Category: Exhibitions

Fourteen masterpieces from the Khanenko Museum in Kyiv are shown alongside twelve highlights from the Bredius collection. Portraits, still lifes, landscapes and historical scenes are exhibited together for the first time, revealing the artistic dialogue between Ukraine and the Netherlands — just as art historian Abraham Bredius experienced during his 1897 journey through Eastern Europe.

In 2026, The Courtauld will present the first ever exhibition dedicated to the seascapes of the French artist Georges Seurat (1859–1891). This major, focused display will be the first devoted to Seurat in the UK in almost 30 years. It will chart the evolution of his radical and distinctive style through the recurring motif of the sea. [...]

The Griffin Catalyst Exhibition: Seurat and the Sea will bring together around 23 paintings, oil sketches and drawings made by Seurat during the five summers he spent on the northern coast of France, between 1885 and 1890. Working in port towns along the English Channel, including Honfleur, Port-en-Bessin and Gravelines, Seurat captured their seascapes, regattas and port activity in his distinctive Neo-Impressionist technique. He sought, in his words, ‘to wash his eyes of the days spent in the studio [in Paris] and to translate in the most faithful manner the bright clarity, in all its nuances’.

The exhibition will bring together sixty masterpieces from Duplessis’ extensive body of work—among the 200 paintings he created. These works come from prestigious collections such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Château de Versailles, and the Louvre Museum. This outstanding selection will allow visitors to (re)discover the virtuosity of Duplessis, particularly his role as the official portraitist of Louis XVI. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalog published by Lienart Editions, documenting nearly two hundred of Duplessis’ paintings.

The rich collection of Flemish cabinet paintings in the Old Masters Picture Gallery offers a particularly fitting foundation for a special exhibition dedicated to the Brueg(h)el, Van Balen, and Francken dynasties and their artistic collaborations. Key works and high-quality pieces from their workshops are brought together in the exhibition to form a 'school of seeing', placed in dialogue with one another. The exhibition aims to shed light on how these workshops—often active over several generations and involving numerous collaborators—interacted and operated.

So far, so close: Guadalupe, Mexico, in Spain offers a new perspective on the role of the Virgin of Guadalupe as a miraculously created image, an object of worship and symbol of identity in the Hispanic world. Through nearly 70 works, including paintings, prints, sculptures and books, the exhibition shows how this manifestation of the Virgin, which first appeared on the Cerro del Tepeyac or Tepeyac Hill in 1531, transcended the borders of New Spain to become a powerful presence in the Spanish collective imagination.

For the first time, visitors will have a chance to see a comprehensive exhibition of female artists who were active in Central Europe, the Netherlands, and present-day Italy in the period 1300–1900. The exhibition is focused on this period because it marks a turning point in the status of women artists: they gradually gained access to art academies, and both aristocratic and urban women were actively engaging in art. Female artists were increasingly taking control of their careers, gradually establishing themselves professionally and socially. However, only a few were able to run an art studio like male artists.

A new exhibition in Villa Bardini allows visitors to admire major masterpieces and previously unpublished material associated with the figures of art historian Roberto Longhi and writer and translator Anna Banti, who “revolutionised” art history with the rediscovery of Caravaggio and Italian art of the 17th century. [...]

The exhibition showcases such masterpieces as Caravaggio’s Boy Bitten by a Lizard, Jusepe de Ribera’s Apostles and a moving sequence of ten small Morandis created by the Bologna-born artist and gifted to Roberto Longhi and Anna Banti on various different occasions in the course of their friendship.

Watteau won particular renown for the thousands of drawings he produced during his life. Drawing, as contemporaries realised, was his favourite creative outlet, bringing him 'much more pleasure than his finished pictures'. He drew incessantly, and developed ideas about the value of drawing that were every bit as original as his paintings. Instead of making figure studies for a picture as academic practice dictated, Watteau drew speculatively, conceiving ideas that might be slotted into a picture months or even years later. The sheets he produced were to be enjoyed in their own right as the first, freshest iterations of ideas that he thought were dulled when translated into paint.

Nowhere were these qualities more appreciated than in Britain, and over the past two centuries British collectors have endowed the British Museum with one of the finest collections of Watteau drawings in the world. Featuring almost every autograph work in the collection, this display is the first exhibition of the Museum's Watteau holdings to be held since 1980. Its varied contents demonstrate Watteau's extraordinary talent as a draughtsman, his sophisticated, novel approach to drawing, and the prestige that his graphic works enjoyed among Europe's connoisseurs.

If we look beyond outmoded prejudices and focus on the accomplishments of Company painting, we will note that this was the moment when Indian artists who had trained in courtly ateliers first moved outside the court to work for new patrons. The agendas of those patrons were not tied up with courtly or religious concerns. They were enthralled by India’s flora and fauna; by its architectural traditions; and by the costumes, customs and manners of its diverse peoples; and they looked to local artists to capture these details in images that would help them understand an environment that was new to them. Never mind that the patrons were foreigners, and their vision could be ill-informed. What should strike us now is how the artists responded to their demands with skill and passion, creating entirely new templates of Indian art. Company painting, while reflecting India’s past, also shows us a moment of modernity.

From 3 June to 28 September 2025, the Palace of Versailles is presenting an exhibition focusing on the famous bust of Louis XIV created by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, a key figure of the Italian baroque era in the 17th century, better known in France as ‘le Bernin’.

This exhibition is running in tandem with the restoration work which has been taking place in the Diana Room since October 2021 to restore the decorative painted and sculpted scheme on the ceiling, coving and overdoors to their former glory. This room offers a setting designed to reveal the full detail of the connection between the genius of the artist and the majesty of his bust of Louis XIV.

The exhibition, which is being presented in the Dauphine’s apartment, turns the spotlight in particular on one of the most iconic artefacts in the palace collections: the bust of Louis XIV, sculpted in marble by Bernini during his trip to Paris in 1665.

The exhibition showcases one of the most significant yet enigmatic figures of medieval Hungarian art, known as Master MS. At the heart of the monographic exhibition is Master MS’s most famous work: the former high altarpiece of Saint Catherine’s Church in Selmecbánya (now Banská Štiavnica, Slovakia). The seven surviving panel paintings of this monumental masterpiece of late medieval art have never before been brought together in a single exhibition.

The exhibition, where visitors can see nearly one hundred works of art, maps, models, goldsmith’s pieces and period documents. They will not only discover the artist’s known and newly attributed works, but also a comprehensive overview of his artistic milieu, the artistic regions that influenced his style, and the historical context of Hungary at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The curators even suggest a possible solution to one of the most interesting mysteries in Hungarian art history: who might be behind the MS monogram.The monographic exhibition, organised in conjunction with the Christian Museum of Esztergom and with contributions from over twenty lending institutions, will hopefully open a new chapter in the decades-long research into Master MS’s identity and art.

The head of Silenus is proudly inscribed “Jos Wright 11 Years”, and may have been copied from a print in a book from his father’s library—or, curator Lucy Bamford thinks, possibly from an inn sign in the city.