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...
He's the almost exact contemporary of JMW Turner and John Constable, and, like them, he's renowned for his atmospheric landscapes, but Caspar David Friedrich is a very different painter. One of the greatest artists of the Romantic movement, and one of the greatest from the German-speaking world, he's being celebrated in a series of exhibitions across Germany and beyond to mark the 250th anniversary of his birth next year. We thought we should make an early start, and so we headed for Schweinfurt in northern Bavaria, where the Museum Georg Schäfer is hosting Caspar David Friedrich and the Harbingers of the Romantic . And before we go further, we have to tell you that it's a fantastic show -- one of the best we've been to over the past 12 months -- with some of Friedrich's finest pictures, beautifully presented. Now Friedrich isn't that familiar to a British audience -- there's just one painting in London's National Gallery -- but in Germany he'...