A look ahead to 2008

At the National Gallery the year starts with a show of Pompeo Batoni’s stylish portraits of 18th-century Grand Tourists in Italy (20 February to 18 May). The painter Alison Watt (born Greenock, 1965) has now completed her two-year stint as the NG’s seventh Associate Artist and will be showing the fruits of her labours in the Sunley Room (13 March to 22 June). Watch out for the endless fascinations of drapery. The summer slot is filled by Radical Light: Italy’s Divisionist Painters 1891–1910 (18 June to

7 September), which traces the development of Italian pointillism into the excesses of Futurism. I’m looking forward to seeing work by Giovanni Segantini, though the likes of museum-hating Boccioni and Balla do seem a bit out of place in the hallowed precincts of our National Gallery. Autumn brings a major study of the Renaissance Portrait, Van Eyck to Titian (15 October to 18 January 2009), trumpeted as the first show to bring together Northern and Southern Renaissance masterpieces in a themed rather than chronological hang.

Photography gets the best deal at the National Portrait Gallery. Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913 to 2008 (14 February to 26 May) is self-explanatory, as indeed is Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life 1990–2005 (16 October to 25 January 2009). Sandwiched somewhere in between is Wyndham Lewis: Portraits (3 July to 19 October), an exhibition worth waiting for, by one of our most radical and difficult artists.

Meanwhile, the Tate offers its usual cornucopia of very mixed delights. The year starts well with a Rose Hilton retrospective at Tate St Ives (26 January to 4 May), a tribute to the gentle School of Paris lyricism of this intensely feminine and intuitive painter. At Tate Liverpool is the first major UK showing of the flamboyant French artist, Niki de Saint Phalle (1 February to 5 May).