'Dame Laura Knight - I Paint Today' (Worcester City art Gallery and Museum until June 30 2024): Just Scratching the Surface

Laura Knight Sundown, 1940-47, Wolverhampton Art Gallery, © the estate of Dame Laura Knight, DBE, RA / Bridgeman Images. Photo credit: Wolverhampton Arts and Heritage

It is impossible to do justice to a career as long and prolific as Laura Knight's in two very small rooms, and you can leave Worcester Art Gallery's  I Paint Today feeling disappointed by the absences. There is very little of her early work: the soft shadows of a Staithes interior leaves you desperate for more, and two sun-baked clay pits noisy with labour are the only hint of her breezy, endless-summer Cornish coastal scenes. There is just one of her incredible series of works for the War Advisory Committee - but, boy, is it good. And a whole wall is given over to her husband's paintings, including two large, similar society portraits, in what seems a frustratingly unnecessary act of gender balance. 

What you do leave with, however, is a sense of Laura Knight's range and variety. Partly this is a product of a long life, lived determinedly in the present (here the title of the show seems particularly apposite). Knight started as a late nineteenth century naturalist, befriended by George Clausen, influenced by Dutch and French art; she became increasingly Impressionistic, embracing a richer almost Bloomsbury-esque palette during the 1930s, before employing her portraitist's eye for the observed realism of her wartime paintings. But her output is not just an accident of longevity. Knight was constantly exploring and experimenting, from acquiring Clausen's printing equipment for her own etchings, to jewellery, ceramics, and London Transport posters. In a small space, the Worcester curators give a sense of all this and more.

In some ways it's a messy exhibition. The chronology dots about, the thematic approach seems governed by availability of works as much as by any coherent plan. There are, for me, too many of Knight's circus and Gypsy subjects, presented here without comment despite their potentially problematic representations. Whilst The Grand Parade, Charivari has an unintentional  surrealism, her backstage theatricals seem polite and dated. However, the curators' efforts are also clear: there are loans aplenty, good, sensibly written wall texts and even some afternoon talks. Could it have been a better exhibition if it focussed on one aspect of her work - perhaps. The local interest connection of the Malverns, the subject of a 2020 book by Heather Whatley, could easily have become the theme of the show. 

Laura Knight suffered under the modernist hegemony of the late twentieth century: she was too naturalistic, too figurative, and far too establishment. Thankfully, she is now gaining the attention she deserves and if the exhibition at Worcester introduces more people to her variety and her talent it will be a good thing. I Paint Today might not be the best exhibition you'll go to, it certainly isn't the best exhibition of Knight's work that I've seen. But it contains at least one masterpiece: Take-Off, Interior of a Bomber is big and bold and utterly compelling in its juxtaposition of calm observation and impending tragedy. A display of Knight's wartime paintings  - now that would be a grand thing indeed. 

'Pesellino: A Renaissance Master Revealed' (National Gallery until March 10 2024): Delight in Detail

Pesellino, King Melchior Sailing to the Holy Land , c.1440-45, 

Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, (Wikimedia Commons)

A single, dark room in the National Gallery shimmers with colour and pattern and detail. It feels intimate and otherworldly after the cavernous spaces and damask walls of the main displays; even busy with people there's a hushed, chapel-like atmosphere. Pesellino is not a 'big name' but you walk out thinking he ought to be. There is something so joyously exuberant about his art, so crazily outlandish. Why add pink marshmallow clouds to his King Melchior Sailing to the Holy Land ? Why surround his Pistoia Crucifixion with surreally-weird disembodied putti? Why have a bear cub snuffling in the foreground of David's grand victory parade? Just for the hell of it, for the brash Icarus-like, 'look at me fly' nerve of it. Even without knowing the tragedy of his early death from the plague, you have to love the guy.

Pesellino was at the centre of artistic life in Florence, at a time when Florence was pretty much at the centre of artistic life; he worked with big names like Filippo Lippi, he worked for big names like the Medici, who commissioned the David panels here. He was also a canny operator: illuminated manuscripts, devotional diptychs, furniture. You get the idea that if the price was right, and the patron was right, then Pesellino, like most of the artists of the day, would turn his hand anything.  He lived right in the middle of that exciting, anything-is-possible time in the midst of the fifteenth century when new - Masaccio's perspectival experiments - and the old - pattern and gold and natural detail  - coexisted in a gloriously chivalrous battle. You can see Uccello's San Romano in Pesellino's foreshortened knights and stylised horses; you can see Botticelli's elegant angels their draperies blowing in the breeze; you can see Gentile da Fabriano's gilded luxury. But if that all makes, Pesellino sound like an artistic magpie, nicking the others' best ideas, you'd be wrong. There is also something uniquely, idiosyncratically him.

Pesellino, David and Goliath, c.1445, National Gallery, London, (Wikimedia Commons)

The little exhibition also showcases the National Gallery. They do this kind of thing so impeccably well that you forget the time and effort (and money obviously) which goes into even a one-room exhibition like this. We owe them for originally gathering together the hacked up pieces of the Pistoia altarpiece, now united. We owe their conservation team their labour in restoring the battered furniture panels of the cassone, with their visible key marks. We owe the curators for having the foresight to see that this was a show worth having and reaching out to get loans like the King Melchior. And most of all, we owe them for not charging an entrance fee. It would be very easy for the gallery to rest on its laurels, put on the big shows and watch the visitors come through the doors, but, as anyone who visits regularly knows, they are constantly tweaking, moving, changing; and always producing these mini-displays. You can also see Jean-Étienne Liotard's pastels at the moment. 

So, go! Make use of the magnifying glasses provided, the excellent key which clarifies the complex multiple scene-narrative of the David panels, and the conservation video which shows just how mind-blowingly skillful Pesellino was in his pre-application of tiny gold leaf details. But most of all just go and enjoy some of the best art you'll see this year. By a guy who never even makes it into the history books. 

'Holbein at the Tudor Court' (Queen's Picture Gallery until April 14 2024): Picture Perfect

Hans Holbein the Younger, Johannes Froben, c.1522-3, Royal Collection, (Wikimedia Commons)

Holbein at the Tudor Court is a schizophrenic exhibition: it can't decide whether it is a show about court propaganda or an indepth look at Hans Holbein's art. On the one hand there are three grand set pieces depicting The Battle of the Spurs, the Field of the Cloth of Gold and the Family of Henry VIII. All are magnificent, giving a sense of Tudor self-importance and the lengths which the new dynasty would go to establish its image; they primarily of historical rather than artistic significance but worth seeing for all that. The Field of the Cloth of Gold has been recently conserved, the various anonymous hands clearly distinguishable, its details vividly clear, displaying a combination of humour, opulence which includes an almost fanciful dragon firework in the sky  The exhibition has a free audio guide, which looks at a small number of works, including this, in depth, and it is very good. But these three stand out. Less convincing are the Flemish School Holbein rip-offs, like the portrait of Princess Elizabeth: arguably they emphasise the gulf in ability between their producers, but in reality their presence seems only to dilute and diminish that of the original. Then stuck in the middle of the last gallery we have suits of armour, arguably there only to fill the space. Queen's Picture Gallery exhibitions are all about showcasing the royal collection, but sometimes they need a bit of judicious pruning.

However, it is really, and it certainly should really be, the Holbein show, and this is where it takes off. The Royal Collection has an embarrassment of riches when it comes to his work, both drawings and paintings, and they make good use of their treasures. After a brief introduction which shows the artist's early religious subjects, we dive straight in. Drawing after drawing shows his method and his skill: precise features, sketched dress, written notes on colour and detail, economical and efficient. He worked on pink-tinted paper to better represent the complexion of his sitters. We see the punch marks which he used to transfer drawing to painting. We learn the tricks of the trade which allowed him to elongate faces or increase stature. Occasionally - though not often enough  - we are presented with drawing and painting side by side, the whole process in all its perfect completeness.

Hans Holbein the Younger, William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, 

1527, Royal Collection (Wikimedia Commons)

That is the overriding impression of this exhibition. Perfection. Holbein has the precision, the finesse and the seemingly effortless alchemy to turn paint into fur, silk, hair, skin. There is something almost unnatural about the non-photographic, photographic accuracy, AI in paint. His colours, especially those teal greens and blues have a richness which brings the sixteenth century into living touchable vitality. His observation is so acute that physical characteristics merge into psychological traits. Here is Thomas More, stubble pin-pricking his chin, a slight sag under the eyes that it is almost impossible not to read prophetically; Archbishop Warham wearied by age and weight of being a man of God in an age of politics. His men are better than his women who seem constrained by the requirements of fashion and ideals of beauty, but even then, with his drawing of Mary Shelton, the set of her lips, the intensity of her gaze creates a compelling sense of pent-up conformity.

This is a quiet exhibition. There is grandeur. There are show-stoppers. Holbein's painting is rich and virtuosic and quite simply beautiful. But it's the still, small voice of those calm, pale drawings which stays with you. In many ways they were nothing: a sales-pitch, a polaroid snap, a means to an end. But they bring the past into the present more effectively than any history book. And they display the essence of portraiture more succinctly than the grandest oil. They're everything.

'Impressionists on Paper: Degas to Toulouse-Lautrec' (Royal Academy until 10 March 2024): Not a Great Impressionism

Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, Woman with a Black Boa, 1892, 

Essence (diluted oil paint) on cardboard Musée d’Orsay, Paris

It must have seemed like such a good idea: those perennial crowd-pleasers, the Impressionists, but on paper. Yet the current exhibition at the RA proves that what looks good on paper doesn't necessarily work in practice. The show consists of three rooms of works which are not all on paper and not all by Impressionists. And if that sounds a mess then it's exacerbated by minimal captioning - most works are given just tombstone labels - and sweepingly generalised wall texts.

There is a bewildering lack of curation which leaves no sense of why works were hung in the order they were. Beyond the broadest chronology - the second room text discusses the 'New Directions' of Post Impressionism but starts with Monet - the main criteria seems to be to leave the biggest / most colourful till last. There is a lot of standard stuff about ‘capturing the moment’ and new portable colours (both of which apply equally to paint on canvas) and a drily precise handout which provides a glossary of terms. Anyone who knows anything about Impressionism would pick holes in the former, the general visitor may well give up with the latter. The RA, which alone among the main London museums does not give proper concession rates, boasts that the admission price includes £2.50 for the exhibition guide. I would much prefer to have been given a choice.

Of course, any Impressionist show has plenty of works which make you forget your grumbling. In the first room, Degas’ small oil and graphite Lyda, Woman with a Pair of Binoculars coolly stares you out. Later his choice of neon green paper gives startling modernity to a few rough lines. Monet’s pastels of Etretat have a smudged nightmarishness, like the evil twin of his lively, richly coloured oils. Seurat beguiles with his soft monochromes, in dialogue the workmanlike angularity of Van Gogh across the room as they both took on the legacy of mid-century realist Jean Francois Millet. There are also discoveries: Federico Zandomeneghi's soft richness lingers in the memory, and even Hippolyte Petitjean's fairly generic pointillism stands out, a burst of sunlight against the overall drabness. Too often the big names disappoint: Pissarro's Apple Picking has none of the lush late-summeriness of his oil versions of the same subject and Lautrec, despite having his name in the title, is poorly served. It is only in Woman with Black Boa that you get a true glimpse of his wit, observation and quick line.

It is never a good sign when the best works in an exhibition are already familiar, like the Degas' Woman Drying Herself, or Redon's Ophelia Among the Flowers, both of which have just taken a taxi across London from the National Gallery. In fact, Redon is a highlight overall, despite being tenuously connected with Impressionism. The eerie blackness and shimmering colour of Stained Glass Window and the glistening silence of The Golden Cell both exploit and elevate their materials far more effectively than most of the other works on show.

Odilon Redon, The Golden Cell’(Profile of a Woman’s Head), 1892,

Oil and coloured chalks with gold on paper, British Museum, London

The curators make bold claims that the Impressionists broke traditional hierarchies and reinvented paper as an exhibition-able medium, but they offer little in the way of context. The large scale and soft finish of Jacques-Emile Blanche's Portrait of Madame Henri Wallet surely needs to be referenced alongside an eighteenth-century tradition of pastel portraiture. Equally, they weaken their argument by making no distinction between works which are clearly intended as quick sketches, like Manet's The Rue Mosnier in the Rain, and 'finished' (for want of a better word) examples. Pissarro has put time, effort and a range of materials into his Market Stall and the result is considered and complex. Artists have always worked on paper, and these have always been varied in intention. Ingres' perfect pencil portraits, Constable's cloud studies, let alone the whole watercolour tradition: these surely merit acknowledgement.

Any exhibition about the Impressionists is worth seeing. There were works here that I loved and that have stayed with me, but it might have been a better show without any intervention from the curators, just pictures on walls. Why do we need to set these artists up as revolutionary, proto-Modernists? Let them create their own impression.