In May this year, Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington’s 1945 oil painting, Les Distractions de Dagobert, sold at Sotheby’s New York for a staggering $28.5 million, the highest sum ever achieved at auction by a female British painter. To put this in context, no painting by Salvador Dalí has attracted such a price tag.

The founding President of the Royal Academy Joshua Reynolds dismissed still life painting as a minor genre, lower in the pecking order than historical paintings, landscapes and portraits. And to a certain extent, this stigma still lingers. It’s just something landscape painters do to fill the time when it’s raining, right?

Wrong.

The second major show at Charleston’s new gallery in Lewes, Dorothy Hepworth and Patricia Preece, an Untold Story, raises more questions than it answers.

Every December, until his death in 2000, the London-based artist, Euan Uglow, would think up a new design, and hand-produce around 300 cards to send out to friends and family.

This Uglow card is among a collection on show at Austin/Desmond’s viewing room until January 12, alongside works designed by David Jones, Alexander Mackenzie, Dennis Mitchell, Edward Wadsworth, CRW Nevinson, Mary Martin and Viola Paterson.

Iona, in the Western Isles of Scotland, has long attracted artists, keen to interpret the ever-shifting visual interplay between sea, sky and shoreline.

To that list you can add contemporary oil painter Frances Macdonald, currently enjoying a solo show – largely featuring oil paintings of Iona – at Portland Gallery, on Bennet St, St James

One of the great loves of Lucian Freud’s life was his dog Pluto, a whippet who he named after the Greek God of the Underworld.

Pluto was present in Freud’s studio from 1988 to her death in 2003, his most prolific period, and was frequently painted by the artist, with and without human companions.

You can see Freud’s 1988 etching of Pluto in the current exhibition at London gallery Browse & Darby, until January 24.

Sean Jefferson: The Twelve Days of Christmas and Other Works runs at David Messum Fine Art, St James until December 22.

Each painting demands a careful reading, though few viewers will be able to decipher all the folkloric and spiritual symbols. It’s a feast of fairies, sprites, jesters, druids, winged dogs, ominous ravens, runic symbols, gnarly trees, medicinal herbs and slivers of moon in yellow skies.

In 2006, the painter Hurvin Anderson accompanied his father to his regular barbershop, situated in a converted attic in the centre of Birmingham.

It was a Jamaican barbershop, which made the father – a Windrush immigrant – feel at home, as it was designed to do, painted in bright colours, the walls covered with posters of iconic black figures and newspaper cuttings: a very Caribbean clutter.

Hurvin Anderson: Salon Paintings runs at Hastings Contemporary until March 3.

Discover the latest show at Long & Ryle gallery of Nick Archer, as well as a brief history of his practice.

In 1970 the Chinese experimental artist Li Yuan-Chi moved from London to the village of Banks, in Cumbria, just north of Hadrian’s Wall. His motive? To single-handedly convert a derelict farmhouse into an art centre, turning cowsheds into galleries.

Kettle’s Yard, in Cambridge, are running the exhibition Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-Chi and Friends, from November 11 to February 18, marking the profound impact the artist’s idiosyncratic Cumbrian venture had on 20th-century British art.

A work by David Spiller is instantly recognisable. Influenced by Picasso and Dubuffet, as much as Disney and Warhol, his canvases, stitched together by hand, display a smorgasbord of competing styles and techniques. They are usually dominated by a representation of a cartoon character.

Spiller’s estate is represented in the UK by Portland Gallery on Bennet St, St James, which is, from November 8 – December 1, showing the last of a trilogy of exhibitions of his work, this one dedicated to his output between 2010 and his death in 2018.

2023 has been an eventful year for the painter Anthony Eyton. In May he celebrated his 100th birthday. In June he was awarded an OBE in King Charles’ first Birthday Honours, and was featured in an exhibition of portraits at Michael Richardson’s Art Space Gallery, alongside Arturo di Stefano. And in September he enjoyed the opening of a retrospective of his work at Browse and Darby. The show continues until November 10.

The lifelong rejection of authority and convention that shaped John Craxton’s life can be in large part explained by his childhood connection with West Sussex, and, in particular, with the city of Chichester, where he was sent to board at a choir school, aged 11.

Now he’s back. A posthumous retrospective of Craxton’s six-decade career, A Modern Odyssey, curated by his biographer Ian Collins, opens at Pallant House in Chichester this weekend.

In 1988 the Scottish figurative expressionist painter John Bellany was given a liver transplant by the pioneering surgeon Sir Roy Calne. “When he came to afterwards,” Calne later remembered, “he asked not for analgesics, but for paper and paint.”

Bellany had had liver disease for years, despite giving up alcohol in 1985, and his brush with death – and new lease of life – galvanised his art practice, enabling him to ‘see colours he hadn’t seen before’.

What do Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgois, Barbara Hepworth, Georgia O’Keeffe, Berthe Morisot, Helen Frankenthaler, Bridget Riley, Tracey Emin, Leonora Carrington, Tamara de Lempicka, Angelica Kauffman, Artemisia Gentileschi, Yoko Ono, Gwen John, Yayoi Kusuma, Sarah Lucas, Cornelia Parker and Cindy Sherman have in common?

None of them have been given a solo exhibition in the main galleries of the Royal Academy, that’s what. In fact, NO woman has ever been given that honour in the 255-year history of Britain’s most prestigious venue.

Until now, that is.

Take a bow Marina Abramović…

The Belfast-born sculptor Tim Shaw has had a good 2023. From works in the Summer Exhibition at the RA , to his piece, Man on Fire, being unveiled in July of this year outside the Imperial War Museum North, to being chosen by the Fiumano Clase Gallery as the artist they are exhibiting in the second edition of SOLO CONTEMPORARY…

The economist John Maynard Keynes sits in the garden of Charleston Farmhouse in the summer of 1917, painted by his host, friend and former lover Duncan Grant. The painting is in the collection of the Charleston Trust, and is in the inaugural exhibition in their new gallery in Lewes, East Sussex, which opened with a sumptuous private view this week.

Tracey Emin has never been shy about putting herself at the centre of her art. In her early career, this reflected a provocative, feisty personality, though it would be short-sighted to dismiss Emin as a mere provocateur. She has, over the years, demonstrated her prodigious talent in many mediums, including installation, sculpture, painting, printing, textiles, photography, film and neon.

Several examples of Emin’s prints will be on display during British Art Fair (and until October 9) on the ground floor of The Conran Shop’s new flagship store in Sloane Square, to mark a partnership with the Fair. The prints have been chosen by the Conran group from the collection of Chelsea gallerist Tanya Baxter.

Before WW1, Slade drop-out David Bomberg made his name as a radical, avant-garde artist, creating complex, geometric compositions, blending elements of cubism and futurism. Without Bomberg we wouldn’t have had Auerbach or Kossoff.

Bomberg’s work, Calle de San Pedro, courtesy of Osborne Samuel Gallery, can be seen at the Crossing Borders exhibition on the second floor of Saatchi Gallery during British Art Fair.

The current retrospective of the work of Gwen John, at Pallant House Gallery until October 8, attempts to dispel the widespread notion that John was something of a recluse. There’s no doubting the sublime, beguiling quality of the work but a whole room of austere limited-palette nun portraits hardly tells a convincing story of Gwen John living the high life in Montmartre. However, a different side to the reclusive artists work is revealed through love letters and gifts to the subject of her fixation- a Russian-Jewish emigrée named Vera Oumançoff…