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...
"Please, sir, I want some more," said Oliver Twist, in that most famous of lines by Charles Dickens. The workhouse boy was desperate for enough gruel, but Dickens' work as a whole overflows with references to food and drink. And, as Food Glorious Food , the latest exhibition at the Charles Dickens Museum in London shows, it played just as central a role in the Victorian writer's own life. The museum occupies the house at 48 Doughty Street that Dickens and his family moved into in 1837 and where he wrote Oliver Twist and The Pickwick Papers . It's the dining room that's the first you step into on your tour, with the table set for entertaining on a lavish, but not too lavish, scale. Dickens wasn't comfortable with grand dinner parties, depicting them, as in Dombey and Son , as frosty occasions where the bad behaviour of the servants reflected the flaws of their employers. The Victorian middle classes didn't do their own cooking, of course; the...