworth, West Sussex, will open an exhibition on July 12 focusing particularly on the later stages of Carrington's very long career and featuring many works never previously seen in the UK. Leonora Carrington: Rebel Visionary runs until October 26. 

Let's stay in Sussex for another British woman artist. Mabel Pryde Nicholson was the wife of William Nicholson, and they lived at The Grange in Rottingdean from 1909 to 1914. Her achievements have been overshadowed by her husband's, and an exhibition of her paintings at her former home will be the first for more than a century. Prydie: The Life and Art of Mabel Pryde Nicholson will be on at what is now the Grange Gallery from July 20 to August 26. 

Up to Edinburgh for the paintings of the Irish-born artist Sir John Lavery -- one of the Glasgow Boys -- recording his travels across the British Isles, Europe and beyond throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. An Irish Impressionist: Lavery on Location has already been seen in Dublin and Belfast, and it'll be on at the Royal Scottish Academy from July 20 to October 27. 

If you missed the shows of Frans Hals's remarkable Dutch Golden Age portraits in London or Amsterdam, there's a final opportunity to see the full range of his paintings at Berlin's Gemäldegalerie from July 12. There will be around 75 pictures on display by Hals and his contemporaries from Haarlem, demonstrating his apparently effortless loose brushwork -- such an inspiration to the painters of the late 19th century. Frans Hals: Master of the Fleeting Moment runs until November 3.

Last chance to see....

Over the top? Certainly. But Tate Britain's exhibition on John Singer Sargent and Fashion is well worth visiting, if you can get down to Millbank before it closes on July 7. 

And if you can make it over to Cologne before July 28, you can see one of the shows we've most enjoyed this year, looking at the art the Impressionists produced 150 years ago, and what they were rebelling against, in 1863 Paris 1874: Revolution in Art at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum.

Images

Cedric Morris (1889-1982), Summer Garden Flowers, 1944, Philip Mould & Company, London
Frans Hals (1580-1666), The Lute Player, before 1623-24, Musée du Louvre, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre)/Mathieu Rabeau
Pere Borrell del Caso (1835-1910), Escaping Criticism, 1874, Banco de España Collection, Madrid. © Photo: Banco de España, Madrid
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