After a false start to their defence of Thomas Lawrence, the National Portrait Gallery reveal him as a great painter, not just a Regency sex pest
Archive
Canaletto and His Rivals, National Gallery
Do you ever tire of Canaletto? Then look closer — he is no hawker of painted postcards, but a great and pioneering Romantic master
Art Special: Cause for thought
You won’t find radicalism in the 2010 Turner Prize, but works of quiet and sophisticated poetic beauty instead
Gauguin, Tate Modern
Gauguin wasn’t a sex tourist, but a myth-maker and troubled genius, as Tate Modern’s magnificent, unmissable retrospective makes clear
Claude Monet, Grand Palais, Paris
Yes, Claude Monet was a great impressionist, but the whopper of a show in Paris reveals definitively that he was so much more
Eadweard Muybridge, Tate Britain
The pioneering photographer was a showman, an obsessive husband and ultimately a murderer. Yet he was also a profoundly important artist
Treasures from the eastern bloc
Budapest’s priceless artworks are the subject of the Royal Academy’s blockbuster autumn show. Our critic headed there to get the back story
Do we really need all these old paintings?
As the arts face the latest round of funding cuts, what’s a critic to suggest? Flog all the stuff we don’t show and watch the cash roll in…
Naked prejudice
He is berated as an arrogant paedophile who falsified his own life story. Even his talent is often dismissed. Yet Gauguin is a falsely maligned genius
An unexpected blessing
The Vatican has lent four of its beautiful Raphael tapestries to the V&A for an unprecedented exhibition. Our critic goes to the Sistine Chapel