Zurbaran (National Gallery until August 23 2026): Perfection in a Piece of Cloth

Francisco de Zurbaran, The Martydom of St Serapion, 1628,
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford Connecticut

Francisco de Zurbaran is often described as a Spanish Caravaggio, and anyone familiar with his moodily gothic St Francis, part of the National Gallery's permanent collection, will probably understand the comparison. However, if you go to Trafalgar Square expecting high drama and cinematic emotion, you will be disappointed. Zurbaran is a quiet, thoughtful painter. He wants to wow you with a fold of drapery or a piece of fruit rather than a gruesome death or sexy vanitas. He is also defiantly Spanish, able to channel Murillo's pretty sentimentality as much as Velazquez realism. We are, I think, programmed to respond to the Italian Baroque with its grand gesture and heavy chiaroscuro and in-your-face gutsiness, but by the time you leave the Zurbaran show, you realise the strength of simplicity and silence.

I almost wish I had begun at the end. The room of still lifes, padded out though it is with works by Zurbaran's son Juan who died tragically young of the plague, explains Francisco's whole approach. Objects are given space and reverence: a white cup of water, a line of jars, a pile of lemons. There is precision, to be sure, in the beautifully rendered citrus skin and perfect pewter reflections, but Zurbaran goes beyond draughtsmanship skill. He conveys the essence, the presence, the very soul of these everyday objects, so that they become emblems of God's creation. 

Rewind to the opening crucifixion and the same loving attention is given to the Christ's loincloth, so voluminous and complex that it defies the reality of the dying figure, to become the pure, flowing embodiment of living faith. It is difficult to tear your eyes away and look at the rest of the figure, sculptural against its almost black background. This is not Christ in agony. The feet rest almost comfortably on a horizontal shelf, the blood is a token trickle, the limbs have none of the contortion and strain you might expect, the face is impassive. Seville preferred such restraint in their painting, restricting high emotion to the lurid polychromatic sculptures which were paraded through the streets on feast days . 

There are a succession of such crucifixions, the best saved till last. The exhibition ends with an extraordinary, possibly unique, image of an artist at the foot of the cross. Perhaps it is St Luke, patron saint of painters, but it is impossible not to speculate that it is Zurbaran himself, producing his work, experiencing a vision. The figure is obviously a portrait of an individual: bald and gaunt, it has a monkish quality. The cross is off-centre, drawing the gaze to the space between the figures and the palette offered up by the artist, its daubs of pigment bright as beacons in the dark. Like the still lifes which have come before, it is an object imbued with extraordinary significance but in this case you can understand exactly what it means to the man who wielded it. 

Zurbaran is at his best when he gives his figures space. The exhibition has two of the twelve  Jacob and his Sons from the Bishops Palace at Bishop Auckland. Elaborately dressed, richly toned giants, they stride across undersized, tokenist landscapes, weighty in every sense. Even as a pair they have a sonorous ring, but I urge everyone to go to County Durham and see them in their full magnificence. St Casida wears a similarly elaborate costume more lightly, a Spanish lady out for a stroll, so that anyone ignorant of her story (food for Christian prisoners transformed into roses) might miss the religion altogether. 

Francisco de Zurbaran, The Young Virgin, 1632-3, Metropolitan Museum of Art

It is the big group set pieces which seem less assured. Figures interact awkwardly or not at all; spatial inconsistences and stagey backgrounds lead to an odd imbalance between observed precision and an overall lack of believability. Therein lies the problem: Zurbaran's art is driven by faith and if you do not share his (or his patrons') belief, the figures and the narratives they tell can seem at best clunky, at worst odd. It is difference between The Young Virgin and the same figure posed with her family.  The former, tiny and fragile yet old beyond her years, is surrounded by carefully chosen symbols in curtain-draped, icon-like isolation, the latter is somehow diluted by the mundane details of her home. Zurbaran's iterations of the Immaculate Conception with their Murillo-esque heavenly palette and a proliferation of creepily disembodied cherub heads left me completely cold. And then there are the Labours of Hercules, a rougher, more muscular, almost Italianate Zurbaran, which, together with the truly extraordinary Colossal Head, suggest there was perhaps another artist trying to get out. 

What stays with you, however, is Zurbaran's utter conviction. Even if you cannot share his faith (and although we know nothing about his religious views I find it impossible to believe he could paint like this without a deep faith), you can appreciate his certainty. High drama becomes unnecessary when every piece of God's creation matters. St Serapion's tortured martydom is utterly gratuitous when you can meditate on the shadowy folds of a white habit, an abstracted version of St Veronica's cloth which appears later in the show. You don't need to show Christ in agony when you can produce perhaps the most unsentimentally poignant image in Western art,  Zurbaran was not a Spanish Caravaggio: at his best, he was much much more.

James McNeill Whistler (Tate Britain until September 27 2026)

James McNeill Whistler, The Artist in his Studio, c.1665-6 Chicago Institute of Art

Whistler can be as difficult to pin down as the butterfly he adopted in his monogram. It makes him fascinating and frustrating in equal measure and the same could be said of Tate's once in a generation exhibition. It begins with a painting, a larger than life reproduction of the same painting and a mirror. Too tricksy by half. A pet annoyance of mine is the use of large scale reproductions in big, expensively priced shows when you've paid to see the real thing. If your pulling power is not sufficient to get a particular work then find a substitute (the Peacock Room recreation here is an exception). If you can’t make original artworks sufficiently interesting as a curator then you're in the wrong job. At best it looks like a gimmicky space filler, at worst it appears lazy. Here, with the original hanging alongside, it is just bewildering. You can make a strong case that Artist in his Studio is Whistler 101 and I’ve heard Carol Jacobi do this very effectively: him at his easel, models including one in white, Japanese objects, vacant mirror, all riffing off Velazquez but translucent, inconsequential and uncertain. The painting says it all so why is it not allowed just to speak.

A disorientating first room also tosses aside two great early portraits: Effie Deans and Maud Franklin. Their scale is grand manner, their palette muddy, the figures twist towards us emerging reluctantly from the gloom. Here they mean very little: I wanted to carry them to the end of the show and set them up up alongside a wall of great later figures, including Lady Archibald Campbell. One of the striking things about Whistler is that he remains remarkably consistent as an artist, something which the relentless chronology of the exhibition does not illustrate. 

Paint dribbles down the canvas in his view of Maud Franklin. Whistler's brushes and palette are in vitrines to the side. The curators justifiably want to make a lot of his innovative technique, no underpainting, liquid pigments, scraping back. The points are much repeated but never with quite enough clarity. When it comes to  printmaking the labels simply give up: you need to be something of an expert to separate lithography and lithotints. There are two intrusive and theatrical audios during the show but a simple video illustrating Whistler's technique might have been much more effective.

James McNeill Whistler, Brown and Silver Old Battersea Bridge, c.1859-63, 

Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts

After a lot of early faffing we get Whistler in Paris and making his first Dutch / Realist inspired works, small, tentative, mostly still prints. One of the great unanswered questions is how an artist so interested in line in could simultaneously be so obsessed with avoiding it in painting. His etchings are vividly evocative, bursting with life, energised by detail but also rooted in the past. This is an exhibition heavy on prints, perhaps too much so, but in the early stages, before visual fatigue starts to set in, they are a dynamic presence.

There's a convenient narrative that Whistler begins as a realist, influenced by the likes of Gustave Courbet, whom he painted with in Normandy, but it is difficult and ultimately rather fruitless to impose that kind of chronology. The Last of Old Westminster Bridge and Brown and Silver, Old Battersea Bridge are poles apart works from the early 1860s: the former prefigures Monet's Waterloo Bridge series with its bustling activity, whilst the latter blurs life into the misted horizontal brushstrokes of the Nocturnes. Does Whistler develop or does he just struggle to find a reconciliation between beauty and life? 

In a room of glorious Nocturnes that sense of harmony is achieved. Never mind the high farce of the Ruskin libel - which barely merits a mention - and regardless of the, admittedly fascinating, in-depth analysis that reveals Whistler as an artist of precision and control, repainting his firework sparks to find the perfect balance - these works have a perfect poetry which is like a sigh of contentment. But there is an aching sadness too, for Whistler's self-destruct button which had already cost him his biggest patron, Leyland, would lead to bankruptcy, homelessness and effective exile. 

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, Portrait of the Artist's Mother, 1871, Musée d'Orsay, Paris 

The big names are here: Tate's own Symphony in White Number Two and Miss Cicely Alexander, Wapping, At the Piano, and of course Arrangement in Grey and Black Number One. Whistler's Mother is given star billing, flanked by a guard of honour of two portraits and with a bench placed in front for those who want to pay extended homage. It is worth taking a seat: overfamiliar this might be, but it is a tremendous portrait, the bottom left is in itself worth the price of admission with the canvas weave emphasising verticality in tension with the edging of the rug. And that tension hangs in exquisite balance in everywhere. The only obvious omission in what is a weighty show, is Falling Rocket, but what is really lacking is a sense of context. Whistler knew anyone and everyone, and fell out with most, but although names are dropped and occasional associations made, there is very little sense of the cultural, cosmopolitan world in which he moved.

There is inevitably a downbeat feel to the tiny tentative Venice works produced after Whistler was thrown a lifeline commission to produce a print series in the city, but Whistler was incapable of being down and out for too long. His final fame-drenched phase, as performer, theorist, teacher, society portraitist is a glorious reaffirmation which does not really get the celebration it deserves. Partly perhaps it is a result to his palette increasingly dominated by low key browns, partly because the exhibition has failed to carry through the ebbs and flows of his career. Perhaps the lack of focus here is deliberate; perhaps you are meant to leave feeling ambivalent about Whistler the man and unsure about his art. Perhaps, however, it is a failure of nerve. Despite its edgy opening, this is a conventional, chronological show about an artist who did his best to defy convention at every turn.