Paris -- there's always so much art to see, so many blockbuster shows of big-name artists in big-name museums. Sometimes, though, there's a lot of pleasure to be had from getting to know a less familiar painter in a much more intimate setting. Such as when we went to see Maximilien Luce: The Instinct for Landscape at the Musée de Montmartre. Luce painted light-filled landscapes in the 1890s following the Divisionist and Pointillist examples of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, and these would be attractive enough on their own, but there's a lot more to discover in this quite extensive exhibition. There are pictures of men at work, building Paris, and of industry, producing the raw materials for the modern world. Some of these paintings of Belgium's Black Country are very dark indeed. And late on in his career, more light-bathed idylls of life in a riverside village in a rather different neo-Impressionist style. Now, even though Luce was a Parisian (he lived and worked...
We'll start this month at the King's Gallery in London, where more than 300 artworks and other objects from the Royal Collection will be on display from April 11 for The Edwardians: Age of Elegance . Illustrating the tastes of the period between the death of Victoria and World War I, the show features the work of John Singer Sargent , Edward Burne-Jones , William Morris and Carl Fabergé, among others. On to November 23. More Morris at, unsurprisingly, the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow. Morris Mania , which runs from April 5 to September 21, aims to show how his designs have continued to capture the imagination down the decades, popping up in films and on television, in every part of the home, on trainers, wellies, and even in nuclear submarines.... From much the same era, Guildhall Art Gallery in the City offers Evelyn De Morgan: The Modern Painter in Victorian London from April 4 to January 4. De Morgan's late Pre-Raphaelite work with its beautifull...