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...
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...