Born in the French colony of Guadeloupe, Guillaume Lethière (1760–1832) was a key figure in the history of art during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The son of a formerly enslaved woman of color and a white government official and plantation owner, Lethière moved to France with his father at age fourteen. He trained as an artist and successfully navigated the tumult of the French Revolution and its aftermath in order to achieve the highest levels of recognition in his time. A favorite artist of Napoleon’s brother, Lucien Bonaparte, Lethière also held important positions at the Académie de France in Rome, Institut de France , and École des Beaux-Arts. A well-respected teacher, he operated a robust studio that rivaled those of his contemporaries Jacques-Louis David and Antoine-Jean Gros.

Despite his remarkable accomplishments and considerable corpus of paintings and drawings, Lethière is relatively unknown today. Lavishly illustrated and authoritative, this groundbreaking study serves to introduce Lethière to new and broader audiences and restore him to his rightful place as one of the most eminent artist of his generation. An international group of scholars offer the first comprehensive view of Lethière’s extraordinary career in its political, social, and art historical context, addressing issues of colonialism, slavery, and diaspora, as well as shedding new light on the presence and reception of Caribbean artists in France during this time.

In the 17th century, frigid winters and unusually cool summers blanketed northern Europe in what became known as the Little Ice Age. Dutch artists depicted this persistent global cooling in scenes of daily activities like ice skating and fishing. Highlighting human vulnerability and resilience in the face of a changing climate, these works offer opportunities to reflect on our current environmental crises. This exhibition features works by Hendrick Avercamp and other Dutch artists of the 1600s.

Why did artists include prominent architectural settings in their narrative paintings? Why did they labour over specific, highly innovative structural solutions? Why did they endeavour to design original ornamental motifs which brought together sculptural, painterly and architectural approaches, as well as showcasing their understanding of materiality? Painting Architecture in Early Renaissance Italy addresses these questions in order to shed light on the early exchanges between artistic and architectural practice in Italy, arguing that architecture in painting provided a unique platform for architectural experimentation.

Rather than interpreting architectural settings as purely spatial devices and as lesser counterparts of their built cognates, this book emphasises their intrinsic value as designs as well as communicative tools, contending that the architectural imagination of artists was instrumental in redefining the status of architectural forms as a kind of cultural currency. Exploring the nexus between innovation and persuasion, Livia Lupi highlights an early form of little-discussed paragone between painting and architecture which relied on a shared understanding of architectural invention as a symbol of prestige.

The proposed PhD project, ’Experimental Approaches to Global Histories of Art and Architecture’, will uncover and historicise experimental approaches to the history of art and architecture, with the aim of exploring diverse epistemological viewpoints. We are interested in PhD projects on artists, architects, historians, critics, and curators who used alternative media to challenge the narratives and methodologies of the history of art and architecture. The PhD project could focus on objects and practices that take the form of artworks, buildings, more complex intermedia projects, or curatorial and pedagogical experiments. The experimental practices under study may have emerged at any point from the nineteenth century to today, anywhere in world. Methodologically, the project encourages PhD candidates to uncover unpublished and under-examined sources that can help us rethink existing disciplinary frameworks.

This year’s exhibition reveals how Turner captured environmental and social developments that would go on to change Britain and the world‘s climates forever. This will be the first exhibition dedicated to this subject. Highly attuned to changes in the landscape and atmosphere, Turner captured them in his ground-breaking paintings, drawings and engravings. Through his art, he documented plumes of smoke, burning furnaces, urban sprawl, deforested landscapes, overfishing and extreme weather. The exhibition will also seek to connect the changes that Turner was observing and capturing in beautiful works of art, with changes to the environment that we are currently seeing.

This new role will further develop BMT's already exceptional learning offer to embed lifelong learning into BMT's practice whilst supporting the organisation to develop its emerging research practice.

This role will be the strategic lead of lifelong learning across BMT, delivering the Lifelong Learning Strategy. This includes strategic leadership of the formal learning program across BMT. The role will support the Learning Manager and Learning Officers with program design and liaise with Primary, Higher and Further Education providers in the city and region to deliver strategic aims for equitable access to heritage education.

The exhibition includes a study for Rembrandt’s first masterpiece; Greuze’s virtuoso depiction of a young cook made for his friend Jean-Georges Wille; Delacroix’s intimate portrait of Jenny, his confidante and caretaker; and a striking watercolor landscape by Cézanne. Also in the gift are significant sheets by major artists such as Rubens, Guercino, Jordaens, Watteau, Géricault, Constable, Degas, Renoir, Seurat, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Rodin, Vuillard, Bonnard, and Gris, including many rarely seen drawings. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

The Royal Castle in Warsaw has added several hundred new works of art to its collection in the past few years, including paintings, drawings, engravings, furniture, porcelain, items of silver and also militaria. Among the acquired objects were over 60 paintings dating from the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries, executed by representatives of important European art centres, as well as Polish and contemporary artists active in Poland. The acquisition of paintings is conducted strictly in compliance with the most significant tenets of the Royal Castle's approved activities, which include gathering historically significant items, putting on temporary and permanent exhibitions, and making its collections accessible to the public for scientific and educational purposes.

The eleven paintings on display in this exhibition span a wide range of genres, periods, themes and origins, including the Quattrocentro of Florence, the trend in Baroque painting initiated by Caravaggio's students and continuators, the animal portraits of the Dutch Golden Age, Venetian vedute, the Renaissance works of Piedmont and Venice, the portrait painting of the Enlightenment, and the Classicist depiction of ancient history.

One of the main goals of this unique series is to understand the complex and multi-layered interaction between women and the evolution of a major national museum. It will include new studies focused on female artists’ production and their presence or absence in museum rooms. But it will go beyond these established topics to examine the link between the formation of the collections of the Prado Museum and women patrons. It will also commission work on women who inspired and received works of art that were incorporated into the collections, not forgetting the contribution of women in technical and ancillary roles. The broad chronology will enable us to trace and reflect the changing role of women and their relationship with the arts, as well as the evolution of a major Western cultural institution and its dependence on women.

Presenting a more expansive and inclusive history of sculpture, Great Women Sculptors surveys the work of more than 300 trailblazing artists from over 60 countries, spanning 500 years from the Renaissance to the present day.

Organized alphabetically, each artist is represented by an image and newly commissioned text. This wide-ranging survey champions the best-known women sculptors from art history alongside today’s rising stars. From more recognizable names such as Camille Claudel, Gego, Barbara Hepworth, and Yayoi Kusama to some of today’s most significant contemporary artists including Huma Bhaba, Mona Hatoum, and Simone Leigh, this book showcases 500 years of sculptural creativity in one accessible, visually stunning volume.

Redisplaying a room that is dedicated to pre-1600 works heavy on Christian iconography takes some thinking when your aim is to make it accessible to the residents of Birmingham, one of the most ethnically diverse communities in Britain. ‘The walkthrough is a Western European narrative, with many gaps and problems,’ Powell tells me as we amble through the galleries ahead of the reopening. ‘For a long time the Barber’s collecting was done in a purist “connoisseurial” way. The fact that there seems to be one single lens here is quite problematic – and the way it presents the idea of “masterpieces”, with that very male sense.’

At the Barber, that very male sense can be hard to escape. Only four of the paintings in a 152-strong collection are by women. The first of these to have been acquired remains by some distance the most memorable: a startlingly direct portrait of the Countess Golovina, all smiling candour, by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1797/1800). It was purchased by Hamish Miles, the Institute’s third director, in 1980.Works on paper aside, the three successive women directors have not acquired many more pieces by women between them. Kalinsky made some headway here – one of the last works she purchased was Maria Tassaert’s Still Life with a Garland of Fruit (c. 1660s), with its rutilant cherries and luminous grapes – but Powell sees lifting that torch as a key part of her mission. ‘We need to go further,’ she says, a note of urgency in her voice. ‘We have to move that forward.’