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 ex...
Monet, Pissarro, Sisley -- names calculated to get the crowds flocking to Tate Britain for Impressionists in London . Legros, Dalou and Carpeaux -- well, probably not, but you'll be seeing more of them than you might have bargained for if you go to this rather misleadingly named exhibition. The show's subtitle is French Artists in Exile 1870-1904, which probably gives a rather better sense of what you are going to see. The story starts with the flight of artists and dealers to London in 1870-71 amid France's military defeat by Prussia and the bloody suppression of the popular uprising that was the Paris Commune. The scene is well set in the first room, which introduces us to the devastation and carnage behind the exodus. Claude Monet crossed the Channel to avoid conscription while Camille Pissarro's house was used as stables by the Prussians. There are a few works from that early period on display -- the relative lightness of a Monet view of the Thames contrasting w...