Category: Exhibitions

This spring, the gallery presents Elizabeth I: Queen and Court, an exhibition exploring how portraiture shaped one of Britain’s most iconic reigns. Featuring outstanding Tudor works drawn from private collections, the exhibition includes the earliest surviving life-size, full-length portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, alongside portraits of some of the key figures from her close circle of courtiers and confidantes. These rarely seen paintings reveal how portraiture functioned as a tool of power and was used to project authority, secure allegiance, and, in rare cases, register dissent.

Active in Brussels in the middle of the 17th century, Michaelina Wautier challenged the limits imposed on female artists at the time by working on an unusually varied range of subjects: from flowers and portraits to grand history paintings – a format usually reserved for her male counterparts.

In her most famous painting, The Triumph of Bacchus, she painted herself as a pagan bacchante in monumental scale, looking squarely at the viewer and confidently asserting her position as the maker.

Although Wautier was hugely successful in her time, her breathtaking paintings and her place in art history were almost lost in the 18th century.

The exhibition presents a wide selection of his drawings and engravings and, for the first time, a near-complete collection of his paintings (altarpieces and easel paintings), including the 1473 Madonna of the Rose Bower, his only painting on panel whose date of creation is known. His works reveal a well-read artist with a penchant for fine, inventive storytelling and a skilful eye for natural subjects.

This display, featuring drawings by artists including Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Hendrick Goltzius, Rogier van der Weyden and Lucas van Leyden, is the culmination of a five-year research project on the Museum collection of early Netherlandish drawings. Around 120 drawings, dated from around 1430 to 1600, have been selected from more than 1,200 which have not been systematically researched or catalogued since AE Popham's collection catalogue in 1932.

The show will highlight new findings that have come from combining curatorial and conservation expertise along with scientific analysis. The project, supported by a grant from the International Music and Art Foundation, charts the origins and development of drawing in the Low Countries. The breadth and quality of the Museum's holdings in this field provide an opportunity to piece together this sometimes-fragmented narrative.

With the exhibition At Home with Jan Steen – 400 Years of Merrymaking, Museum De Lakenhal celebrates Jan Steen's 400th birthday. In this exhibition, you will discover how the Leiden artist used his children, spouses, friends and pub as inspiration for his paintings. The exhibition offers a surprising glimpse into everyday life in the 17th century and the humour and humanity that make his paintings so beloved. Through his works and those of other artists of his time, you will embark on a journey of discovery through Steen's world full of humour, chaos and hidden messages.

For the first time in its history, the Fondation Beyeler will devote an exhibition to Paul Cezanne, a pioneer of modern art and one of the most important artists in the museum’s collection. The exhibition will focus on the last and most significant phase of the artist’s career, highlighting key themes of his later years, among them still lifes, portraits, landscapes and bather scenes. Bringing together around 80 oil paintings and watercolours, the exhibition will bring to life Cezanne’s groundbreaking work as regards form, light and colour – the qualities that have inspired and influenced artists for generations and through to the present day.

In Spring and Summer 2026, Nationalmuseum will present a major exhibition on sculptor and draughtsman Johan Tobias Sergel (1740–1814) Sergel was a central figure in Swedish art during the late 18th century and is also considered one of the most important sculptors of his time on an international scale.

The exhibition offers a comprehensive view of Sergel’s life and art—from his early years in Stockholm in the 1760s, through his extended study trips to France and Italy, to his commissions for King Gustav III upon his return to Stockholm. One of the goals of the exhibition is to place Sergel’s life and work in a broader cultural and historical context. His relationships with leading Swedish cultural personalities and political authorities of the time are given significant attention, and his career is portrayed against the backdrop of life in 18th-century Stockholm, Paris, and Rome. Sergel maintained an extensive international network, and the exhibition highlights how important these connections were to his artistic development.

Gainsborough will be the subject of a landmark exhibition marking the 300th anniversary of the artist’s birth. The show will bring together 120 works in a once-in-a-generation tribute to this quintessentially Georgian artist. Reflecting the rich variety of his practice, it will explore the contrast between the glamourous society portraits that made his name and the creative chaos in which he worked behind the scenes.

The Tudors reigned over a period that saw the birth of modern Britain, and in turn, that of British painting. Tate’s first major presentation of Tudor art in 30 years, this exhibition will bring a fresh perspective to this profoundly transformative period. Over 150 exceptional oil paintings, miniatures, works on paper, sculptures and decorative art objects will be brought together, including iconic portraits of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.

Discover the relationship between John Bradby Blake (1745-1773), an English botanist who worked as a supercargo for the East India Company in the 1770s, his Chinese interlocutor Whang At Tong 黃遏東, and Mak Sau 麥秀, the botanical artist Bradby Blake commissioned to document plants native to Canton.

The exhibition will explore the exchange of botanical knowledge shared between Canton (now Guangzhou) and London between 1766-1773, displaying a collection of Chinese botanical art and research for the first time in Britain since it was commissioned 235 years ago.

Featuring 30 botanical paintings by the artist Mak Sau 麥秀 together with herbals, maps, models, a portrait of Whang At Tong 黃遏東 by Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), and watercolours and drawings of Canton from the V&A, Seeds of Exchange will tell the story of a little-known international botanical collaboration.

Created on the north Kent coast, where the painter had decamped to escape depression and the pressures of London, it is, in effect, a tribute to Maria and an acknowledgement of the grief that Christina and Dante share—Christina, by contrast, expressed her feelings in the poem An October Garden. As his younger brother William would write a decade later, the portrait had a positive effect: “The experiment turned out a complete success. [Dante] perceived at once that nothing but an effort of will was needed to enable him to continue working at his art.”

The portrait, one of only two solo portraits he created of his sister in later life, was recently acquired by the National Trust and forms part of “The Rossettis – Siblings and Spouses,” an exhibition at Wightwick Manor in Wolverhampton, a city in the English Midlands. Wightwick Manor was bestowed to the National Trust in 1937 by Rosalie and Geoffrey Mander, whose devotion to collecting Victorian art has made the property a significant place to see Pre-Raphaelite and Arts and Crafts work.

One of the most renowned groups in the Gulbenkian Museum’s collections is the splendid set of paintings by Francesco Guardi (1712-1793), the last great Venetian painter of views in the 18th century, acquired in the first twenty years of the 20th century. They include some of the most sublime works by the artist, who is famous for having begun painting views in middle age, after years spent experimenting with history and genre painting.

All dating from between 1770 and 1790, Guardi’s works in the Gulbenkian are outstanding examples of his style, with allusive brushstrokes and freely distorted proportions, creating views in which the structure of perspective appears elastic. Now far removed from Canaletto’s geometric certainties and camera obscura, Venice as portrayed by Francesco Guardi is made up of buildings eroded by light, rendered through tremulous brushwork, as if offering an inward image of Venice and its civilisation already in rapid decline. The subjects are those that the artist explored at various times, such as The Feast of the Ascension in St. Mark’s Square, the Regattas on the Grand Canal and the Departure of the Bucintoro.