Opening and Closing in April

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...

Opening and Closing in April

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 beautifully draped female figures can be stunning; we remember seeing Night and Sleep in the very uneven Pre-Raphaelite Sisters exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery a few years ago and thinking it the best thing in the show.

One of Britain's leading Pop Artists, Derek Boshier, died last year, and a new show at Gazelli Art House in the West End -- the first since his death -- zooms in on his output from Pop's breakthrough period in the 1960s. The Way Forward: Derek Boshier and the Sixties, on from April 25 to June 28, also features contemporaries including Peter Blake, Pauline Boty, David Hockney and Patrick Caulfield.

Two kingdoms united and the course of history changed for centuries to come; 1603 was a momentous year when for the first time one man wore the crowns of both England and Scotland. At the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, The World of King James VI and I will tell the story of his reign, which ended precisely 400 years ago. More than 140 exhibits will be on show, including paintings, jewellery and costumes, with loans from across the UK. April 26 to September 14.

A few decades after James, the Netherlands was experiencing its Golden Age. And the big names from that period will grace the walls of the H'ART Museum in Amsterdam -- formerly the Hermitage -- from April 9 in From Rembrandt to Vermeer: Masterpieces from the Leiden Collection, one of the outstanding private collections of Dutch art. There are 18 works by Rembrandt in this show to mark the 750th anniversary of the founding of Amsterdam, and Frans Hals and Jan Steen are among others illustrating how life was lived in 17th-century Holland. Until August 24.

It's the 160th anniversary of Félix Vallotton's birth, and the centenary of his death. The Swiss are not letting this go by unnoticed; the first of the year's big exhibitions about the Lausanne-born painter, who spent most of his career in France, opens at the Kunst Museum in Winterthur on April 12. Running until September 7, Félix Vallotton: Lost Illusions will have more than 150 works demonstrating all facets of his career. If you can't make it to Winterthur, there's an even bigger show scheduled in Lausanne from late October.

One of this year's European capitals of culture is Chemnitz in eastern Germany, and among the major exhibitions they've scheduled is a pan-European overview of the realist art of the 1920s and 30s, including the New Objectivity movement in Germany. Some 300 works from 20 countries will be brought together in European Realities at the Museum Gunzenhauser from April 27 to August 10.

You can't miss the adverts all across Paris for Matisse and Marguerite: Through Her Father's Eyes at the Musée d'Art Moderne. On from April 4 to August 24, this show presents well over 100 works in various media depicting Matisse's eldest daughter and most constant model. Many are being shown in France for the first time. And at the same museum, over the same dates, there's also Gabriele Münter: Painting to the Point, a retrospective of 150 works by the German Expressionist.

You might have thought that the David Hockney exhibition at the Royal Academy in 2012 was enormous. But wait. At Paris's Fondation Louis Vuitton, they'll be providing lots of space for what Hockney says is "the largest exhibition I've ever had". Running from April 9 to August 31, David Hockney 25 will fill the entire building with more than 400 of his works going back to 1955. And that includes A Bigger Splash and Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures).

Last chance to see....

On until April 27 at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester is Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury, telling the story of a painter perhaps better known for her complicated personal life than her art. There are some memorable pictures in this enjoyable and interesting show.

Images

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912), God Speed, c. 1893. © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2024/Royal Collection Trust
Derek Boshier (1937-2024), Highlights, 1966. © Derek Boshier

Eduard Ole (1898-1995), Passengers, 1929, Art Museum of Estonia, Tallinn. Photo: Stanislav Stepaško
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669), Study of a Woman in a White Cap, c. 1640, The Leiden Collection
Dora Carrington (1893-1932), Spanish Landscape with Mountains, c. 1924, Tate. Photo: Tate

What's On in 2025

What will be the exhibition highlights of 2025 around Britain and Europe? At the end of the year, Tate Britain will be marking 250 years since the birth of JMW Turner and John Constable with a potential blockbuster. Meanwhile, the Swiss are making a big thing of the 100th anniversary of the death of Félix Vallotton (a real favourite of ours). Among women artists in the spotlight will be Anna Ancher, Ithell Colquhoun, Artemisia Gentileschi and Suzanne Valadon. Here's a selection of what's coming up, in more or less chronological order; as ever, we make no claim to comprehensiveness, and our choice very much reflects our personal taste. And in our search for the most interesting shows, we're visiting Ascona, Baden-Baden, Chemnitz and Winterthur, among other places. January We start off in Paris, at the Pompidou Centre; the 1970s inside-out building is showing its age and it'll be shut in the summer for a renovation programme scheduled to last until 2030. Bef...

Carrington: You've Met Leonora, Now Discover Dora

Carrington: She only wanted to be known by her surname, unwittingly posing a conundrum for art historians, curators and the wider world a century later. Because it's another somewhat later Carrington, the long-lived Surrealist and totally unrelated, who's recently become Britain's most expensive woman artist. But today we're at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester to see an exhibition not about Leonora but about Dora Carrington. She hated that name Dora -- so Victorian -- but with Leonora so much in the limelight (and the subject of a recent show at Newlands House in Petworth, just a few miles up the road), the curators at the Pallant didn't have much option, so they've had to call their retrospective Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury . Leonora was a bit of a rebel, as we found out in Petworth. Dora too. But we ought to respect her wish. Carrington, then, has been a bit neglected recently; this is the first show of her works in three decades. And while ther...

The Thrill of Pleasure: Bridget Riley

Prepare yourself for some sensory overload. Curves, stripes, zig-zags, wavy lines, dots, in black and white or colour. Look at many of the paintings of Bridget Riley and you're unable to escape the eerie sensation that the picture in front of you is in motion, has its own inner three-dimensional life, is not just inert paint on flat canvas, panel or plaster. It's by no means unusual to see selections of Riley's paintings on display, but a blockbuster exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh brings together 70 years of her pictures in a dazzling extravaganza of abstraction, including a recreation of her only actual 3D work, which you walk into for a perspectival sensurround experience. It's "that thrill of pleasure which sight itself reveals," as Riley once said. It's a really terrific show, and the thrill of pleasure in the Scottish capital was enhanced by the unexpected lack of visitors on the day we went to see it, with huge empty sp...

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