So the question to ask about the Michaelina Wautier exhibition at the Royal Academy in London must be: Is the hype about this recently rediscovered 17th-century woman painter justified? The answer: Yes, absolutely. She really does merit acknowledgement -- and not just because we recognise a woman working in a man's world. Her art shows she was extremely talented, producing superb canvases covering a diverse range of subject matter. What's more, she painted very large pictures featuring male nudes, such as Bacchus, despite her contemporaries thinking that was not the sort of thing a female artist could do. And her portraits are wonderfully lively and lifelike. This is Martino Martini, an Italian Jesuit missionary who travelled to China in the 1640s. It was painted in 1654, when Michaelina was around 40. Martini, who was staying at the Jesuit College in Brussels, is depicted wearing traditional Chinese silk court attire and a hat of fur and feathers. A rather substantial...
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, ...