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...
You know Eric Ravilious , right? Those very English watercolour landscapes, understated and charming, that grace the covers of a surprising number of books. He's been the subject of a couple of exhibitions over the past few years, including one at Dulwich in 2015. But what about his wife? Bet you don't know a lot, if anything, about her. Her name was Tirzah Garwood, and as Mr and Mrs Ravilious , a quite splendid little show at the Fry Art Gallery in Saffron Walden in Essex, demonstrates, she turns out to have been a really talented artist in her own right, making wonderfully observed and often very witty drawings and wood engravings. Tirzah was a student of Eric at the Eastbourne School of Art in the late 1920s, and they married in 1930. Along with Edward Bawden and his wife Charlotte, the Raviliouses moved to Great Bardfield in Essex, not that far from Saffron Walden, in the early 1930s. And here she is, depicted by Eric in this very domestic scene from 1933, shellin...