New Exhibitions in October

What a lot of new exhibitions this October! We list well over 20 across Europe below -- many more than usual -- and have still had to leave out quite a few that we'd mention in most other months in order to keep this post to a reasonable length.

Let's start at the Royal Academy in London with deep blue seas, cloudless skies, intense light and the heat of the sun. From October 2 to January 31, you can experience the excitement Renoir, Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso and many others felt while Painting the French Riviera. The exhibition features more than 160 exhibits from the 1870s to the 1960s, and a version of the show travels on to the Cleveland Museum of Art in March. 

Hmm, Renoir. Now perhaps seen as the most chocolate-boxy of the Impressionists, but without doubt the creator of some of the most recognisable images in French art of the late 19th century. Well worth stealing, and clearly the National Gallery is on to a winner with its Renoir and Love exhibition, because advance sales for the show, running from October 3 to January 31, have set a new record. With 45 works, it's the biggest Renoir exhibition in the UK for 20 years, and it'll move on to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in late February. 

Probably the most recognisable of all non-Western works of art is Katsushika Hokusai's print The Great Wave; it's part of a series he created nearly 200 years ago that pays homage to Fuji, the equally recognisable mountain that's at the heart of Japanese culture. For the first time, a complete set of the prints is being shown in the UK, allowing you to appreciate Hokusai's artistic genius, which had such an influence on late 19th-century Western painting. Hokusai: 36 Views of Mount Fuji from the Iuchi Collection is on at Dulwich Picture Gallery from October 20 to January 17. 

Oh, and don't forget that October 21 is when the next tranche of tickets for The Bayeux Tapestry at the British Museum goes on sale. Follow the link for details. 

Sadly, we rarely have much in northern England to tempt you with, but from October 17 to February 13 there's the chance to see Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Poetry at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne. More than 100 exhibits will show how Burne-Jones, Hunt, Millais, Rossetti and the like were influenced by poets such as Chaucer, Dante, Keats and Tennyson. (And if you're in the North-East, a brief mention of a show at the Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle we inadvertently missed out last month: Impressions of Light, featuring Monet, Courbet, Dufy and more from MuMa in Le Havre, and running until March 14.) 

More Pre-Raphs at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge: From October 23 to May 3, A Call to Art: William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites attempts to go beyond the medieval romanticism and decorative designs and examine the movement's vision of a better, fairer future for society.  

And moving into the 20th century, the Holburne Museum in Bath presents Ancient Landscape, Modern Times: Eric Ravilious and the Artists of the Chalk Downs, looking at how landscapes such as the South Downs influenced artists including William Nicholson, John Nash, Tirzah Garwood and, of course, her husband Ravilious. October 3 to January 10.

It's 50 years since the death of LS Lowry, enigmatic chronicler of the grim industrial landscapes of North-West England. The occasion, then, for an exhibition, but not in a location you might be expecting. LS Lowry: The Theatre of Life is on from October 24 to February 28 at the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes (one of our favourite venues), and it aims to cover the whole of his output, taking in seascapes and portraits as well the smoking chimneys of Salford. 

One of the most stunning things we've seen this year was the Francisco de Zurbarán exhibition at the National Gallery in London. Although we're not big fans of religious art, we were blown away by the Spanish painter's emotional intensity and technical brilliance, particularly in the recreation of fabrics, or indeed the fleece of a lamb. From October 7 to January 25, you can see Zurbarán (1598-1664) on the next stop of its tour at the Louvre in Paris. And then, at the end of February, it begins a four-month run at the Art Institute of Chicago.

This autumn is a big one for women Impressionists in Paris. With Eva Gonzalès: A Free-Spirited Artist already on and selling fast at the Petit Palais, October 6 sees the opening of Mary Cassatt: Being Independent at the Musée d'Orsay. It's the centenary of her death, and this show will bring together almost 80 paintings, pastels and prints. It's on till January 31, reopening at the National Portrait Gallery in London on March 11, and then moving on to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (following Renoir) in July. Cassatt is just the first of a number of women artists we're highlighting this month, so don't stop reading!

An enormous-sounding exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton is devoted to Gustave Fayet (1865-1925), a major early collector of modern art. Running from October 9 to March 8, Gustave Fayet: Collector-Designer brings together more than 250 works he once owned, including 10 paintings by Vincent van Gogh, 78 works by Paul Gauguin and 88 by Odilon Redon, as well as Matisse, Morisot, Degas, Cezanne and more. Not to mention 375 of Fayet's own works, most never exhibited before.... 

At the Musée de Montmartre, they'll be examining a theme that attracted artists from Toulouse-Lautrec to Picasso, Seurat to Chagall. The Circus: A Factory of Modern Art is on from October 16 to February 14. 

And for our next woman artist, we're off to the Pompidou Centre in Metz in eastern France for the extraordinarily intricate floral creations of the self-taught Séraphine Louis (1864-1942). This show is on from October 31 to April 12.   

Still with us? The National Museum in Oslo has a very attractive-looking show on female artists from 1550 to 1650, with the puzzling title of Woman Painter (how do you pronounce the word that's struck through?). On from October 8 to February 7, it features some 50 works, with Artemisia Gentileschi, Michaelina Wautier, Sofonisba Anguissola, Lavinia Fontana, Giovanna Garzoni, Judith Leyster and Clara Peeters among those on display. The exhibition is due to travel on to the Galleria Borghese in Rome, though we've seen no official confirmation of the dates so far. 

From the same period comes Van Hemessen & Father: The Antwerp Workshop of Jan and Catharina van Hemessen. This show at the Snijders&Rockox House in Antwerp sheds light on one of the earliest women to have broken through in a male-dominated profession, making a mark with her small-scale portraits. On from October 15 to January 31, before a free show about Catharina opens at the National Gallery in London in March. 

Elsewhere in Belgium, let's focus on the Impressionists. At the Musée de la Boverie in Liège, the locals -- including Théo Van Rysselberghe, Anna Boch and Emile Claus -- will be displayed alongside the French giants, such as Monet, Renoir and Sisley, to tell Impressionism: A Belgian Story. This show, with nearly 150 works, can be seen from October 9 to March 29.   

She's among the artists in Liège, but Jenny Montigny (1875-1937) is also getting her own show at the Museum of Fine Arts in her home town of Ghent from October 10 to January 10. Expect luminous, intimate pictures such as the garden scene below. 

We've mentioned Artemisia already, but the Museo degli Innocenti in Florence is the venue for a show about her time in the city, a key period in her career, when she received prestigious commissions from the Medici family. There's not much detail available yet about Artemisia Gentileschi in Florence, which is on from October 21 to April 4; the website calls it "extraordinary", but that's a much overused adjective in Italy. 

It's a short train trip from Florence to Pisa, where the Palazzo Blu is showing Edward Hopper: New York and Beyond. Running from October 14 to March 7, this exhibition features more than 150 works and it's organised by the Whitney Museum in New York, which has more Hoppers than anyone else. We're firm Hopper fans: We last saw a big show of him at the Fondation Beyeler in Switzerland in 2020. 

Heading back north, the flamboyant James McNeill Whistler takes over the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam from October 16 to January 10 with Whistler: Dandy and Disruptor; we saw the London version of the show at Tate Britain -- hugely informative if a little too big. On the same dates as the Amsterdam exhibition you can also see Whistler: Loving the Netherlands at the Mesdag Collection in The Hague.

Meanwhile, at the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, you can visit Signac: Symphony of Colours from October 24 to February 28. Paul Signac, one of the great exponents of Pointillism, is the leading light in a show that also features Georges Seurat, Maximilien Luce and, as in Liège, Théo Van Rysselberghe.

Women Surrealists are quite a theme at the moment, and from October 23 to February 21, the Italian-Argentine artist Leonor Fini gets a retrospective at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, assembling around 100 works. 

And a short hop away at Museum Wiesbaden, they're exploring the role female artists played in the early German Expressionist Blue Rider movement just before World War I. Gabriele Münter and Marianne von Werefkin are the biggest names; others have been largely forgotten. Women of the Blue Rider is on in Wiesbaden from October 23 to February 21; it then goes to the Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum in Bremen in March, moving to the Lenbachhaus in Munich in October 2027. 

And for our final new exhibition this month (thanks for sticking with us!), it's off to the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin. Portraits! Surprising Encounters from Botticelli to Lempicka juxtaposes pairs of paintings spanning six centuries, producing unusual perspectives. Rogier van der Weyden, Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt and Titian are among those on show from October 16 to March 14.   

Last chance to see....

There's a lot of very interesting art and fascinating history from the Britain of the 1930s and 40s in Comrades in Art: Artists against Fascism at the Towner in Eastbourne; the show closes on October 18.

October 25 is the last date to catch the Danish master of silent, enigmatic interiors at the Kunsthaus in Zurich in Vilhelm Hammershøi: The Eye that Listens. We saw the show earlier this year at the Thyssen in Madrid. 

And there are three shows ending on November 1, starting with Love & Landscape: Stanley Spencer in Suffolk at the Spencer Gallery in Cookham, Berkshire. We saw the exhibition in its first run at Gainsborough's House in Sudbury; what a strange character Spencer was....

It's also the final day for Joseph Wright of Derby: From the Shadows at Derby Museum & Art Gallery. There's no charge to see this show of Wright's "candlelight" paintings, which was overpriced when on last year at the National Gallery.    

And November 1 also represents your final chance to catch the survey of British Landscapes: A Sense of Place at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester.

Images

Raoul Dufy (1877-1953), Golfe Juan, 1927, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas
Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898), Laus Veneris, 1873-75, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne 
Francisco de Zurbarán (1598-1664), Agnus Dei, 1635-40, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. © Photographic Archive Museo Nacional del Prado
Séraphine de Senlis (also known as Séraphine Louis) (1864-1942), The Tree of Paradise, c. 1920-25, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: © 2026 Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence
Jenny Montigny (1875-1937), The Begonias (The Gardener), 1913, Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent

Paul Signac (1863-1935), Voiliers et pins, 1896, Archives Signac, Paris

Clive Branson (1907-1944), Blitz: Plane Flying, 1940, Tate