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Ford Madox Brown ‘Pretty Baa Lambs’ (Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery)

This autumn’s blockbuster exhibition, Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde at Tate Britain, is a sumptuous display of much-loved paintings by the core of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) – Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt – together with works by their disciples, as well as sculpture, textiles, furniture and glass. Five years in the making, this is the chance to see around 180 works brought together, and is the largest survey of the group since 1984. Read my full review here

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The Soane Museum, former home of the architect, Sir John Soane, who designed the Bank of England and Dulwich Picture Gallery, is a treasure trove of the eccentric and eclectic right in the heart of London – and one of my favourite museums. Read about my visit and what antiquities, objets and oddments lie behind the door of No. 13 Lincoln’s Inn Field here.

Sir John Soane presides over his collection of Roman statuary in the basement of his home

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The Upper Class at Bay, tapestry by Grayson Perry

It’s about time we stopped referring to Grayson Perry as “the transvestite potter who won the Turner Prize”. That was then (2003); this is now, and Perry, by his own admission, hasn’t made a pot for ages. Perry, who is articulate and highly engaging on any subject, and who has always used his art and craft to comment on contemporary society’s mores, hypocrisies, and preoccupations, has now turned his keen artist’s gaze and curiosity onto taste and the British (which is, of course, synonymous with class) in a television series and an exhibition at Victoria Miro Gallery in north London of six monumental tapestries inspired by Hogarth’s social commentary ‘The Rake’s Progress’.

Read my full review here

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‘Marianne’ (1887) by Frederic, Lord Leighton
© Courtesy of Leighton House Museum

Leighton House Museum, former home and studio of the great Victorian artist, Frederic, Lord Leighton, and a “private palace for art”, provides the perfect setting for an exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite and Victorian paintings from the John Schaeffer Collection. Works by Pre-Raphaelite and other major Victorian artists, such as William Holman Hunt, Edward Burne-Jones, G F Watts, and John William Waterhouse, many of whom worked in the vicinity of Holland Park, close to Leighton’s former home.

Read my full review here