Feasts for the eyes

Although the art market is on its summer holidays, there are plenty of excellent exhibitions to visit, including one in France

- Huon Mallalieu

THE summer-holiday period is not a time for new artmarket openings and many galleries close for several weeks, or at least enter a period of semiaestivation. Nonetheless, there are still exhibitions to be visited that will run on until the reawakening in September. Here are one or two continuing commercial shows, together with one distinctly uncommercial one in France that looks well worth a detour.

When Dame Elizabeth Blackadder died in 2021, she bequeathed more than £7 million to the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) to provide prizes, travel awards, bursaries and other opportunities, not only for graduates, but, importantly, for artists in mid career. It is intended that 60-plus individuals will benefit from this Blackadder Houston Bequest each year. Blackadder was the first woman to be elected to both RA and RSA and, from 2001, she was Her Majesty’s Painter and Limner for Scotland. This scheme may well have been inspired by her own Carnegie travelling scholarship on leaving college. She is now perhaps more widely known than her husband, John Houston, RSA (1930–2008), but he was an influential teacher and, as a couple, they were at the centre of Scottish artistic life.