August is always one of the quietest months for new exhibitions, and this year is no different, but we do have one big event to alert you to, as well as two splendid shows that only have weeks to run. The one major opening is Gwen John: Strange Beauties at the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh. Running from August 1 to January 4, this is a comprehensive retrospective of the work of the woman perhaps now seen as Wales's most significant artist, born 150 years ago this year. Maybe a little too comprehensive, according to some of the reviews of the show when it was on at the National Museum in Cardiff. The exhibition goes on to the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, in February and then at the end of July next year to the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC. We saw a rather smaller Gwen John exhibition in Chichester in 2023. Last chance to see.... Ending on August 23 is the exhibition at the Lakenhal in Leiden ...
We went to the British Museum in London recently with high hopes of Inspired by the East , a show intended to explore how the Islamic world influenced Western art. We'd seen a very enlightening exhibition in Paris earlier in the year called Oriental Visions that looked at how painters gave an often thoroughly mendacious interpretation of the Middle East, and then we were intrigued by the successful 19th-century English artist John Frederick Lewis , who liked to reimagine himself as a Arab merchant or chieftain. And the British Museum show starts off strongly, with an arresting image from the Victorian heyday of Orientalism: The Prayer by the American artist Frederick Arthur Bridgman. A splendidly dressed man and another wearing a patched garment are worshipping inside a mosque. The details are splendid; Bridgman brought many props back from trips to the Orient, including the lamp and carpet so meticulously rendered here. "My impressi...