‘As long as autumn lasts, I shall not have hands, canvas and colours enough to paint the beautiful things I see,’ wrote Vincent van Gogh to his brother, Theo, on September 26, 1888. That year, he filled his canvases with bursts of gold and orange streaked with green, standing against crisp blue skies festooned with passing clouds. As the last hooray of Nature before the end of the year, a time of browning fields and flaming leaves, fat rosehips and juicy berries, autumn has never failed to inspire artists. John Constable sang of the browning foliage and leaden skies of his beloved East Bergholt in Suffolk, Claude Monet of the resplendent reflection of the trees on the Seine at Argenteuil, just outside Paris in France, and the greatest poet of autumn among them all, Samuel Palmer, made his views of the Darent Valley, Kent, a gilded explosion of russet, tangerine and coral.
It’s only fitting, then, that this season sees a cornucopia of fairs and exhibitions. There is much for collectors of all kinds to look forward to in the coming weeks. London alone hosts PAD, a triumph of 20th-century and contemporary design; Frieze, always worth a visit, as much for the imaginative fashion of the art crowd as for the thought-provoking, sometimes shocking, but never boring works; Frieze Masters, for 16th-century Flemish and other greats, jaw-dropping antiquities and rare books; the Affordable Art Fair, for everything from contemporary British to indigenous Australian artists; or the antique clocks, glistering silverware, glorious furniture and paintings at LAPADA.
Not to be outdone, museums and galleries vie for attention with, among others, the glittering glamour of Marie Antoinette’s diamond-encrusted style (at the V&A Museum), Cecil Beaton’s soul-capturing photography (at the National Portrait Gallery), Picasso on either side of the Irish Sea (at Tate Modern and the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin) and, at the Wiltshire Museum in Devizes, an ingenious show that celebrates the county’s landscape and ancient history through the work of artists such as Henry Moore, Paul Nash and Norman Ackroyd.
Nevertheless, leave time, this month, to head outdoors. The happy spells of very warm, sunny weather in the summer, miraculously punctuated by enough rain to prevent an early drop en masse, promise some of the best foliage in years, a thrilling spectacle where bronze oaks, blazing Japanese maples and rich yellow beeches soar above the ground in a giant mosaic of bejewelled colours. Who knows, you may even have your very own van Gogh moment: ‘I have a terrifying lucidity at times when Nature is so beautiful these days, and then I am not conscious of myself any more…’
