The Bayeux Tapestry exhibition at the British Museum starts on September 10; it's already sold out for this year but booking for the rest of the run, from January 1 through to July 11, will open on October 21. If you've never seen this most breathtaking of historical artefacts, you may want to seize the chance before it leaves London next year for its permanent home in Normandy, which will have been renovated during its absence. At Southampton City Art Gallery, we're promised an extensive exhibition of British art from the first half of the 20th century, drawing on the museum's own substantial holdings and those of the Ingram Collection . Running from September 26 to February 21, Art Then! British Painting, Sculpture and Drawing, 1910-1960 will feature artists including Barbara Hepworth, Gwen John , Paul Nash and Eric Ravilious. There might not be much new on in London this month, but we'll always have Paris. Starting at the Musée Jacquemart-André with Time...
LS Lowry's best-known pictures of grim northern townscapes and huddled masses of stick-like figures rushing from the mill or to the football ground make it hard to credit that he was a Pre-Raphaelite at heart. And yet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown were Lowry's two favourite artists. Images of the Pre-Raphs' muses adorned the walls of his bedroom in his suburban home in Mottram on the outskirts of Manchester. He was president of the Rossetti Society. "I said to my father: 'I wish you'd buy me a Rossetti painting.' Now I've got about 12,'' Lowry said late in life. "I'm a Victorian all right, you know." Lowry and the Pre-Raphaelites , a free show at the Lowry in Salford, makes a stab at shedding more light on why these pictures meant so much to an artist whose own work was so very different. For us, it doesn't really succeed. Lowry was a very private man, and though we get to hear and read some of his own words...