You may have noticed that it's the 250th anniversary of John Constable's birth this year, while JMW Turner was born 250 years ago last year and Thomas Gainsborough's 300th birthday falls in 2027. Put them all together and you get Gainsborough, Turner and Constable: Inventing Landscape at Gainsborough's House in Sudbury, Suffolk. This show, running from April 25 to October 11, explores the emergence of English landscape painting through three of its greatest exponents, and it features mostly rarely seen works from private collections -- including Turner's Abergavenny Bridge , which hasn't been on public display since 1799! Meanwhile, the show that's just been on at Gainsborough's House -- Love & Landscape: Stanley Spencer in Suffolk -- transfers to the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham, Berkshire, starting on April 4. On till November 1, the exhibition explores the pivotal role the time Spencer spent in Suffolk had on his career. You can read he...
The headline new exhibition in London in October is Francis Bacon: Human Presence at the National Portrait Gallery, which assembles more than 55 works to examine Bacon's far-from-traditional approach to portraiture from the 1950s onwards. Among the sitters: Lucian Freud. The show runs from October 10 to January 19. Those in search of something less visceral might prefer to Discover Constable & The Hay Wain at the National Gallery. This is the latest in a series of relatively small free shows at the gallery looking at a single picture in depth; we've found them very enjoyable so far. Constable's painting is now seen as presenting a traditional view of the countryside; when it was made, though, it was regarded as rather radical. On from October 17 to February 2. More than five years ago, we went to the Nunnery Gallery in Bow in east London to see an exhibition of paintings of the local area by Doreen Fletcher . Those modern cityscapes could be seen as fo...