'The Life of the Fields' (St Barbe Museum and Art Gallery, Lymington, until January 10 2026)

Eric Ravilious, The Downs in Winter, 1935, Towner, Eastbourne

St Barbe's The Life of the Fields is part social history, part call for action , all wrapped up in a broad survey of agricultural landscape art over the last hundred years. One of the main problems which has to deal with is that we inevitably view rural images as, at best, nostalgic and, at worse, twee. So, on the surface this looks like a show dedicated to safe, old-fashioned images which have more in common with the nineteenth than the twentieth or twenty-first centuries. The intention is a history of the visual representation of agricultural since the First World War which tackles questions of changing farming practices and changing attitudes to the countryside. The curators are determined to make you look behind the cliches and the prejudices and see these images as both authentic and important. I am not sure it entirely succeeds in its intention, but it is varied, wide-ranging and very satisfying show.

The exhibition sets out its stall as social commentary with divisions into sections like farming practices and rural architecture, and ends with a group of contemporary works which represent farming today. It takes a deliberately wide definition of visual culture to incorporate Charles Tunnicliffe's Ladybird book illustrations and propaganda posters like Frank Newbould's Your Britain, Fight for it Now, as well as significant numbers of printworks from Clare Leighton's wood engraving January to John Nash's humorous lithograph Harvesting, produced as part of the School Prints initiative. There is a good balance of familiar and less familiar names: George Clausen and Lauren Knight sit alongside James Bateman and Thomas Hennell - certainly new to me. Equally, because this is thematically curated there is a huge range of juxtaposed styles. John Arnesby Brown's Millet-influenced Spring has Romanticism in its lowering sky; Eric Ravilious transforms the Downs in Winter with a undulating fluidity in which the roller looks almost like a ship adrift at sea; Frances Hodgkins imbues the Broken Tractor with organic surrealism; Julian Opie reduces fields to minimalist linearity.

John Arnesby Brown, Spring, Southampton City Art Gallery 

The exhibition is very good at contextualising these disparate representations, both in history and in personal experience. Some of the producers were themselves from a rural background, others found themselves in the countryside by chance - Ethelbert White was sent to work on the land in Devon as a conscientious objector - and for many more it was a place of retreat. Harry Epworth Allen was a World War One amputee who travelled round by bus; Kechie Tennent and her husband, who had been imprisoned as a 'conchie', retreated to rural Norfolk after his release; Stanley Anderson moved out of London to escape the Blitz. The importance of agricultural production during both world wars gets good coverage. St Barbe can claim to have pioneered the rediscovery of Evelyn Dunbar with their 2006 exhibition and she is represented here with A Land Girl and the Bail Bull. Randolph Schwabe shows the Land Army working alongside German PoWs; Edward Burra has soldiers bringing in the harvest. Equally, the wartime drive for productivity can be seen in the increased presence of mechanisation in post-War works like Norman Neasom's Woolas Hall.

The great irony of the exhibition is that all these works are painted at a time which postdates the golden age of agriculture and the great population shift from country to town. They are all intrinsically nostalgic even when purporting to be factual observation, and in their determination to be unsentimental there is I think an under-acknowledgement of this on the part of the curators. The long legacy of landscape painting underpins much of the work here, sometimes overtly, as in Robin Tanner's debt to Samuel Palmer, often obliquely. The huge sky with its churning clouds and Jesus-rayed sun in James Lynch's The Last of the Harvest, Mere Down is evocatively elegiac, and not just because it tops industrialised rectilinear fields. The lone figure in Tennant's Ploughing bent effortfully into his work at the same angle as the tree behind, is a figure from Hardy or Clare, or even a Medieval Book of Hours.

I suspect for many visitors, the factual, socio-historical context will be an appealing and instructive way into the art, so I am not going to moan too much. This is a thoroughly-researched and endlessly interesting survey (there is also an accompanying catalogue). It will introduce you to artists, stir memories, evoke emotions and stimulate you to make connections. The time and effort spent by the curators should not be underestimated. Once again, a 'provincial' museum has put on an exhibition which everyone deserves the chance to see. 

'Gothic Modern: Munch, Beckmann, Kollwitz' (Albertina Museum, Vienna until January 11 2026)

Arnold Böcklin, Self-portrait with Death as a Fiddler, 1872, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin

I'm not sure why the Albertina's iteration of Gothic Modern has decided to highlight three big names: previously in the Scandinavian versions of the show, the more evocative, and optimistic, descriptor was 'From Darkness to Light.' There are indeed wonderful works by Munch, Beckmann and Kollwitz but ultimately this is a thematic, multi-artist exhibition where the ideas and the connections between works and across time are more important than individual names. On the surface Gothic Modern sounds like a crowd-pleasing attempt to attract a younger audience, something reinforced by the prominence of Van Gogh's Skeleton With Burning Cigarette in the publicity. In reality, the curators present a complex narrative which encompasas both Gothic (Medieval and Early Renaissance) art and architecture, and the popular death and angst interpretation of the term whilst also, more interestingly, exploring the assumption than 'modern' necessarily means forward-looking and new. Maybe there is just too much in the mix, but this is a beautifully presented show, full of an eclectic selection of interesting art. You can argue that not everything here is gothic or modern, but everything is worth looking at.

Gothic is of course a moveable feast of a word. We can all conjure up an image of soaring, spired architecture, and many people will think of flattened figures and complex colourful patterns. In this form it is art about God rather than the devil, and there are, perhaps incongruously, Edward Burne Jones' Adoration of the Magi and Marianne Stokes' Madonna as well as a wall of stained glass light boxes, included here. The Medieval world also had its share of the (sometimes humorously) grotesque and the gruesome, think Bosch, doom paintings, misericords and gargoyles, and it is in this context that Van Gogh's Skeleton is presented. This more historical definition, has, however, since the early nineteenth century been overshadowed by the eerie, amorphous weirdness of gothic literature - graveyards and vampires, sex and death. Deep purple and red walls set the tone: a group of three archetypal Munchs (Vampire, Eye in Eye and Ashes) arguably anchor the whole show. 

The vast vagueness of the term gothic brings its own problems.Many of the so-called gothic obsessions on display are simply human nature, visible throughout time and across art forms. Fear of mortality, of the unknown; an association of darkness with evil; sin, temptation and the devil. Images of Adam and Eve are not inherently gothic, nor are attempts to personify death. Is Holbein's Dead Christ, for all it's exaggerated emaciation, intrinsically any more gothic than Mantegna's highly foreshortened version? In juxtaposing the Medieval and the modern, the exhibition by-passes Romanticism, another fin de siecle phenomenon which shared many of the concerns and neuroses of the 1900 generation - war, modernity, introspection. 

Hugo Simberg The Wounded Angel, 1903, Ateneum Art Museum Museum, Helsinki

Despite these issues, the fundamental argument, that modernism was not simply a forward- looking rejection of the past, is compellingly presented. Kollwitz, in two and three dimensions, joins a Medieval pieta in a triptych of desperate, distorting love; Durer and Beckmann both take us to cacophonous women's baths; Schiele images himself as St Sebastian. By the time you get to Kirchner's Rhine Bridge, the picture seems less an Expressionist dystopia of alienating, distorted space and more as if the modern structure is an organic extension of the cathedral behind. Set against light blue walls and opposite Munch's euphoric sunrise it creates an optimistic end after all the gloom. Throughout, the curators have created a series of beautiful groupings and sightlines which bring out the best in the art. Munch and Stokes' Madonnas, polar opposites which nevertheless share a tilt of the head and a weighty pathos. A whole series of attenuated, horizontal male nudes which resonate with the dead Christ. There are enough moments of gothic absurdity for the purist: Hans Baldung's Three Ages and Alfred Bocklin's self portrait complete with leering skeleton. But it is a, sometimes terrible, beauty which really triumphs here.

Gothic Modern is a big exhibition with a big idea which is carried through with commitment and style. It wears its scholarship lightly, and presents a dazzling array of works on paper, sculpture and decorative art alongside the paintings. There is a decidedly Nordic and Germanic focus and as such, for this viewer, the added benefit of introducing new artists: Hugo Simberg, his symbolist Wounded Angel carried by two very earthly and resentful boys; Joseph Alanen giving Disease and Death a Art Nouveau elegance. With my partisan hat on, I feel Britain deserves a bigger role. Juliet Simpson is a co-curator and the later Pre-Raphaelites get a walk-on role, but what a fabulous show we could have had at a UK venue. For anyone lucky enough to be in Vienna before January, Gothic Modern should not be missed. 

'Myth and Reality: Military Art in the Age of Victoria' (National Army Museum until Nov 1 2026): More Myth Than Reality

Elizabeth Thompson, Lady Butler,  'Dawn of Waterloo'. The 'Reveille' in the bivouac of the Scots Greys on the morning of the battle, 1815 1895, National Army Museum

Victorian military art can be the stuff of cliche: the Thin Red Line, the Charge of the Light Brigade. It is, in reality, varied and complex, from the first photographs of war and on the spot battlefield sketches to mass marketed prints, stock portraits and nostalgic forays into past glories. It also has a surprising superstar in the form of Elizabeth Thompson, Lady Butler, whose representations of conflicts past and present were blockbusting crowd-pleasers in their day. The National Army Museum tries to convey all this is a compact exhibition, hampered slightly by their Victoriana styling. In trying to do too much, they end up scratching the surface itch without really exploring either the myth or the reality, but they do make you want to know more.

The first section of the exhibition is devoted, supposedly to women in general, but largely to Thompson in particular. Sadly, some of her most famous works are represented only in print reproduction (a testament perhaps to her pulling power which makes other institutions now reluctant to lend). The NAM have pulled off the coup of getting Roll Call from the Royal Collection - maybe the King is not fond of it, having also parted with the painting for last year's Now You See Us exhibition at Tate Britain. Thompson's works that are here, are variable. The Defence of Rorke's Drift is as preposterously stagey as a 1970s film poster, luridly coloured and overloaded with emotive details. In contrast, Patient Heroes, showing a team of artillery horses literally on their last legs, has the observational attention to detail and the emotional pull which is so potently displayed in Roll Call, and an empathy which reminds one of Lucy Kemp-Welch.

Thompson's sketch books and a preparatory works like the study of a Wounded Guardsman attest to her determination to get things right but the works on show also highlight one of the problems with the exhibition as a whole. She was as comfortable producing the Dawn of Waterloo, an eerie and counterintuitively ominous scene, as she was illustrating contemporary conflicts like the Battle of Tel-el-Kebir, in which he husband was directly involved. The same was true of other military specialists like Thomas Jones Barker who went straight from Napoleonic scenes to the Crimea. Myth and reality become increasingly difficult to separate when past and present collide so easily and this concertina-ing of time muddies the exhibition, making it difficult to get a handle not just on the chronology, but on the ways in which Victorian representations of war changed. There is a lot of ground to cover between Barker's picturesque Wellington at Sorauren and Georges Bertin Scott's Buller's Final Crossing of the Tugela with its bright, impressionistic palette.

John Dalbiac Luard, A Welcome Arrival, c.1855, National Army Museum

Another major focus of the show is the Crimean War, the first conflict to be photographed - by Roger Fenton in his mobile dark room - and the first to be marketised as art. Fenton's trip was actually sponsored by the art dealer, Agnews', who put on an exhibition of his photographs in Pall Mall and the firm also had a contract with Barker whose huge panoramas were mass reproduced in print form, complete with labeled keys to the figures. At the same time Jerry Barrett was portraying Florence Nightingale at Scutari with an eye to the print market and William Simpson was producing battlefield scenes to be reproduced as lithographs for Colnaghi. Alongside all this John Dalbiac Luard's A Welcome Arrival injects a personal narrative, albeit one reserved for the officer classes with their cosy hut and parcels from home. Luard, a former soldier, was visiting his brother serving in the Crimea and records witnessing the scene, yet his work reads like carefully constructed propaganda, especially given press criticism of poor equipment and accomodation in the early stages of the war. Myth and Reality are hard to disentangle 

Much of the rest of the exhibition is taken up with what might be called second-rate art, and it is too easy to dismiss with a cursory glance paintings which ultimately tell a powerful story. Louis Desanges' representations of Victoria Cross recipients are a best laughable and at worst deeply problematic, yet the strength of narrative they contain is incontestable. Many of the portraits derive their strength not from artistic prowess, but from biography, from Emily Ormsby's careful tribute to her father which he may never have lived to see, to the portrait of Frederick Roberts which hangs alongside the telegram announcing his death and a photograph showing the painting in the family home.  Vereker Hamilton was a noted military artist, but his swagger portrait of his brother, stalwartly facing toward the light with the slash of red from the cape over his shoulder, has the added strength of fraternal affection, and more than a nod to Sargent and Whistler.

The National Army Museum has always made good use of its art collection in its permanent mixed displays, and it is worth visiting these to augment your appreciation of Myth and Reality, for instance, comparing Charles Fripp's Battle of Insandlwana with Thompson's Rourke's Drift. Ultimately, however, this adds to the bittiness, a sense that you are not really getting a full story. An exhibition of Thompson's work; a show about representations of the Crimean War or the long shadow cast by Waterloo; or a focus on the impact of war on those left behind, touched on here by Henry O'Neill's Home Again, these would all be strong themes in their own right. The reality is that Victoria reigned for a long time and most visitors' knowledge of British military campaigns of the period is likely to be sketchy - we need more space and more information. Perhaps in these circumstances, it is inevitable that myth wins out, but perhaps that is the reality of war art. The success of this exhibition is that I left wanting to find out more. 

 

'Kiefer / Van Gogh' (Royal Academy until October 26 2025): Sometimes you don't have to shout

Vincent van Gogh, Snow Covered Field with Harrow, 1890, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

There is no doubting the sincerity of Anselm Kiefer's enthusiasm for Vincent van Gogh: the small exhibition hand-out traces his 'pilgrimage' to Arles as a young man through diary entries. Somehow, though, this genuine respect, affection, perhaps even hero-worship doesn't really resonate through the Royal Academy's Kiefer / Van Gogh. Partly, this is a problem with curation. Three rooms, especially when you are exhibiting works as big as Kiefer's, is not a great deal of space, and this is a truncated iteration of a much larger presentation shown across two venues in Amsterdam earlier this year. Equally, the curators seem surprisingly reluctant to offer the works in dialogue, so van Gogh's Piles of French Novels is not shown in the same space as Kiefer's Danaë in which an elongated sunflower sheds golden seeds on a pile of crumpled books. Similarly, a line of Kiefer's drawings which so clearly speak to van Gogh's Arles quill and ink sketches are shown next to much earlier examples of the Dutchman's draughtsmanship. Was there a failure of nerve, as if the two artists might appear too close, as if Kiefer might be reduced to a mere copyist?

The problem is not just curatorial. The canvases Kiefer shows hover between brilliance and  kitsch. Nevermore slathers reference on reference, with the same abandon that the artist applies his mixed media: Edgar Allen Poe, Gauguin, Hitchcock, van Gogh, even, as my companion wickedly suggested, Brian Blessed's birdmen in Flash Gordon. The tarry flock of vampiric black shadows feels like overkill, not just unnecessary but self-destructive. In the same room Hortus Conclusus carries echoes of the woodcuts which were recently on show in the Ashmolean, messily complex, layered and inconclusive but nevertheless retaining subtlety. Under the Lime Tree on the Heather presents a rococo respite, floral and delicate, lyrical and evocative. Poetry is never far from Kiefer's art, sometimes even physically present as text, but he is often at his best when it is spoken softly.

The dilemma of the exhibition is summed up by the two most heavily influenced van Gogh pieces, The Crows and The Starry Night. The former takes the viewer into the wheatfield, through projecting stalks and perspectivally exaggerated path. The scale is such that you feel you could literally walk in, like an illusionistic painted backcloth in the Wizard of Oz, and, like that, simultaneously hyper-real and otherworldly. The sky glitters with flaking gold like a distressed altarpiece as the canon crumbles. Crows hover through the gilded mist like dark clouds. This is full-on Kiefer overload, but it works. In contrast, The Starry Night tips over the brink, the over-familiar swirls have none of the anxious brushstrokes which animate the original, and instead rely, rather like an immersive extravaganza, on shock and awe scale. Sometimes more is just too much.

Anselm Kiefer, The Crows (Die Krähen), 2019. Emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, straw and clay on canvas, 280 x 760 cm. Courtesy of the artist and White Cube. Photo: Georges Poncet. © Anselm Kiefer

Pummelled by the weight of these huge creations, van Gogh seems to barely be given a chance to speak. In comparison with the National Gallery's wonderful Poets and Lovers exhibition, the paintings here seem ill-chosen (or hardly chosen at all). The exception is Snow Covered Field with Harrow, one of the many Millet-inspired landscapes which van Gogh produced in St Remy. Here the thread of inspiration leads back another generation, the same furrows and high horizon and bleakness which are visible in Kiefer's Last Load, yet with each iteration life, hope and a future spring seems to recede further until the sky is reduced to a slice of black and agricultural land becomes an apocalyptic morass. At his best, Kiefer can leave you devastated, hollowed out in the face of such physical, literal rawness and this is Kiefer at his best.

In the end, though, this uneven, unsatisfying exhibition fails to do either artist real justice. The draw of van Gogh for Kiefer is hinted at rather than fully explained and you are left wondering if the young enthusiast is really still present in these big showstoppers, or if the older artist is grasping at long lost straws. Because the image that lingers is not grandiose and declamatory but comes with the quiet creak of old leather: van Gogh's Shoes on their eighteen-inch, near monochrome canvas. Sometimes you don't have to go big to hit home. 

'Radical Harmony. Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists' (National Gallery until February 8, 2026): Dot the Eyes

 

Georges Seurat, Le Chahut, 1889–1890, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands.

The title of the National Gallery's new exhibition, with its overt reference to the Kröller-Müller collection gives a misleading sense that the curators have shipped in an almost ready-made show. The Kröller-Müller has the best Neo-Impressionist collection in the world, as well as an extensive selection of van Goghs which barely get a look in here, but the curators have gone out of their way to source beyond Otterlo, to plug gaps and tell new stories, notably that of Anna Boch. The result is a pretty comprehensive survey of core Neo-Impressionism, although the exhibition's stated aim, to underline the radical politics of the movement, is perhaps less successfully achieved. 

The work of Georges Seurat (1859–1891) and Paul Signac (1863–1935) is often labeled as Pointillism, a dismissive term coined by critics who thought they had reduced painting to a series of dots. The artists themselves preferred the term Divisionism or Neo-Impressionism to describe their new, more scientific approach to Impressionist subjects, which centred on the colour theories of Michel Eugène Chevreul. The Impressionists had exploited his ideas of complementary colours, but the Neo-Impressionists wanted to do so more rigorously, using small, regular dots and making the viewer’s eye do the work of mixing and contrasting the pure colours. 

The opening room of the Radical Harmony sets this context and gently acclimatises visitors to Neo-Impressionism with a series of landscapes and seascapes. There are obvious links back to Impressionist subjects and locations but the paintings themselves deliberately avoid the immediacy and naturalism of the earlier works. This is partly an inevitable result of the Pointillist technique which creates a structure and rigidity, and close-up gives an element of abstraction to the picture surface. Flags do not flutter in the breeze; waves seem frozen; time stands still. However, the artists also make compositional choices. Seurat deliberately emphasized that these are constructed images with his inclusion of painted borders. Signac numbered his works like musical compositions. Both focused on flattened geometry, strong lines, and angles which accentuate the two-dimensionality of the picture plane and sometimes create almost surrealist oddness. Signac's Portrieux, the Lighthouse, Opus 183, reimagines the central structure as a baton wielding bandmaster on a harbour stage. 

Alongside this, the exhibition introduces Helene Kröller-Müller, the German-born collector whose works form the basis of Radical Harmony. The daughter of a wealthy industrialist, who married a Dutch entrepreneur, Kröller-Müller became one of the richest women in the Netherlands and used her huge spending power to become a pioneering female collector. She increasingly bought directly from the artists she admired, and eventually amassed over 12,000 items including furniture and ceramics, as well as paintings. All of this sits slightly uneasily alongside the curators’ central argument that these painters were political as well as artistic radicals. There seems more than a little irony in the fact that Maximilien Luce's The Foundry hung for many years in the offices of the Kröller-Müller's iron ore business. 

Yes, many of these artists had anarchist friends and sympathies, but plenty of people did in the last years of the nineteenth century. It is a lot harder to see any such ideas carried through to their art, whether in Signac's sketch for In the Time of Harmony which could just as easily show a family picnic as a bucolic pre-industrial idyll, or in restrictive interiors, which seem more like a bridge between Caillebotte's uptight bourgeoisie and the Nabis rather than a call to arms. Jan Toorop‘s (1858–1928) Morning (After the Strike)  and Evening (Before the Strike) are an exception, forming melodramatic contrast where the beauty of the colours seems strangely at odds with the subject matter.  In fact, these so-called radicals were often surprisingly reluctant to actually show urban workers: their cityscapes and port scenes are more often almost devoid of figures.  Many seemed to retreat to the countryside. The sole example of Van Gogh’s work, The Sower, is a timeless, almost Biblical subject with a deeply symbolic sun radiating across the sky. Anna Boch‘s (1848–1936) During the Elevation is a conservative religious scene of an overflowing church and traditionally dressed congregation.

Anna Boch, During the Elevation, 1892, Stadsmuseum Oostende, Ostend, Belgium.

The next sections are dominated by a series of very middle-class portraits and scenes of domesticity: well-dressed figures in well-furnished rooms. Théo van Rysselberghe‘s (1862–1926) In July, Before Noon is Impressionism in all but name, with its snapshot-like composition of leisured ladies, sunlight dappled like Renoiresque powder puffs on their dresses. In contrast, Toorop, who emerges as the real start of the show, gives his Portrait of Marie Jeannette de Lange a combination of delicate naturalism in his representation of the sitter and a background so packed with objects and pattern that it becomes a Symbolist representation of her character. His use of a restricted tonal range and heavily impastoed dots creates an almost sequin-like effect as the paint catches the light. 

Strutting through these and given top billing against a dramatic, deep purple wall, although it hardly needs such theatrics, is Seurat's La Chahut, not seen in the UK since the 1950s. Seurat’s monumental can-can dancers high-kicking with fixed smiles and watched by leering figures, as the orchestra plays, rejig the compositional tricks of Degas and  Toulouse-Lautrec. Now we are not part of the mayhem but, like the performers themselves, alienated and detached, frozen in an unreality of sleazy sepia. Life is a cabaret, but it doesn’t look much fun.

Increasingly Chevreul's complementary colour contrasts are rejected in favour of tonal uniformity. Rysselberghe’s Coastal Scene  is a study in blue, and van de Velde’s  Twilight  is dominated by violet hues. The curators choose to end the exhibition with a series of landscapes which emphasize this sense of peaceful harmony, although works like Johan Thorn Prikker’s (1886–1932)  Basse Hermalle, Sun at Noon  hint at the possibility of something more radical. His sparse pastel dashes, which hark back to van Gogh’s brushwork, create a simplified, flattened abstraction in which the landscape seems almost incidental.  This is the point at this the exhibition could look forward, joining the dots between these artists and Henri Matisse (who gets only a mention), Piet Mondrian or other groups like the Italian Futurists who used pointillism. That it doesn't feels like a missed opportunity. 

Ultimately, then, there is less “radical” and more “harmony,” but that is no bad thing. This is a Zen-like exhibition which encourages you to take your time, breathe deeply, and appreciate the deceptive complexity and inherent beauty of the works. Neo Impressionism can often be represented as scientifically cold and dull, here is it inventive, lyrical and genuinely enthralling. 

This is a version of the review published in DailyArt Magazine

'Millet, Life on the Land' (National Gallery until October 19 2025)

Jean-François Millet, The Wood Sawyers, c.1851, Victoria and Albert Museum, London

It has been a very long time since the last exhibition dedicated to Jean-François Millet and I suppose that is reason enough to welcome the National Gallery’s Life on the Land. The current show is, however, a meagre affair, built around the admittedly substantial coup of the Angelus loaned from the Musée d'Orsay, but without depth or substance. One room and a handful of works does not lend itself to a successful survey of a prolific artist who had a thirty year career. Equally, Life on the Land is simply too broad a title and ambition. A better show would have been more focused, perhaps on the central theme of the Angelus - faith - or, even more conducive to a contemporary audience, Millet's clear gendering. One can see that the curators wanted to include the National's own Winnower but they miss the opportunity afforded by the available works to construct an interesting narrative around action and stillness. As it is, a disparate selection of seemingly random pieces (anything they National could acquire from British museums) are not given enough cohesion and simply left this viewer wanting more.

Millet is unfashionable and problematic for 21st century tastes, hardly surprising when one considers that even his contemporaries didn’t really know what to make of him. One time posterboy of the 1848 radicals: the Winnower was bought by member of the short-lived Republican government, he became the darling of conservatives who saw his religious, stoic peasantry as the reliable backbone of France. A victim of his own mythologising, he was labelled the 'peasant painter' by his first biographer, Alfred Sensier: the Normandy lad who made good in Paris but never really left the land. Ever since, writers have felt compelled to debunk that version: Millet was aloof from his Barbizon neighbours, he read Virgil, he didn’t attend church, even to marry. Whatever the unknowable truth, he represented the rural poor with a commitment, clarity and earnestness which no other 19th century French artist could match. He had none of Courbet's in-your-face stridency nor, even in his milkmaids and goose girls, the saccharine academicism of Jules Breton. Only Jules Bastien Lepage comes close, imbuing his chunkily awkward figures with a pallid clarity which does little to disguise his debt to the older artist.

Jean-François Millet, The Angelus, 1857-9, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Arguably Millet carried on resolutely doing the same thing whilst the world shifted and French politics whirled around him. In that sense he was a painters' painter, beloved by Vincent Van Gogh, Georges Seurat and Camille Pissarro, and all the politicised readings miss the point. Millet's canvases are like a rich winter stew, complex and layered, warmly satisfying even when composed of the most mundane ingredients. They are hearty in a literal sense, creating a meaningful connection across time and space with figures who are not only beyond our experience, but, largely featureless and introverted, defiant in their disconnection from us. In the absence of detail, of expression, of eye contact, he achieves an emotional bridge though brushwork and colour. You are in the barn with the Winnower , dust catching in your throat, feeling the effort in his back, the scratch of the straw in his sabots, the subtle power of a grip which can flick up the basket with practiced precision. In the same way you can hear the Angelus bell, perhaps with the impatience some have read into the man's twirling of his cap, perhaps ominously -  Dali imagined a grave in the foreground - perhaps elegiacally with the sunset. 

What the exhibition does provide are examples of Millet's drawings, energised, vigorous and gestural in their determination to capture the reality of pose and movement. There is much speculation about whether these were done on location, or from posed studio models: I suspect a combination of the two. It seems of little consequence when the intention is so clear. Millet laboured to represent labour because it mattered, a case of basic survival for women bent double with the burden of scraggly twigs which one imagines would burn within moments, for girls old beyond their years charged with watching geese or sheep, for landless men earning a pittance or a couple grateful for their scrap of earth. He had been there and the reality of what he saw in Barbizon was so overlaid with Millet's own memories of childhood that the paint soaked up his empathy and understanding. In that sense I find him akin to Constable, another artist whose deep affinity with the agricultural countryside is misunderstood today.

The National Gallery exhibition might be a missed opportunity (it is for instance far less successful than their similarly sized show about the Haywain) but it reminds us why Millet was so popular and why he remains so compelling. It’s not about politics or religion; it’s not, as Jonathan Jones writing in the Guardian seems to think, about sex. It's not about realism either. Millet was an old romantic. It’s all about love. Love of the land and love of his materials. Stand close and relish the gnarly brushwork and the writhing lines and the unctuous, oozing colour. One room is as paltry as the stoney ground Millet so often portrays but even here you can glean so much.

'The Edwardians: Age of Elegance' (King's Picture Gallery until November 23 2025): All that Glitters

Frederic Leighton, Nanna (Pavonia), 1859, Royal Collection Trust

Last year the Royal Collection Trust gave us the Georgians, this year, the Edwardians, a rather more amorphous title which encompasses a significant amount of Victoria's reign (from the Prince of Wales' marriage in 1863) and slides well beyond Edward VII's death to a finishing point after the end of the First World War. It is definitely a show to please the summer tourists, with an eclectic mix of gifts, jewellery and costume alongside fine art and photography. The emphasis is on objects and their stories, rather than fine art, and the quality of some of the paintings might be called into question - Laurits Tuxen particularly is over-represented and under-performs.  However, with a busy display which makes the most of the space available, plenty of anecdotes and a free audio guide, there is always something to interest, even as you find yourself deploring the extravagance.

The curators make little effort to counterbalance all the glitter. History is a passing annoyance and the dynastic complexities of the British royal family are never really explained. There are multiple, multi-figured canvases where a guide to the characters involved would have been helpful; even a basic family tree. A scene-setting drawing room gathering contains the figure of Albert Victor, mentioned without explanation in the caption, yet surely only the most ardent royalist would know him to be Edward VII's eldest son, soon to die of pneumonia. In a small, sunny image of 1911, George V and the Kaiser take the salute together at the opening of the Victoria Memorial - a poignant enough image given that three years later they would be opposing sides, but specifically why Wilhelm is there is not discussed. Empire and international relations are passing excuses for presentation gifts rather than the subject of interrogation. You long for surfaces to be scratched.

Edward himself remains a mystery: his gambling and womanising are simply ignored apart from the most oblique of asides: images of favorite race horses and his collection of photographs of actresses and singers, displayed as one side of a folding screen, well away from the generals and politicians. A man who could not even be bothered to stand for his coronation portrait by Luke Fildes, he preferred suits to military uniform and enjoyed fancy dress. In the most extraordinary image, Jules Bastien Lepage, better known as a portrayer of peasant poverty, shows him as Renaissance ruler in front of a tapestry-like Thames. 

Laurits Tuxen, The Family of Queen Victoria in 1887, 1887, Royal Collection Trust

Alexandra seems to become more elongated with each passing year, famous for her tiny waist and swan-like neck, a succession of flashy society portraitists fail to reveal more. She becomes more rounded through her possessions, a love - perhaps homesickness - for her Danish homeland which does not seem to fade and her genuine enthusiasm for photography. If Edward and Alexandra are sketchy, George V barely gets a walk-on part. A small John Lavery study for his 1913 group portrait of the royal family is labelled to suggest that dullness, duty and an impending sense of doom had already overtaken the king. Equally, one might argue, it was Lavery's preferred palette. The intriguing figure here, and intermittently throughout is that of the future Edward VIII, delicately blonde and boyish. In a Sargent drawing from 1920, he seems unnaturally young - a twenty-six year old schoolboy who has served in a war.  

Amongst the royal watching, the tea-sets and dinner services, the silverware and exotic gifts, you can overlook the art. Some pieces are old friends: Alfred Gilbert's Icarus, a sleekly sensuous reinterpretation of Donatello's David weighed down by his wings; three beautiful, individually distinctive Burne-Jones drawings; a small, slice of Mediterranean blue from Alma-Tadema. Gustave Doré's Wood Nymph, luminous amid dense, dark, greenery, is a surprise for those more familiar with his graphic work. Leighton was clearly a royal favourite: his Nanna (Pavonia) has a sultry sensuality despite the artist's usual impassive surface. Edward chose Nanna; in contrast, Guthrie's tiny, smudged and almost sky-less landscape was a gift, and one suspects an under-appreciated one. 

Ultimately there is little substance to the Edwardians. It is all surface and show. Even the downbeat, final room, with its sombre march past the newly unveiled cenotaph, does little to tarnish the glitter. The Edwardian era is often misrepresented as a long elegiac summer; here it is a brash, flash party. The original glitterati. You might be impressed, but it is difficult to feel anything but emptiness.