The Art Exhibitions Blog

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...

Who were the first great English painters? The answer surely has to be Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver. They may have worked on a small, even minuscule, scale, but in the late Tudor and early Stuart periods, Hilliard and Oliver were artistic giants. Their story is told in  Elizabethan Treasures: Miniatures by Hilliard & Oliver , an exquisite, rewarding and eye-opening exhibition at London's National Portrait Gallery. Portrait miniatures were big in England and in France in the late 16th century: popular with royals and the aristocracy, and with the emerging middle classes too. This wasn't so much art for public display as to express a personal relationship, perhaps indicating the recipient was in the monarch's favour, or worn to demonstrate loyalty. Or to show burning passion: This  Unknown Man Against a Background of Flames , painted by Hilliard in about 1600, presumably intended this picture as a keepsake for his beloved to express his undying devotion. He...

Thomas Gainsborough painted more portraits of his family than any other British artist before him, at least as far as we know. Some of the 50 or so pictures in Gainsborough's Family Album , now on show at the National Portrait Gallery in London, are small in scale and dashed off with an economical use of paint, because a busy artist didn't want to use up too much time, energy or materials on a job to please the in-laws. Others are more polished, to show off his skills to a demanding clientele.  Gainsborough, one of the great names of the 18th-century golden age of British painting, really preferred landscapes, but as far as portraits are concerned he seems to have saved his best, his most endearing work for his favourite sitters, his daughters Mary and Margaret.  Here they are, pictured in 1756, when Mary would have been about six and Margaret a year younger. The elder girl restrains her sister to stop her pricking her finger as she reaches towards a butterfly per...

The blockbuster is Picasso 1932: Love, Fame, Tragedy at Tate Modern, which runs from March 8 to September 9. It's the first ever solo Picasso show there, and the Tate is calling it one of the most significant it's ever staged. More than 100 works will take the visitor on a month-by-month journey through a pivotal year in Picasso's life. When it was on at the Musee Picasso in Paris, this exhibition was called 1932: Année Erotique , but you can imagine the Tate might have had trouble with that for its posters on the Tube... Be warned, this show appears to set a new standard for London ticket prices at £22 (they cost half that -- 12.50 euros -- in Paris). The National Portrait Gallery offers Victorian Giants: the Birth of Art Photography   from March 1 to May 20, featuring pictures by Lewis Carroll and Julia Margaret Cameron. There's more camerawork at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich in The Great British Seaside , including new material by Martin Parr. Ta...