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 ...
Pre-Raphaelite Sisters doing it for themselves. That's the premise of the show at the National Portrait Gallery in London, an attempt to reclaim, to reassert the significance of the roles of women as models, wives, artists, muses in that most Victorian of art movements, one that's traditionally seen as being dominated by men with an abundance, nay, a profusion of facial hair. So a Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood to rival the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais? It's a neat conceit, isn't it, but it's not one that's really borne out by this rather uneven exhibition. Because some of the dozen women highlighted here were certainly quite impressive artists in their own right -- and there's a couple of surprise discoveries to be made as we go through -- but in some cases we're talking about women who were mainly active as models. And, err, muses. There's an apparently deliberate reluctance to tal...