Between Light and Shadow, with Cats Watching: September 2025 Art Exhibitions

September in the art world feels like a prelude before the “exhibitions of the year” begin to open in October and November. Italy and France take the lead, offering major shows that set the tone – Fra Angelico in Florence and Georges de La Tour in Paris. At the same time, across the Atlantic, American museums present smaller but delightful exhibitions that deserve a closer look before the blockbuster season fully kicks in.

 

Georges de La Tour. From Shadow to Light

France / Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris

until January 25, 2026

The French open the season with a master of silence and candlelight. Georges de La Tour. More than thirty of his paintings, nearly a third of his surviving oeuvre, gather in Paris, making this one of the most ambitious shows of his work in decades.

La Tour is sometimes divisive, for the peculiar stillness of his figures. Some find them uncanny, almost waxlike, caught in suspension between the living and the eternal. Yet even skeptics admit that no one captured light and shadow with such genius. A single candle transforms a humble scene into a vision of mystery.

 

Remarkably, La Tour was almost completely forgotten for nearly three centuries. His unsigned works were scattered, often attributed to Murillo, Caravaggio, or Velázquez, until art historians began reconnecting the pieces and finally restored his name to the canon.

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Captivated by Vincent: The Intimate Friendship of Jo van Gogh-Bonger and Isaac Israëls

The Netherlands / Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Until January 25, 2026

This small but revealing exhibition shines a spotlight on Jo van Gogh-Bonger – Vincent’s sister-in-law and the woman without whom the genius of Van Gogh might never have reached the world. Married to Theo van Gogh, Jo was only 28 when she lost both her husband and his brother within a year. Alongside her grief, she inherited a daunting responsibility: a trunk full of paintings and letters. Refusing to let them fade into obscurity, Jo published Vincent’s correspondence, organized exhibitions, and carefully shaped his reputation. In many ways, she became the true architect of Van Gogh’s posthumous fame.

Around this time, painter Isaac Israëls entered her circle. Born in 1865, the son of the celebrated artist Jozef Israëls, he became one of the leading figures of the Amsterdam Impressionists. Through Jo he encountered Van Gogh’s work not as a distant legend but as real canvases she lent him, including Sunflowers, The Bedroom, and The Yellow House. In his studio these paintings became touchstones, and Israëls jokingly called his own experiments “Vincenting,” a playful way of acknowledging the influence he absorbed.

The exhibition brings together about ten of these works, alongside more than a hundred letters between Jo and Isaac, and portraits of Jo and her son. A centerpiece is the recently restored portrait of Jo herself, where the yellow varnish has been lifted to reveal a woman of quiet strength, the very woman who ensured that Vincent’s sunflowers would bloom for the world.

So next time you find yourself marveling at The Bedroom or Sunflowers, don’t forget to raise a quiet toast to Jo.

 

Pride and Solace: Medieval Books of Hours and Their Readers

Belgium / Groeningemuseum, Brugge

Until October 7, 2025

Have you ever been to Bruges? If not, here is a little tip: watch the film “In Bruges” first. After that, you will not only want to visit the city, but you’ll also want to linger there forever. Bruges is perhaps the most medieval of all European cities, a place where time seems to flow slowly and mysteriously. The Groeningemuseum, right in its heart, is perfectly in tune with this atmosphere. It pulls you into a contemplative, almost otherworldly Middle Ages.

The exhibition Pride and Solace brings together the delicate marvels of medieval Books of Hours, personal prayer books that were once the most treasured objects in a household. Richly decorated with miniature paintings, gilded initials, and intricate borders, these books were both private devotional tools and artistic treasures.

But this is not just about admiring their beauty. The show explores the very act of reading and living with these books: a monk tracing the hours by candlelight, a noblewoman finding solace in the margins, a traveler carrying comfort on the road. These were not just manuscripts; they were intimate companions, offering pride in possession and solace in prayer.

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Surreal on Paper

Denmark / SMK, Copenhagen

Until January 11, 2026

If you love Surrealism as much as we do, then Copenhagen is the place to be this fall. Surreal on Paper is a rare chance to see drawings, watercolors, and works on paper by the great Surrealists. Trust us, the effect is no less captivating than Max Ernst’s riot of colors or the dreamscapes of Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington.

More than a hundred works reveal the movement in its rawest, most experimental form, quick lines, delicate washes, sudden visions caught on fragile sheets. Paper became the playground where Surrealists tested ideas, releasing their subconscious with ink, pencil, and watercolor long before some of these motifs reached their canvases.

On view are works by Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Max Ernst, Victor Brauner, Man Ray, André Breton, and Remedios Varo, among others, names that shaped Surrealism both in its images and in its manifestos. Seeing their visions condensed into works on paper is like catching them mid-thought, before the dream became paint on canvas.

We’ve just stepped out of the exhibition ourselves, and it is marvelous in all its surrealist madness. Until the big centenary show lands in Philadelphia, maybe next year, with more than 500 works, Copenhagen gives you the perfect, paper-thin glimpse into the Surrealist imagination.

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Fra Angelico

Italy / Palazzo Strozzi & Museo di San Marco, Florence

Until January 25, 2026

Italians, as always, know how to open the season with style. While the rest of the art world is only warming up, Florence pulls out the big guns: a monumental exhibition dedicated to Fra Angelico, one of the fathers of the Renaissance. Hosted across two venues, Palazzo Strozzi and the Museo di San Marco, this is the first major Fra Angelico show in the city in seventy years. The last time Florence honored him on this scale was back in 1955. In short, this is a cultural milestone of 2025.

The exhibition brings together more than 140 works from world-class collections – the Louvre, the Met, the Vatican, the Rijksmuseum, Munich, Berlin, and many others. Paintings, drawings, illuminated manuscripts, sculptures. Masterpieces that usually live far apart are being reunited, including altarpieces broken up and scattered centuries ago. Some arrive fresh from major restorations, revealing once again the brilliance of Angelico’s luminous colors and spiritual intensity.

In the exhibition, his dialogue with contemporaries like Masaccio and Filippo Lippi, together with sculptors Ghiberti, Michelozzo, and Luca della Robbia, shaped a visual language that unites sacred devotion with human presence.

For anyone who has dreamed of experiencing Fra Angelico’s vision in depth, Florence this autumn is the place to be.

The exhibition catalog is expected by mid-October

 

Appiani. Il Neoclassicismo a Milano

Italy / Palazzo Reale, Milan

September 23, 2025 – January 11, 2026

If you are already in Italy, marveling at Fra Angelico’s sacred drama in Florence, and feel the urge to exchange it for the polished beauty of Neoclassical painting, Milan will welcome you into Appiani’s world of radiant elegance. We have noticed that 2025 is quietly turning into the year of Andrea Appiani.  Wherever you turn, he seems to be waiting with another exhibition. After his summer appearance in France (see our July exhibition roundup), the spotlight now shifts to Milan, where Palazzo Reale devotes a grand exhibition to this painter who defined Italian Neoclassicism. Appiani is having more of a grand tour this year than most of us.

Appiani celebrated as both the refined interpreter of Enlightenment ideals and Napoleon’s official “First Painter,” comes alive here through more than 100 works from public and private collections in Italy and abroad. His portraits and mythological scenes reveal why contemporaries admired him so deeply. He could merge the authority of classical form with a surprising intimacy and warmth.

Palazzo Reale itself is a building with a history as layered as the art inside. From the courts of the Visconti and Sforza to its flourishing under the Habsburgs and Napoleon, from devastation during WWII bombings to a twenty-year reconstruction, today it stands beside the Duomo as one of Milan’s cultural calling cards.

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Gothic Modern

⭐Our Favorite

Austria / Albertina Museum, Vienna

September 19, 2025 – January 11, 2026

Gothic Modern has already made waves in Finland, and now it has arrived at the Albertina in Vienna. We’ve already written about what may be the most haunting work in the show, Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s Lemminkäinen’s Mother (read our deep dive here). Trust us, you will not walk past this painting without stopping.

The whole idea of “Gothic Modern” grew out of northern artists around 1900 who turned to the Gothic and the Northern Renaissance for inspiration. Instead of cutting ties with the past, they embraced its drama and mystery to shape something entirely new. The exhibition gathers almost 200 works, placing Holbein, Dürer, Cranach, and Baldung side by side with Munch, Kollwitz, Klimt, Van Gogh, Schjerfbeck, and many others

And do not skip the Belgian Symbolist Gustave Van de Woestyne. His paintings rarely travel, and here they appear in unusual numbers. And then there are Hugo Simberg’s eerie Dances of Death, plus his unforgettable Wounded Angel.

This exhibition is firmly in our top ten of the year.

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Ithell Colquhoun. Between Worlds

United Kingdom / Tate Britain, London

Until October 19, 2025

Ithell Colquhoun might be a new name to many, but she deserves to be placed alongside the greats of modernist mysticism. Think of her as a curious mix of Hilma af Klint, Georgia O’Keeffe, and the later Dorothea Tanning: her canvases throb with esoteric symbols, organic forms, and a very personal sense of the surreal. The Tate’s new exhibition is, in fact, the first major UK retrospective of her work, finally giving her the spotlight she has long deserved.

Our personal favorite? The Pine Family. This work was requested to be removed from a London exhibition in 1942, labeled as pornographic at the time. Art historians still puzzle over its meaning, which leaves the fun to you: see if you can guess why it so irritated the organizers back then.

The exhibition runs alongside a retrospective of Edward Burra, and it is an astonishing dialogue: Colquhoun’s mystical explorations meet Burra’s vivid, social, almost theatrical painting. Together they create an exhibition that truly lives up to the title Between Worlds.

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The Edwardians: Age of Elegance

United Kingdom / The King’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London

Until November 23, 2025

At Buckingham Palace’s King’s Gallery, this exhibition brings the world of Edward VII & Queen Alexandra and George V & Queen Mary into dazzling focus. Think of tiaras, fashion, portraits, jewelry, and photographs. All the glamour of the royal stage in one sweeping show. This is arguably the most glamorous exhibition of the year, with a distinctly regal accent and scale.

 

One of the highlights is Queen Alexandra’s coronation dress. Names like John Singer Sargent, Edward Burne-Jones, Frederic Leighton, William Morris, Rosa Bonheur, and Laurits Tuxen already give the exhibition an extra touch of brilliance.

If you love fashion, royalty, or simply want to immerse yourself in something both beautiful and historically intense, this is one of those shows you’ll be talking about long after leaving the gallery.

 

Spirit & Splendor: El Greco, Velázquez and the Hispanic Baroque

United States / Blanton Museum of Art, Austin

Until February 1, 2026

Spirit & Splendor is a jaw-dropping journey through approximately 60 paintings from the Hispanic Society Museum & Library. The show brings together masters like El Greco, Velázquez, and Zurbarán, alongside artists from Latin America who pushed Baroque into new, colonial contexts. Every piece feels like a story.

 

 

One portrait caught our eye: Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, 3rd Duke of Alba by Anthonis Mor. For Spaniards, he was a formidable military leader, for the Dutch, a figure of ruthlessness. He governed the Netherlands under Philip II and harshly suppressed Protestant uprisings. Art and history clash in this image, capturing the weight of power and the controversies of legacy.

We actually visited this exhibition earlier when it was on view in Boca Raton, Florida, and the feeling was unforgettable. Each canvas seemed to whisper not only of saints and splendor, but also of the rise and turbulence of empire, the glory of Spain and the shadows of its colonial reach.

 

Rachel Ruysch: Artist, Naturalist, and Pioneer

United States / Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Until December 7, 2025

 

Bouquets never looked so alive. Rachel Ruysch was anything but ordinary. She was a rare woman artist who gained fame in her own lifetime, the first woman admitted to the painters’ guild in The Hague, and one of the most gifted still-life painters of the Dutch Golden Age. She painted more than a hundred works, sold them for astonishingly high prices, and even managed to fully support her large household. That alone would be impressive, but add that she had ten children, lived to the age of 86, served as court painter to Elector Palatine Johann Wilhelm, and even has a crater on Mercury named after her.

The first U.S. monographic exhibition brings together 35 of her finest paintings, many rarely seen in public. Alongside her works are botanical specimens and art by contemporaries such as her sister Anna Ruysch and Maria Sibylla Merian, revealing the networks of women who shaped art and science together.

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Paws on Parchment

United States / The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Until February 22, 2026

The medieval cat was many things at once: a household companion, a vigilant guardian of book collections against mice, and a symbol loaded with moral meaning.

The exhibition brings together cat images from manuscripts across Europe, the Middle East, and Armenia. On the margins of these works, cats could be playful tricksters or serve as sharp allegories for human vices. Islamic and Armenian manuscripts show that fascination with cats was far from a purely European affair. Tradition even holds that the Prophet Muhammad had a beloved cat, Muezza, who slept on his sleeve.

One of the most endearing highlights? Actual pawprints of a medieval cat who once dashed across a manuscript page before the ink had dried, leaving a trace of daily life preserved for centuries.

This show also launches a larger series of projects at the Walters exploring the role of animals in art history. And really, who could resist a medieval cat exhibition?

 

And while September prepares us for the season ahead, a few additional exhibitions deserve your attention. Sargent and Paris has left the Met in New York and can now be seen at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. In Genoa, Repetto Gallery presents Giorgio Morandi and Beyond, while in Vienna, the Belvedere hosts Radical! Women Artists and Modernism 1910–1950, a small but powerful show that redefines narratives of modern art.

 

Header image credits: This collage was created by the author using details from the following artworks:

Ad Astra by Akseli Gallen-Kallela; Cristo coronato di spine by Beato Angelico; The New-born  by Georges dec La Tour

All original works are in the public domain. The collage composition © 2025 exhibitioncatalogs.com. All rights reserved.