''Mastering the Market: Dutch and Flemish Paintings from Woburn Abbey' (Barber Institute until September 24 2023)

Rembrandt van Rijn, An Old Man, possibly Boas, 1643, Woburn Abbey

The Barber Institute's Mastering the Market  has a snazzy alliterative title which pushes the right buttons with its oblique references to patriarchy and capitalism, but the reality is a small and fairly random selection of seventeenth century Dutch works. Woburn Abbey, currently closed for renovation has been loaning parts of its collection to provincial galleries. Worcester gained some of their Canalettos last year. Gainsborough’s House had a show featuring their landscapes in the spring, and anyone who had seen that might be slightly disappointed to revisit two of the paintings here. 

I’m quibbling. For a free exhibition, the Barber gives you a carefully curated and beautifully presented display (the gallery is always stylish). The little guidebook (also free) is well written, avoiding the wokery which some galleries feel obliged to peddle, and just about maintaining the tenuous thread of ‘the market’. It means the walls are left to the paintings, with only unobtrusive tombstone labels. And the best paintings here demand your full attention. There’s a Rembrandt portrait of a bearded old man (1643) peering out of the darkness, the eyes are unfocused, the skin sags with blemishes and sunken flesh. A gold chain glints around his neck, weighted with irony. Everyone knows Rembrandt is brilliant at old age, but the reality is still a wonder. The miracle of paint at once mirror smooth and fluidly loose, the subtlety of light which can illuminate a limited palette into myriad hues, the empathy that breathes humanity into inanimate materials. 

The same humanity throbs through the pulsating brushstrokes and rippling outlines of Van Dyck’s double portrait (c.1627-32). It’s an insidiously deceptive image of a couple who seem initially as bland as their drab puritan dress: dull, middle-aged marriage personified. Yet spend some time with them and the cracks begin to show. His expansive lean is less the comfortable swagger of a man at ease than a deliberate attempt to distance himself from his wife. The rose in her hand is less a symbol of love, than the crushed remains of past romance, a symbol of her own youthful freedom and subsequent constraint. And those faces, with their dimpled fleshiness and unhealthy bluish tints, and watery eyes which stare out with listless nostalgia. Van Dyck, so often reduced to the cavalier artist, here shows his consummate skill as an observer of humanity.

As so often the case with temporary exhibitions, the Barber's own works seemed freshened up by their new neighbours. In Ecce Homo, Van Dyck takes those micro-miseries to a different level. Christ is at once athletically idealised, all rippling muscles with abs to envy, and simultaneously a man already dead, with grey-blue shadows on his flesh and resignation in his reddened eyes. The single tear is almost superfluous. Initially invisible, a soldier leers behind mockingly draping him in a robe of honour. The gallery has put a lot of effort into reinterpreting a painting now seen as problematic, but Van Dyck’s decision to use a Black model seems justifiable on purely aesthetic grounds. The white toothed grin, relishing the suffering and representing the sound and fury of the unseen crowd, become as hideous focus as the black flesh recedes. #

The artist who misses out is Hals. His two portraits seem superficially flashy alongside the emotional depth of Rembrandt and Van Dyck; the dashed impasto a little too deliberate, the bravura strokes of the glove in his 1635-8 Man in a Hat, self-conscious and showy. But in a sense Hals is more in keeping with the savvy commercialism of the works on show. From  Tenier the Younger's 'spot the masterpiece'  view of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm’s Picture Gallery, to Steen's Twelfth Night or Van de Cappelle’s A Dutch Harbour, these are artists who knew exactly what the punters wanted and were masters at delivering it again and again.

The Barber is a fabulous little gallery, rather like Birmingham's answer to Dulwich. Both are small, slightly out of town (but not difficult to get to), elegantly designed; but whereas Dulwich has a 17th and 18th century focus, at the Barber you can see everything from late Medieval to early Modernism. At the moment, too, there is the bonus of Ford Madox Brown's Last of England, beautifully hung at the perfect level to lap up its glorious detail. I've visited both venues in the last week: Dulwich was humming, I had the Barber to myself. It's a huge shame and I'm not sure 'Mastering the Market' is enough of a lure to generate extra visitors. But go. You won't be disappointed.

St Francis at the National Gallery (until June 30 2023)

Sassetta, Wolf of Gubbio, the San Sepolcro Altarpiece c.1440s, National Gallery, London

The National Gallery's small free exhibitions are always worth a visit. Sometimes, only a room and a couple of works - as with the recent Ugly Duchess or the newly opened Crivelli's Garden. Sometimes more substantial, like Sin which has been slowly touring the UK since it was shown in London in 2020, and is currently on view in Bishop Auckland. St Francis is idiosyncratic and thoroughly enjoyable. It takes you from the thirteenth century through to the present day, from holy relics and manuscripts to comic books and film. And yes, you won't like everything, but you'll also find unexpected joys.

The curators make judicious use of the gallery's own holdings. Their two wonderful Zurbarans are familiar but given space to breathe here. Never has poverty been so richly and lovingly expressed. The Sassetta sequence, despite being displayed against an unsettling mustard wall-colouring, is full of beautifully-realised detail. In The Wolf of Gubbio, a notary holds his quill poised in mid-air between delicate fingers, balancing a scroll on crossed legs. His face is alive with inner intelligence, but still his eyes widen at the miraculous sight before him. 

The first rooms are all about detail. The floral carpet which surrounds the flames in Fra Angelico's Trial by Fire; the marginalia of an English manuscript; the radiating phrases of Richard Long's Walk. Then you get the bigger picture: Baroque bombast. Caravaggio's early St Francis in Ecstasy has been heavily promoted, but for me the stand-out here is a clear, crisp El Greco. Every sinew of the grey-clad figure is visibly, vibrantly straining towards the surrealist-blue sky above.

I am less keen on Gormley's stigmatised, hollow, tin man: if he only had a heart. Similarly unemotionally-engaging is the HD, technicolour Victoriana. Cadogan-Cowper's 1904 St Francis is no match for the full-blown Pre-Raphaelite angel perched uncomfortably in a tree, or the sun-kissed Italianate landscape beyond. Merson's Wolf of Gubbio is precision perfect down to the last crack in the walls, but for that is as cold as the wintery scene streets if portrays. It's a relief to come back down to earth with Spencer's riotous, big-bearded, be-slippered saint. 

The last room, for all its pop culture contemporary interest feels like a weak ending. And worse, the exhibition throws away Buttner's 2016 Beggars woodcuts which in their simple, emotional punch take you right back to the Zurbaran at the start. But for all that, it's a great show which turns a thirteenth century saint into a man for all time, with a message for today.