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...
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...