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...
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...