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. 

Michaelina Wautier (Royal Academy until June 21 2026)

Michaelina Wautier, St John the Evangelist, c.1650-9, Parity Project

It is rare and marvellous to go to an exhibition and be truly astonished. In three rooms at the Royal Academy, Michaelina Wautier blew me away. The rediscovery of women artists has become a pretty commonplace occurrence: since the National Gallery brought us Artemisia Gentileschi during the depths of Covid, we've had Lavinia Fontana in Dublin, Rachel Ruysch touring Europe, to name a few. In most cases, one has a vague sense of the artist involved, but Michaelina Wautier has literally appeared out of nowhere. She will perhaps never reach the popular heights of Gentileschi - there are fewer works, less provocative subject matter and no dramatic biography. But purely in terms of paint on canvas, she is head and shoulders above the rest.

We know virtually nothing about Wautier. Her life is largely a mystery, her training unrecorded, her later years a blank. The works which exist come from a limited time period of about ten years. The anchor is her brother Charles, a fellow artist and collaborator, who shared a studio, but who, on the evidence of the works here, was less talented as a painter. Without Charles, one might speculate, Wautier herself might never have practiced, never have achieved the commissions and success and independence. He provided respectability without the ties and responsibility which marriage would have carried (one thinks of Judith Leyster who effectively gave up her career after her wedding). Wautier also had a good patron, here represented in a Daniel Teniers portrait which seems especially chosen to show how average painters could be. Archduke Leopold was clearly a big fan and again, perhaps without his backing she might never have been able to paint the range and scale of subjects which she did. 

For the extraordinary thing about Wautier is that, at a time when women artists were not as  uncommon as we sometimes like to think, but were largely restricted to floral and still life subjects, she consistently broke the mould. There are two of her flower paintings in the show, paltry things, as if she is going through the motions. Wautier had bigger fish to fry: portraiture, religion and mythology. Even when she turned her hand to more female-friendly genre subjects, she went her own way: the Five Senses are big-eyed, curly-locked, elegant boys, not cheeky lads, not pretty girls. They live and breath on the canvas, rounded individuals with wild hair and expressive hands - two Wautier characteristics - who bring humour, pathos and energy.

From the freshly-scrubbed girlishness of Mary, wide-eyed and eager with her book in the Education of the Virgin to the well-worn wrinkles of her St Joseph and St Joachim, Wautier paints real, believable people. They are brought alive by brushwork which ripples across the canvas, not showily virtuoso in an Hals-ian way but naturally energised as if caught in the act of almost-movement. She has a knack with gesture and angled poses which add to that sense of casual immediacy.  St John the Evangelist, intense in his emotion and unconventional in his looks, epitomises her ability to create a narrative and psychological hinterland. Cropped, against a dark background, his one visible eye shines with passionate, hopeless devotion, his long fingers cradling the chalice with tender passion.

Michaelina Wautier, Self Portrait, c.1650, private collection

It is extraordinary how quickly Wautier gets there. The first room of portraits, including that of herself, are quietly impressive but unspectacular. She comes across as coolly competent, with her unprimed canvas and limited palette. The fabric of her Sunday best dress is beautifully rendered, her features starkly lit as she stares off into the distance: she hold sup well against the Rubens next door but it is all a little safe. The early Portrait of a Military Commander has more depth of character. The crumpled features of a well-lived life could have been painted by William Dobson, but there is wariness and weariness too in that intensely illuminated face. 

The show ends too soon, with the Triumph of Bacchus, big and bold and full of ebullient good humour. The central figure, all flesh, indolence and absurdity in his wheelbarrow chariot is one of the great representations of the god. I am not fully convinced about her presence in the form the bare-breasted figure of the right. Would Wautier really show herself like that, suffering some lecherous fondling as she looks out with a 'we've all been there girls' look. I think there might be some wishful thinking among art historians brought up on #MeToo and Gentileschi. Does it matter? This is a triumph of a painting by any standards, and a triumph of a show

'In Bloom: How Plants Changed Our World' (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford until August 16 2026)

Rachel Ruysch, Forest Floor, Still Life of Flowers,1687, Ashmolean Museum

The Ashmolean's In Bloom exhibition might be better titled 'How we changed the plants' world.' Current art history has an obsession with ecologies, extinctions and extractions and the curators spend a great deal of time and energy banging on about exploitation, with annoyingly generalised hand-wringing. Plants have changed our world in a myriad of positive ways , yet there is virtually nothing here about medicinal plants, about how other cultures use plants, about how plants have always had deeply symbolic meanings, about how they have been used as dyes, or indeed their fundamental importance as a basic source of food. The emphasis instead is on our (Western/ European) negative impact, both on the natural world and on indigenous cultures. I am obviously not disputing that this is the case, nor am I saying it is not worthy of discussion, but the curators' narrow reluctance to concede anything else is frustrating and strangely at odds with both their chosen subtitle, and with many of the objects which are on display.

Because the first thing to acknowledge is that this is a strikingly beautiful exhibition. The opening room cocoons you within green walls, garlanded with painted flora; the large middle space is high, light and swathed in suspended draperies creating a rainforest-like canopy with a subtle soundscape of birds and water to match. You leave through large scale contemporary works of immersive colour as if you are in the world's most beautiful garden, although one seen, in Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg's works, through the eyes of pollinating insects. I am not a fan of the current fashion for scent-scapes and the opportunity to stick your nose into various odours here seems like a crude gimmick in the midst of all these sumptuous visuals. 

The objects themselves are also stunning. Excellent lighting elevates that most mundane of genres, still life, so the blooms have a tactile intensity and you can get nose-close and see water droplets, veining and insects. Rachel Ruysch's red poppies sing out of the darkness in a tumbling, characterful cascade: there is nothing still about this and it is full of life. There is a brief discussion about changing fashions in flower painting, but I wanted to know so much more, and it was, as so often the case with the labelling here, not followed through. Floral art does not begin and end in seventeenth century Holland; what about some eighteenth century French examples or indeed other nineteenth century artists? Fantin Latour appears only to illustrate the Victorians' rose-mania rather than to show shifting aesthetic attitudes to flowers. Alma Tadema's poster-girl feels like it was included because they wanted some more conventional paintings.

The oils are isolated examples, but the core of the exhibition are scientific and observational drawings. These are exquisite, always worth showcasing, but in themselves potentially repetitive. There is an odd disconnect between celebrating their draughtsmanship whilst at the same time using the drawings as illustrations of exploitation and colonialism. Again there is a tentative mention of changing tastes - the increasing inclusion of birds and wider ecologies - but too often the drawings are treated as nothing more than impeccable illustrations of a politicised point. More unusual and interesting are the three-dimensional models of plants used as teaching aids: they sit in (unfortunately indirect) dialogue with Anahita Norouzi's striking black irises in the final room. 

Everhard Kik and Daniel Frankcom  Sunflower (Helianthus annus), 1703, Watercolour on paper, The Duke and Duchess of Beaufort, on loan from the Badminton Estate, Gloucestershire

Other objects have curiosity value: the Wardian chest for transporting specimens, vulanised rubber mourning jewellery, an opium pipe. We get snapshot stories which seem to leave too many gaps. Rubber trees, native to South America, were imported to South East Asia, yet this is not linked to other and continuingly destructive monocultures. Tea is discussed but sugar is ignored. A decision to take John Tradescant, whose collection effectively launched the Ashmolean, as a starting point means that previous plant movements (by the Romans, or tobacco from North America) are not mentioned. 

Equally, and again here I take issue with the subtitle, this is an exhibition about men (and a few women) as much as about plants. We begin with portraits of the Tradescants and there are a succession of explorers, botanists, collectors and scientists who are name checked, from Carl Linnaeus strutting his stuff in Sami costume to the Duchess of Beaufort willfully imposing her global plant collection on the English countryside. This is a show which doesn't need people: plants have enough character of their own, from the papery fragility of centuries old flower-pressings to the full-blown blousy eroticism of orchids.

I set high standards for Ashmolean exhibitions and was hoping In Bloom would be a repeat of their wonderful Colour Revolution which was packed with interesting tit-bits and beautiful objects. There is beauty aplenty here, but In Bloom has the constrained artificiality of a parterre on which the curators have imposed their plan rather than the organic and productive abundance of a cottage garden. One can effectively illustrate colonial exploitation and endangered nature without writing it into every label: indeed the final display allows contemporary artists to do both with far more elegance and bite than any of the previous pieces of text. 

Gwen John: Strange Beauties (National Museum, Cardiff until June 28 2026, then touring)

Gwen John, Mrs Atkinson, 1898, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Small is big in Gwen John's work. None of her canvases are very large and many of her watercolours are tiny. The range of themes which interested her was limited. She painted the same subject repeatedly with subtle differences. The curators of Strange Beauties, who lean heavily into her spirituality and conversion to Catholicism, highlight her adherence to St. Thérèse of Lisieux's Little Way. 'Smallness' and religion may seem off-putting, but John was neither restrictive nor ascetic. She went to church to sketch as much as to pray, and it was painting itself which drove her with an intense but almost scientific determination to explore the medium and the subject. Across a patchwork of watercolour squares you see notes and coded numbering as she applied and recorded new colour combinations. And the more you look at a line of superficially repetitive figures, the more you meditate on the small but deeply significant compositional and structural differences.

This is a big show of small works - nearly 200 of them - their lack of scale perhaps unhelpfully emphasised by the soaring height of the galleries at Cardiff's National Museum. Unlike the recent Pallant House/ Holburne exhibition, which focused on a limited period, this is a full-blown retrospective, although, partly because of the nature of John's work, much of it will seem familiar to anyone who saw Alicia Foster's 2024 curation. Cardiff takes a broadly chronological but defiantly un-biographical stance. John's early life in Tenby and her Slade years are handled with barely a passing mention of Augustus, her more flamboyant and originally more famous brother. Sometimes, this approach verges on the coy, when brushing aside her 'romance' with Auguste Rodin, or her close friendships with women. Even for someone who dislikes the usual curatorial insistence on biography, there is an annoying inability to pin down Gwen John as a person, beyond the fact that she clearly did not want to be known. 

Arguably, the most revealing self-image shows John drawing herself, standing naked in front of the mirror, sketchbook awkwardly balanced in her outstretched arm. It is entirely without artifice, embarrassment or allure, an academic exercise such as she was taught at the Slade, conveniently and cheaply reenacted in her own room. This steely self-reliance is everywhere, from the astonishing decision to walk to Rome with her friend Dorelia, to her independent existence in Paris and her unsentimental description of World War One bombs. It is also front and centre of every single painting she did of a female figure (and she virtually never painted men): that inscrutable distance, the centered introversion. You could put a wimple of any of them and they would be plausible nuns. 

The early portraits are the most individualised: Chloe Boughton-Leigh, bony and crumpled; Mrs Atkinson, Dickensian in her sallow-skinned shapelessness, Fenella Lovell sullenly defiant as she poses clothed and nude, but they all share that otherworldly disconnection. These are people John knows well, counts as friends, yet she retains a disinterested eye, treating them as flesh and blood still lifes, convenient vehicles through which to explore paint. Her experimentalism is dealt with perhaps too cursorily here. Her use of chalky grounds to dry pigments, her single layer brushstrokes which led to whole canvases being abandoned for a single misstep, the rigidly imposed restrictions on colour. These details are difficult to convey in exhibition labelling (and I would advise buying the catalogue). But get up close to any of her works and the surface is alive with texture, the paint taking on a granular, almost sculptural solidity.

Gwen John, The Pilgrim, c.1920, Yale Centre for British Art

The most successful section allows her church watercolours to speak for themselves in a cacophonous choir. Bizarrely the greens and purples and candid camera poses remind me of Toulouse Lautrec's nightclub scenes, all chaotic conversation and crowded composition rather than religion. It is, however, difficult to escape a sense of tailing off, an ever-decreasing-circles reductionism. The works generally get smaller. John appears to get less satisfied with her art the more she pushes the boundaries, and the final room with its unconvincing sketchy landscapes feels downbeat. It is worth returning to the two centrally placed versions of Pilgrim which bestride the gallery with weight and purpose. They have the presence of Medieval saints, timelessly clad yet distinctly modern, painted almost entirely in blue like a Whistlerian homage yet with none of his hazy ambivalence. John reminds me of her contemporary Helen Schjerbeck, currently on show in New York. They are both almost too idiosyncratic (always seen as a bad trait in a woman) for their own good.

Cardiff is the obvious place to hold this retrospective: the National Museum has the largest collection of John's works in the world, currently over 900 items, and many of the pieces here have rarely been seen in public. The exhibition is travelling to Edinburgh later this year and then on to Yale Center for British Art and the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington: a proper tour which will surely bolster John's status on both sides of the Atlantic. So, this is by any measure an impressive exhibition. My fear, however, is that it reinforces cliches about John's art, rather than challenging them. Those who have already decided that she is cold, limited and essentially too gendered (a sad cat lady) will not find much to change their opinion; fans will love it. As for those discovering the artist for the first time, John requires thought and close looking. Small things come to those who wait. 

'The Rossettis Siblings and Spouses' (Wightwick Manor, Wolverhampton until November 2026)

Elizabeth Siddal, The Haunted Wood, 1856, Wightwick Manor, Wolverhampton

Wightwick Manor ought to be a recognised halt on the Pre-Raphaelite pilgrimage trail, but perhaps because of its inauspicious location on the outskirts of Wolverhampton, perhaps because has been subsumed into the National Trust portfolio, it is not as well known as it should be. A beautifully intact Arts and Crafts house, it boasts a superb carved timber exterior and interior rooms decorated with Morris and Co wallpaper and stained glass. However, it is the art collection massed by paint magnate Sir Geoffrey Mander and his wife which is the real draw. Now, the National Trust have raided their store and produced an exhibition of works by the Rossettis, Siblings and Spouses. It should be a treat but although there are plenty of individual treasures, the overall show is less than the sum of its parts.

The major problem is one of display. The exhibition sprawls through the house with screens in front of other objects and little sense of cohesion. The house itself is cluttered, dark and domestic - a perfect, cosy House Beautiful but not ideal as an exhibition space. The National Trust are not keen on labels at the best of times: visitors are usually reliant on effusive volunteer guides and a slightly dog-eared folder detailing items and paintings in each room. Here, the folders are out of date, with normally displayed works moved to accommodate exhibition pieces, and the guides themselves seemed a little bemused by the changes. The result is frustrating: one is never quite sure what is part of the Rossettis show, and a great deal of time is spent leafing through the scant information available. The curators, perhaps in an effort to combat this, have produced large information boards full of biographical detail and contemporary quotes. The hall contains a family tree and gives each focus member a nickname (Christina, for instance, is The Famous One). They tell a great story but it is a lot to read and retain.

The Rossettis are collectively, of course, a compelling subject - here regularly and not inaccurately compared to the Brontes - but not an easy one to negotiate. Tate Britain tried it a few years ago, with only partial success: that exhibition kept teetering towards being the Dante Gabriel Show. Curators Hannah Squire and Helen Bratt-Wyton have given themselves a harder task by including not only all four siblings, but also Elizabeth Siddal and Lucy Madox Brown (Ford's daughter, who married William Michael Rossetti).  Only three of the six are recognised as artists, although there is a small Veronese copy tentatively attributed to Christina on show, and indeed Maria Rossetti eschewed culture altogether in favour of a life of religious devotion. Added to this, the exhibition is restricted by its determination to only use in-house material, so there are few famous showstoppers. Paradoxically, this becomes its strength. Whereas Tate couldn't resist splashing big Rossetti canvases, here arguably the most impressive work on show is actually by the least heralded artist. Lucy Madox Brown's Romeo and Juliet, all gothic pallor and shadows, is a tantalising glimpse of the career she might have had, if marriage, motherhood and ill-health had not intervened. 

Ford Madox Brown, William Michael Rossetti by Lamplight, 1856, Wightwick Manor, Wolverhampton

In the main, this is a show of small things. Lady Mander was an enthusiastic collector of Siddal's work and one of the bedrooms is devoted to her tiny, angular, Medievalist drawings and two richly coloured gouaches which are reminiscent of Samuel Palmer in their claustrophobic intensity. Two pencil versions of an ecstatic St Cecilia also stand out. Rossetti's lithographic experiments are fascinating (and newly acquired) and the emphasis on his early drawings provides an interesting counterpoint to the more usual focus on his late 'stunners'. Works like The Bivouac After the Ball and the Shadowless Man have a fluid bulkiness which prefigures the curvilinear strength of his later figures and make his Pre-Raphaelite works seem like an increasingly uncharacteristic interlude. Much is also made of portraits, including Rossetti's tender pencil drawing of his mother and jokey cartoon of a tantrum-ing Christina. Indeed, one of the excuses for the whole exhibition is a newly acquired pastel portrait of a middle-aged Christina, painted soon after the death of her sister Maria and weighty with sadness. Wightwick also holds the famous Madox Brown portrait of William Michael Rossetti by Lamplight and a delightful representation of his daughter, Lucy, all jaunty ribbons and reluctant smile.

I would recommend a visit to Wightwick Manor under any circumstances but for the casual visitor I am not sure how much the exhibition will enhance the experience. The material and curatorial effort merit a better exhibition space, and the addition of a few loans - perhaps through a partner institution - could have raised this from a decent to a spectacular show. That said, this remains a must-see for anyone interested in the Rossettis and the domestic setting is ideal for small works which would get overwhelmed in a gallery space. There is an added bonus for Evelyn De Morgan fans: two of her works have been relocated to the Malthouse Gallery giving a first chance to see them in good lighting and all their glorious colour.

A Kiss is Never Just a Kiss (for Valentine's Day)

 

Giotto, ‘Meeting of Joachim and Anne at the Golden Gate’, c.1303-6, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, Italy (Wikimedia Commons)

You might think art galleries were good places to find romance. All that beauty, all those stories of love, all that naked flesh. But the longer you look and the more you know, the less lovely love seems.

Giotto is usually credited with painting the first kiss in Western art. It is a tender image of middle age devotion, as Anne and Joachim meet to share the happy news that they are finally to have a child. The trouble is, worshippers looking at this would have known what happens next. It’s the start of a tragedy: their son will be John the Baptist, destined to be beheaded at the whim of Salome. Suddenly a kiss of joy looks almost like one of consolation, and you start focusing on the ominous figure in black.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard/ Marguerite Gérard,’The Stolen Kiss’, 1787, Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia (Wikimedia Commons)

Eighteenth-century artists loved romantic intrigue and The Stolen Kiss was a favourite subject. A wealthy young woman has left her friends socialising in the other room, perhaps on the pretext of getting her shawl. Really she is meeting her lover. But will it end happily? The strong diagonal of messy fabric which draws your eye to her low-cut dress and the deep shadows behind suggest not. The mystery extends to the artist which may be Fragonard (famous for The Swing) or a female painter, Marguerite Gérard, whose work is often misattributed to him. 

Isobel Gloag, ‘The Kiss of the Enchantress’, c.1890 (Wikimedia Commons)

It wasn’t just women in danger. Art is full of mermaids and sirens who would lure an unsuspecting man to death or enchantment. Look how the knight is becoming trapped by the enchantress’ tail and the thorny branches springing up around him. This watercolour is sometimes linked to Keats’ poem Lamia based on a serpent-woman in Greek mythology, sometimes it is titled The Knight and the Mermaid. Whatever the exact inspiration, it is one of a number of such late nineteenth century images. They are often connected masculine fears about to the rise of educated, independent New Women. Although in this case the artist is female.

Edvard Munch, ‘The Kiss’, 1897, Munch Museum, Oslo, Norway (Wikimedia Commons)

Becoming inseparable is a such a romantic idea, until it is taken literally. Munch’s work frequently portrays a jaundiced view of love and sex, and his Kiss feels increasingly sinister when you start to focus on the featureless blobs of merged flesh. Yet the figures emanate an infectious warmth. The intense intimacy, with the bright world shut out and the curving brush strokes cradling the figures’ heads, somehow wins through.

Francesco Hayez, ‘The Kiss’, 1859, Pinacoteca de Brera, Milan, Italy (Wikimedia Commons)

Hayez’s Medieval romance is as perfect a pastiche of history as an Hollywood Technicolor film. A mysterious, passionate embrace with just a hint of tragedy – look at those figures lurking through the doorway. Yet this is less about individuals in love and more about political symbolism. It was commissioned to promote the idea of an alliance with France during the nineteenth century fight for Italian unification. The colours deliberately recall the French flag. But Hayez puts his heart and soul into it: even knowing all that, you can still hear violins. 

Gustav Klimt, ‘The Kiss’ 1907-8, The Belvedere, Vienna. Austria (Wikimedia Commons)

Arguably the most famous kiss in art, this is also a litmus test: are you a romantic or a realist? The gold, the flowers, the pattern create a such a beautiful intensity that you almost ignore the figures. Does he seem domineering? Does her pose seem awkwardly tense? Is her hand on his an encouragement or a restraint? Why are they on the edge of a precipice? Some historians argue that this is Orpheus and Eurydice, captured at the moment when she sinks back into death, lost to him forever. Some see it as indicative of Klimt’s own preference for sexually submissive women. Others just focus on the closed lids of her ecstatic swoon. 

Maybe February 14th is not the time to be cynical about love, but the best art always repays a second look. Go to a gallery and have a (friendly) argument with your partner about what you see. You could even enjoy kissing and making up afterwards.

This article originally appeared in Erato Magazine.

'Artist as Witness: The Impact of War' (Russell Cotes Art Gallery Bournemouth until March 8 2026)

Paul Nash, Spring in the Trenches, Ridge Wood 1917, 1918, Imperial War Museum, London

The Russell Cotes Art Gallery in Bournemouth is a slightly incongruous place to hold an exhibition of war art, with it pot plants, Arts and Crafts decor and spectacular seascape views. Yet, the Morning Room is testimony to the reality that war can strike anywhere: the ceiling was repainted by Anna Zinkeisen after a blast wave from a German parachute mine caused its collapse in 1941. Their exhibition space is currently devoted to Artist as Witness: the Impact of War, too large a theme perhaps for such a small venue, but nonetheless an absorbing show which although focused on the two World Wars, is brought right up to date with contributions from George Butler in Ukraine.

There is a clear attempt to avoid the cliches of war art and to reflect the full range of those impacted. This is particularly seen in the contribution of women, some of whom, like Ethel Gabain, were employed as official War Artists, recording images of the Home Front. Themed sections include the rather unglamorous sounding 'Food Production' and 'War Preparations': Evelyn Dunbar has become a recognised name in recent years and while her unfussy depiction of the Women's Land Army Hostel has less visual impact than some of her works, it remains a fascinating slice of social history. In contrast Archibald Standish-Hartrick's lithograph invests his ploughing female figure with timelessness which seems to echo back to Medieval Books of Hours and  James Bateman's Evacuees Help with the Hay Harvest is a rural idyll which belies the labour and the uprooted workforce involved.

The horror of war is never far away with Holocaust survivor Edith Birkin, and Robert McBryde's eerie ruins, but in many ways it is the banality which strikes home: Laura Knight's and George Biddle's sketched recordings of the Nuremberg Trials. These sit alongside more conventional reportage like Stephen Bone's Tank Landing Craft, with its dawn sky and oppressive silence which not only feels like the calm before the storm but engenders the stiff upper lip stoicism of British films. Similarly, Charles Burleigh's scene of Brighton Pavillion being used as a hospital is a straightforward representation, which derives its power from the incongruity of the grandiose setting and the ranks of white-sheeted beds. 

Stephen Bone, Tank Landing Craft: On the Bridge at Dawn, 1943, 

Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth

There are plenty of big names: John Lavery's view of cavalry horses in Green Park 1914, and Lady Butler's watercolour of a kilted VC hero  both seem like left-0vers from another more honourable age. Paul Nash manages to conjure poetry from the decimation of the First World War. Yet, as often the case with provincial exhibitions in which curators have raided both their own collections and the stacks of other museums, there are new names to discover. The faceless, ghostly figures of Amy Julia Drucker's 1916 Air Raid Shelter, crowded under artificial lights are reminiscent of Henry Moore's sketches of the same from the Second World War. Albert Richards' Anti Tank Ditch is like an bloody gash across the landscape; John Armstrong's The Red Cow takes a deliberately oblique view on the impact of war on the countryside.

This is an unfussy exhibition, with a good range of works and a functional display which allows all your attention to focus on the fifty or so pieces of art. There is variety aplenty, and Gill Clarke's clever juxtapositions of themes and examples means that one never feels overwhelmed by the subject. It is, however, impossible not to leave with a heavy heart: George Butler's works mean that this is the stuff of present reality not past history. Ultimately, all artists can do is to bear witness. 

'Empire of Sleep' (Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris until March 1 2026): The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of

Carolus-Duran, Sleeping Man, 1861, Palais des Beaux Arts de Lille, France

It is a big call to say in January that you have seen one of your exhibitions of the year, but the Musee Marmottan's Empire of Sleep is the stuff that dreams are made of. I have rarely seen such a beautifully hung, thoughtfully curated show. The mood is set with a first small rotunda, hung with heavy drapes of a deep midnight blue on which hang five depictions of sleep, from a Renaissance St Peter to Monet's baby son. The thematic, eclectic approach is continued throughout, for although the focus is 19th century there are Medieval woodcarvings, Picasso prints and a whole lot more besides. The wall texts and labelling (helpfully dual language) are full of information without sacrificing clarity - the section on Religion for instance lists Biblical associations from the Drunkenness of Noah to the idea of Christ being not dead but sleeping. 

The exhibition unfolds in eight sections, including Biblical, classical, erotic, dreams and death. The rich blue walls give way to an equally rich red to sweep you through the developing mood, but this is not just about crowd-pleasing paintings. There is a a serious curatorial line about shifting interpretations of sleep and dreams through the course of the nineteenth century: the exhibition is co-curated by a neurologist, Laura Bossi, and scholarship is at its heart. Effort has also gone into the loans, from literally all over - Grenoble, Montreal, Prague, Skagens, even an Evelyn De Morgan from Cannon Hall near Barnsley - and the effect is a journey of discovery. I was not familiar with Gaetano Previati's work: his Opium Smokers treads an uneasy line between glamour and seediness all painted with a hashish-brown sludge that makes you feel like you may have imbibed yourself. Or Fernand Pelez's Violet Seller, a ruthlessly unsentimental portrayal of a child dying in a doorway which gut-punches with emotion. Or Jules Bastien Lepage's Young Woman Sleeping, a soft focus interior from an artist known for his countryside realism. These discoveries are strung together like pearls by the hang and the curation - individually beautiful but so much more in combination.

One might think that sleep is a narrow theme - a hundred and thirty works of people with their eyes closed - but variety comes from the range of media and the depth of exploration. Goya's famous engraving The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters is borne out by Fuseli's disturbing eroticism, Maximilián Pirner's La Somnambule perched precariously on a window ledge and Kiki Smith's spidery drawing from 2001. Sculpture comes in the form of Rodin's fragmentary sleeping figure and a Medieval ivory, apostles crammed together in mutual support. The curators are not afraid to venture into high camp, with John Faed's The Dream of the Poet, a John Martin-esque extravaganza of Highland landscape and spectral figures. And there is room for humour too, from David Hockney's dog and John Everett Millais' sleeping sermon goer, kept just the right side of cutesy by his rich palette of reds and purples.

John Everett Millais, My Second Sermon, 1864, Guildhall Art Gallery, London 

If there is a negative, it is the final bedroom section, which, like a rude awakening, takes you into a brighter lit, more functional space. It almost feels as if the show has accidently spilled over with works crammed awkwardly between stairwell and lift shaft. The Lepage is hung in a corner, next to a similarly stunning Sorolla Mother and Child, two dark heads marooned in a sea of white, distance only serving to emphasise closeness. However, this anticlimax is only really evidence of the woozy pleasure that the previous sections fostered, rather like the comfort of a warm bed and a good night's sleep, this is was an exhibition that I simply didn't want to end. 

Wright of Derby: From the Shadows (National Gallery until May 10 2026)

Joseph Wight of Derby, A Philosopher Lecturing on an Orrery, 1776, Derby Museum and Art Gallery

Joseph Wright seems hampered by his soubriquet 'of Derby', which underlines his apparent provincialism and suggests an almost fairground freakery - a painter! from Derby! well, I never! The town is of course justifiably proud of their son and I would urge anyone who likes his work to go and visit the art gallery there (which will be hosting this exhibition later this summer). Over the years there have been attempts to redress this narrative with studies of the Midlands Enlightenment and the importance of early industrialist patronage. The reality, however, is that Wright trained, travelled and lived for periods elsewhere - Liverpool, Bath, London, Italy - whilst still always calling Derby home. Somewhere along the way he discovered the previous century's love of candlelit paintings and he was hooked. 

This is the starting point for the National Gallery's little one room exhibition. Based as it is around one of their most popular paintings The Experiment on a Bird with an Air Pump, it seems a bit much to sub-title it 'from the shadows'. It is a show which does little to elucidate Wright's inspiration and motives, and its particularly narrow focus on candlelight means the exclusion of other light-based works (the moon, volcanoes). But, boy, are there some wonderful paintings.

Wright's investigation of light is often presented as an anomaly - and, of course it is in terms of both the eighteenth century and of British art. The reality, rather skimmed over here, is that seventeenth century Europe had lapped up dramatic light and shade paintings. Caravaggio is the much quoted instigator, but it was Dutch artists like Gerrit van Honthorst and Hendrick Terbrugghen who really took the idea and ran with it, and to whom Wright seems most obviously indebted. Coincidentally, across the Channel, a sell out show at the musée Jacquemart-André in Paris bringing Georges de la Tour 'from the shadows' (or specifically 'from shadows to light') as well. 

The Dutch artists favoured tavern scenes, musicians, humour or moralising genre: Wright's Two Boys Fighting Over a Pigs Bladder has that Low Countries feel, virtuosic but absurd with its comedic red faces and a tight composition which suggests we are the ones who will have to break up the tussle. Equally, however, there was a strand of religious art, exemplified by la Tour, which exploited the same tenebrist qualities - in terms of mood, Wright often follows this. Indeed, he seems to have two distinct styles, employed as subject demanded: a soft edged emotionalism which seems to evolve directly from the beautifully handled monochrome pastel  self portrait on show; and a crisp, sometimes harsh observational edge.

The exhibition splits into what might be called an Enlightenment section and a genre or 'fancy' section. Two beautiful paintings of classical sculpture establish Wright as an educated, intellectual artist, among fellow intellectuals. Academy by Lamplight allows him to explore a mixed group of observers - something he will go on to do so effectively in his two most famous works, Air Pump and Philosopher Giving a Lecture on an Orrery - but the real subject is art itself, personified by luminously pristine marble. The two big canvases are cleverly hung alongside the real instruments at their centre, the orrery casting arc-ing shadows which Wright himself would have loved. They are extraordinary paintings, complex, subtle, ambiguous, which can be read as paeans to science, proto-Romantic explorations of the sublime, or Frith-like social commentaries, full of exchanged glances and gossipy subplots. They feel like they should be the grand finale of the show rather than the opening act as they are here.

The subsequent, smaller works and accompanying prints are inevitably a little anticlimactic. The Alchemist, for all its apparently similar subject matter has an element of, surely not unintentional, humour in its presentation of the elderly, heavily-bearded and portly scientist, and the detailed recreation of his instruments and feels like a homage to much earlier Northern Renaissance art. The classical ruin setting of the Blacksmith's Shop channels myth as much as it does contemporary life. Disappointingly, The Iron Forge, an obvious companion painting, is not included and the absence of Wright's industrial works (Arkwright's Cotton Mills by Night, for instance) seems a weakness. 

Joseph Wright of Derby, Earth Stopper on the Banks of the River Derwent, 1773, 

Derby Museum and Art Gallery

Stuck round a corner, as the last painting, Earth Stopper on the Banks of the Derwent is even more bereft: Wright was an enthusiastic landscapist and a painter of nature at night with a particular interest in juxtaposing the coolness of the moon with hot man-made light. The Earth Stopper has more in common with these than with the interior candle-lit scenes which dominate the show. Besides the consummate control of the big canvases, these works also have an unevenness, whether this figure's unconvincing weight on the spade, or the oddly out of kilter perspective in Hermit Philosopher by Lamplight. The narrow focus and small number of works mean than these issues are amplified.

Wright is a bigger artist than this display implies. His portraiture and landscapes are often unjustly neglected and if the National Gallery really wanted to bring him 'from the shadows' it could have produced a more interesting exhibition in which the famous candlelight scenes provided a springboard for a wider exploration of Wright's career. This, along with the lack of any real tenebrist context, feels like a missed opportunity. The show is travelling to Derby where it will be enveloped by their permanent collection of Joseph Wright's works - I can't help thinking that will prove to be a better (and free) place to see it.

'John Singer Sargent An American in Worcestershire' (Worcester City Art Gallery and Museum until June 14 2026)

John Singer Sargent, Simplon - Mrs Barnard and her Daughter Dorothy, 1905-15, 

Birmingham Museums

Late nineteenth century Europe was awash with artists' colonies (Skagens, Newlyn, Pont Aven) but Broadway, a sleepy village at the very southern tip of Worcestershire, is not one that springs immediately to mind. Still less do you associate it with a community of ex-pat Americans, whose names you might link more readily to France or Italy. It was news to me that John Singer Sargent rocked up there, convalescing from having hit his head diving off a weir, and liked it so much he returned for several summers. It was news too that a group of artists and writers which included Henry James, Edmund Gosse, Alfred Parsons and Edwin Austin Abbey joined him. This all makes Worcester City Art Gallery's new exhibition, An American in Worcestershire, intrinsically interesting, and  the show is impressive in the number of loans and its ambition to tell this little known, locally significant story. Ultimately it is not big or comprehensive enough but the Worcester curators always make an effort and for that alone they should be applauded.

The exhibition hangs round the work of John Singer Sargent, and although most of it here is tenuously connected with Broadway, it is nonetheless worth seeing in its own right. The first room boasts some fine Sargent portraits, particularly two charcoal sketches of the Earl and Countess of Rocksavage on loan from a private collection and a small but dashing oil of Flora Priestley, spikily bright in black, from the Ashmolean. Even in a small selection Sargent's apparently effortless ability to balance flattery and characterisation is evident. Perhaps the most striking work, however, is a First World War image of American Troops Going up the Line, a khaki-grimed prequel to Gassed, as men gather by the railway tracks which will take them to the industrial slaughter of the Front Line. It is small and shocking after the jokey letters, cartoons and world of sunshine, tennis and country japes which the show has previously conjured up.

Sargent's most famous Worcester work, however, perhaps inevitably has not been secured for the exhibition: Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose remains in Tate Britain (although the gallery has been generous with other works). The iconic image of the Barnard sisters was painted at Broadway over a number of weeks in 1885, with Sargent working only briefly outside each day, when the evening light was exactly right. The narrative of the production is well told, but the curators have to rely of reproductions not just of the final painting but of preliminary sketches, now in the United States. The result feels a little hollow. There are, however, some beautiful watercolours of the sisters and their mother, which have all the fluidity of Sargent's later landscapes with the sky-less intimacy and the soft, pinkish peaches which he increasingly favoured. They are fresh and oozing with life. 

Francis Davis Millet, Between Two Fires, c.1892, Tate

Colony camaraderie is the second strand of the exhibition, related through solid wall texts, contemporary letters and blown-up reproductions of some of Sargent's own scribbled cartoons. Broadway developed haphazardly, perhaps suggested to Alfred Parsons as a rural retreat by William Morris (here relegated to a supporting role outside the main show). Francis Davis Millet's purchase of the ramshackle old manor, Abbot's Grange, provided a 'bolt-hole' and the ex-pat community were the regular visitors - Henry James, Edwin Austin Abbey, Sargent himself. They were augmented by Brits like Edmund Gosse, Parsons and George Boughton (born in Norwich but brought up in the States) and the Alma Tademas (who don't get a look in here). There is a great story here, and some lesser known artists to be explored, but the exhibition does little more than frustratingly whet the appetite. Millet's beautifully painted Between Two Fires presents a tongue-in cheek view of Puritan England but does so with the soft subtlety of Dutch genre and some impeccable still life painting. Parsons is represented by two loose, lively landscapes: In the Vegetable Garden is all heat and high summer, When Nature Painted All Things Gay, cool and spring-like. Letters, photographs and book illustrations add layers but it is never really enough.

In the second tiny section of the two room show we are taken off on a series of tangents. Philip Burne Jones' portrait of Elgar is included to illustrate the composer's connections to Broadway and Sargent.  Watercolour is an excuse to exhibit works by other members of the RWS, the importance of France for these artists is enough of a reason to show a Renoir and Pissarro from the Worcester collections and one wall is given over to landscapes of the Worcester countryside. Is this a lack of curatorial discipline or simply a lack of material? Either way feels like an opportunity squandered. Yet, as ever, a visit to Worcester's art gallery is an enjoyable experience: it is a well frequented, much-loved venue, staffed by real enthusiasts and with a determination to act rather than simply sit back. They are promising a major renovation and extension project this year which will increase the number of works they can show. In the meantime, An American in Worcestershire  provides a interesting nugget of an exhibition and some really beautiful works. I only hope that at some point in the future the Broadway Colony gets the fuller coverage it deserves.