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\n Pink Skater (Will I Win, Will I Win) by Rose Wylie (2015)<\/p>\n
\n Pink Skater (Will I Win, Will I Win) by Rose Wylie (2015)<\/p>\n
If you have been keeping a weather eye on the discovery, rehabilitation and reordering of female artists that has been in full swing for the past half-dozen years or so, 2026 offers a rich selection of distaff painters and makers \u2013 both ancient and modern. Tate Modern, for example, presents the two biggest names: \u201cFrida: The Making of an Icon\u201d (25 June 2026 \u2013 3 January 2027), a British genuflection to the cult of Kahlo, and \u201cTracey Emin: A Second Life\u201d (27 February \u2013 31 August), a display of her sploshy solipsism. Both will provide an opportunity to judge whether their art actually measures up to their column inches.<\/p>\n
More intriguing pleasures are promised by \u201cA View of One\u2019s Own: Landscapes by British Women Artists, 1760-1860\u201d (Courtauld Gallery, 28 January \u2013 20 May), a peek at a genre in which women traditionally have barely figured, and \u201cChiharu Shiota: Threads of Life\u201d (Hayward Gallery, 17 February \u2013 3 May), featuring the Japanese artist who uses skeins of red wool to transform objects (boats, chairs, even shoes) and spaces into dreamlike webs. Meanwhile, the vigour of Rose Wylie (Royal Academy, 28 February \u2013 19 April) seems not to dim with the passing years, while Cecily Brown (Serpentine South, 27 March \u2013 6 September), purveyor of sensual, colour-loaded expressionism, is a painter in her pomp.<\/p>\n
Two trailblazers are also due a welcome outing: \u201cCatharina van Hemessen\u201d (National Gallery, 4 March 2026 \u2013 30 May 2027) will present the 16th-century Flemish portraitist who was considered important enough in her lifetime to merit a mention in Vasari\u2019s Lives of the Artists, and \u201cMichaelina Wautier\u201d (Royal Academy, 27 March \u2013 21 June 2026) reveals an extraordinarily accomplished 17th-century Fleming who sought expression in the faces of her subjects \u2013 a curled lip here, a sideways glance there. Their distant heirs include the mystical abstract painter Hilma af Klint (\u201cArtist and Visionary\u201d at the National Gallery of Ireland, 15 October 2026 \u2013 7 February 2027), the still underrated St Ives modernist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (Tate St Ives, 24 October 2026 \u2013 11 April 2027), and the inventive and humorous designer-artist Enid Marx (Compton Verney, 18 July 2026 \u2013 3 January 2027).<\/p>\n
There are some pretty decent male artists on show too. The two stand-outs are both at the National Gallery. Francisco de Zurbar\u00e1n, a painter of great potency whose religious paintings use tenebrism to dramatic \u2013 and meditative \u2013 effect, is sometimes half-dismissed as the \u201cSpanish Caravaggio\u201d, but he now steps out from the latter\u2019s shadow (2 May \u2013 23 August). And what a coup for the same institution to stage \u201cVan Eyck: The Portraits\u201d (21 November 2026 \u2013 11 April 2027), a display of all the vanishingly rare portraits by one of art\u2019s founding fathers. Jan van Eyck was one of the first artists to show the possibilities of the genre, released through oil paint, and his Arnolfini Portrait (1434) shows just two of a series of startlingly immediate faces.<\/p>\n
New year, new read. Save 40% off an annual subscription this January.<\/p>\n It might seem odd to place George Stubbs as a descendant of Van Eyck but he was every bit as attentive to the nuances of horse flesh as the Flemish painter was to facial flesh. Stubbs\u2019s Whistlejacket (1762) has long been one of the favourite paintings in the National Gallery and with \u201cStubbs: Portrait of a Horse\u201d (12 March \u2013 31 May) he will share a paddock with \u201cScrub\u201d, another monumental, riderless rearing horse. The picture, painted for the Marquess of Rockingham around 1762, remains in private hands and is rarely exhibited, so the opportunity to glimpse this heroic creature should be grabbed before it returns to its stall.<\/p>\n A cluster of Stubbs\u2019s fellow Georgians \u2013 Turner, Gainsborough and Constable \u2013 will be on display at Gainsborough\u2019s House, Sudbury in Suffolk (25 April \u2013 11 October), as part of the celebrations around the 250th birthday of John Constable (11 June 1776). He can also be found at Christchurch Mansion, Ipswich, from March. Meanwhile, a wider display of early-20th-century outdoorsy painters feature in \u201cBritish Landscapes: A Sense of Place\u201d (Pallant House, Chichester, 30 May \u2013 1 November) \u2013 Graham Sutherland, Eric Ravilious and Paul Nash among them. Landscape offered Winston Churchill a respite from politics, and time at the easel cleared his head of the fug of parliament. The evidence is on show in \u201cWinston Churchill: The Painter\u201d (Wallace Collection, 29 May \u2013 29 November). If only today\u2019s MPs were as good at politics as he was at painting.<\/p>\n Hurvin Anderson puts landscapes, often lush Caribbean ones that acknowledge his Jamaican heritage, at the heart of many of his pictures. His atmospheric, slightly dishevelled work will be on show at Tate Britain (26 March \u2013 23 August). A different sort of scenery will appear at Dulwich Picture Gallery with the first British exhibition of the early-20th-century Estonian painter Konrad M\u00e4gi (24 March \u2013 12 July), whose Baltic views, often charged with symbolic intent, ripple with colour. But for joyousness and autumn warmth, \u201cPainting the French Riviera\u201d will fill the Royal Academy\u2019s galleries with hot shades as it explains why, from the 1870s, artists such as Matisse, C\u00e9zanne, Paul Signac, Monet and Bonnard headed south (2 October 2026 \u2013 31 January 2027).<\/p>\n Long before artists actively sought to be a bit odd, William Blake was showing the way. His visions are given full rein in \u201cWilliam Blake: The Age of Romantic Fantasy\u201d (National Gallery of Ireland, 16 April \u2013 19 July). Other non-conformists include Richard Dadd, the father-murdering painter of fairy scenes and maniacally intense portraits (\u201cRichard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam\u201d, Royal Academy, 25 July \u2013 25 October). The naive, folk painter \u2013 and former fisherman \u2013 Alfred Wallis captivated Ben Nicholson when he came across his seascapes in St Ives in 1928. What he and other avant-garde painters found in them is explored in \u201cAlfred Wallis: An Artists\u2019 Artist\u201d at Pallant House (21 November 2026 \u2013 11 April 2027).<\/p>\n Euan Uglow was another painter who did his own thing, and the nudes and still lifes of this meticulous postwar artist are the fruit of long looking and a curious empirical method (\u201cAn Arc from the Eye\u201d, Milton Keynes Gallery, 14 February \u2013 31 May). His contemporary Lucian Freud was also a slow painter \u2013 to the chagrin of his subjects, forced to endure innumerable sittings; his methods are laid bare in \u201cDrawing into Painting\u201d (National Portrait Gallery, 12 February \u2013 4 May).<\/p>\n Never a year goes by without a flurry of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood exhibitions, and this year\u2019s roster includes \u201cPre-Raphaelites: Art and Poetry\u201d (Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, 17 October 2026 \u2013 13 February 2027), \u201cA Call to Art: William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites\u201d (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 23 October 2026 \u20133 May 2027), and \u201cWilliam Morris: Common Paradise\u201d (Whitworth, Manchester, 12 December 2026 \u2013 14 November 2027). Morris, the great social campaigner, would surely have approved of the spirit behind \u201cComrades in Art: Artists against Fascism\u201d (Towner, Eastbourne, 7 May \u2013 18 October), a look at the ornery and principled painters of the Artists International Association, from Laura Knight to the unfortunate Percy Horton, who saw what was coming with the rise of militant nationalism.<\/p>\n Connoisseurship, patronage and therefore power is the theme of \u201cCosimo I de\u2019 Medici: Art and Dynasty\u201d, an imaginative exhibition at the Wallace Collection (18 November 2026 \u2013 21 March 2027). Duke Cosimo (1519-74) was the epitome of the cultured Renaissance prince, and the products of both taste and riches will be shown through objects he owned, from ceramics and swords to painting. To prep, use up any spare air miles and head to Florence for more Medici, and combine the trip with a visit to \u201cRothko in Florence\u201d (Palazzo Strozzi, 14 March \u2013 23 August), the stuff of dreams.<\/p>\n Even that, however, might not top \u201cMetamorphoses\u201d (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 6 February \u2013 25 May, then at Galleria Borghese, Rome, 22 June \u2013 20 September). Titian, Correggio, Cellini, Caravaggio, Rubens, Rodin, Brancusi and Magritte were among the artists who responded to Ovid\u2019s great poem with dazzling works of their own: a poem about transformations inspired transformative art. <\/p>\n [Further reading: Photo books of the year 2025<\/a>]<\/p>\n Content from our partners<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/dl6pgk4f88hky.cloudfront.net\/2021\/09\/TNS_master_logo.svg\"){kind=logo}
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