Table of contents for November 2025 in Apollo

While November might conjure images of grey days and bleak weather to many readers of Apollo, this year it also promises the closest thing the art world has to sunny uplands. The November auctions in New York are looking better than many recent auction seasons. By better, I mean that there are more high-quality works of art presented for sale than there have been recently. The notable uptick has, as many commentators have pointed out, been driven by single-owner collections. As the announcements began in the late summer, it seemed as though Christie’s was ‘winning’ the auction season. The collections of Elaine Wynn and Robert Weiss, among others, suggest that auctions of 20th-century art might be back to bringing in around $50 million for a single work. Wynn bought Francis…

Great whisky is about patience; every dram is the result of numerous decisions. There are seven essential stages to the process. First, the barley is malted and milled to free the starches. Second, mashing, where hot water breaks down the starch into sugars. Third, fermentation in washbacks, in which yeast turns those sugars into a liquid called wash. Next comes distillation in copper pots, before maturation in casks. Then, for blended whiskies, there is marrying, where the maker mixes the liquid from several vessels to create a final product. Last, the whisky is reduced, filtered and bottled. Japanese makers adapted and refined this method in the first half of the 20th century. Commercial whisky production in Japan began in 1923 when Shinjiro Torii opened what is now the Yamazaki distillery.…

1 The Carracci Drawings: The making of the Galleria Farnese Musée du Louvre, Paris 5 November–2 February 2026 The elaborate frescoes of the Galleria Farnese in Rome are considered the crowning achievement of Annibale and Agostino Carracci, who decorated the vaulted room in the Palazzo Farnese between 1597 and 1608. Here, preparatory drawings from rough sketches to large-scale cartoons laying out the brothers’ designs give an intimate sense of the gallery’s interior. 2 Wright of Derby: From the Shadows National Gallery, London 7 November–10 May 2026 Joseph Wright of Derby’s reputation as a ‘painter of light’ is well-known; this exhibition shows that his tenebrism was not merely a demonstration of virtuosic skill but also a vehicle for conveying certain moods and themes or dramatising moments of discovery. 3 Turner and…

How will you contain your excitement as you wait for the opening of the exhibition ‘Vanessa Bell & Duncan Grant’, recently announced for November 2026 at Tate Britain? With more than 250 works, the show promises to take in ‘vivid portraits, still lives, landscape paintings, decorative works on furniture, ceramics, textiles, and much more’. And it also includes what the press release calls an ‘unmissable highlight’: ‘a once in-a-lifetime restaging of Duncan Grant’s studio, relocated for the exhibition from their Sussex home, Charleston’. One way to occupy yourself in the meantime would be to read Wendy Hitchmough’s Vanessa Bell: The Life and Art of a Bloomsbury Radical (2025), then go and see ‘Roger Fry’, which opens this month at Charleston – where of course you could see the painted furniture…

It feels like a long time that we’ve been without the Studio Museum in Harlem. Founded to address the lack of New York City institutions dedicated to art created by members of the African diaspora, it has been missed these past seven years. It’s true that Black artists have recently achieved a presence that could have only been imagined at the time of the museum’s creation. While it was closed, artists whose careers were launched at the Studio Museum, such as Kerry James Marshall and Julie Mehretu, set records at auction. The role of the Studio Museum, however, has been not only to sustain Black artistic production but also to challenge easy definitions and demarcations of ‘Black’ art – by the art market or elsewhere – by expanding our sense…

In 1656, the Dutch East India Company – since 1639 the only Europeans allowed to trade with Japan – ordered from its contacts in Nagasaki a shipment of Japanese porcelain. Before 1644, Europe’s appetite for this ‘white gold’ had been fed by Chinese porcelain; but the chaos following the fall of the Ming Dynasty in 1644 had made supply chains unreliable. News had reached the company that Japanese porcelain was also highly regarded and had become attuned to European tastes. Thus began a busy trade. By the time exports from China began again in 1683, the lucrative market in a distinctive Japanese style of enamelled porcelain was so well established that the Chinese themselves began to imitate it. Japanese porcelain-making was then a young art form. In the 1590s, Japanese…

The Maverick’s Museum: Albert Barnes and his American Dream Blake Gopnik The American collector Albert C. Barnes earned his fortune selling Argyrol, a silver-based gonorrhoeal antiseptic that was, according to one British doctor, ‘the best thing we have had since the introduction of cocaine’. Venereal disease gave Barnes an almost limitless market for his invention, which was even prescribed to infants. A few drops in a newborn’s eye prevented ocular infections that might be picked up in the birth canal. ‘With the money acquired from a product which prevents blindness,’ read a 1928 profile in the New Yorker, ‘Dr Barnes purchases pictures for the sight to feast upon’. On the eve of the Great Depression, Barnes sold his business for $5 million, able to plough even more of his fortune…

In Samuel Palmer’s painting In a Shoreham Garden (c. 1830), the viewer is struck by the stillness. Like the best gardens, it is somewhere to stop, to escape from the world: a place where the everyday hum is dimmed. Gardens slow people down, so that they have time to stare and think. When he was homesick on the streets of London, Yeats dreamed of retreating to his imagined plot on the isle of Innisfree, writing ‘And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow.’ Equally fed up with the filth and grime of city life, in the mid 1820s the young Palmer left the capital for rural Kent, in the company of like-minded friends who all yearned, like Yeats, for a return to a simpler, quieter life.…

Simultaneously chaotic and cacophonous, elegant and erudite, Rome has been a city of contrasts since antiquity. At the Campo de’ Fiori market today fruit and vegetable stalls still, just about, hold their own amid a battery of tat. Bawdily shaped novelty bottles of alarmingly luminous limon-cello and lascivious aprons are, it seems, on the up. In the middle of the piazza a statue of Giordano Bruno, burned here as a heretic in 1600, gazes impassively over the scene under a crisp blue sky, as the first early morning chill of autumn sweeps away the torpor of late summer. Just a square away from the cabbages and novelty aprons, Piazza Farnese is quite a different proposition: aristocratic calm overlooked by the vast Palazzo Farnese, the grandest of Renaissance palaces in Rome.…

When the French novelist Jules Verne sent his clubbable Englishman Phineas Fogg around the world in 80 days, he sent him via Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan. Perhaps surprisingly, Verne does not seem all that interested in one of travel’s main attractions, the discovery of different countries. Of Japan, he offers a little colour, but only a little: ‘youngsters, who looked as if they were cut-outs from a Japanese screen, were playing among short-legged poodles and yellowish cats that had no tails and were very lazy and affectionate. […] The streets were teeming with people and there was an incessant coming and going.’ Yet while Verne’s globe-trotting novel, with its endless facts about treaties and international border agreements, was finding commercial success, France had become gripped by a mania for…

Michaelina Wautier – Painter 30 September–22 February 2026 Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna Hold your nose. Something smells. A rotten egg. You can almost see the foul vapour rising from the shell. A boy pinches his nostrils, concealing his mouth, and meets our gaze with an inscrutable stare. The paintings comprising Michaelina Wautier’s philosophical reflection, The Five Senses (1650), certainly have a mischievous quality. In another, a knife rests on a table, blood drips from a boy’s hand, his strange face contorted in an expression of pain and annoyance. A boy tries to play his recorder but is distracted; another takes a sly bite of buttered bread. One last boy holds a pair of glasses to his eyes, peering inquisitively at the palm of his hand. These five witty, masterfully painted works…

Bomarzo Manuel Mujica Lainez Translated from Spanish by Gregory Rabassa You cannot fault the pedigree of Manuel Mujica Lainez’s Bomarzo. On its original publication in Argentina in 1962 it was praised by Borges for bringing back the spirit of Robert Louis Stevenson and Victor Hugo to the modern novel, and promptly went on to win the Gran Premio Nacional de Literatura. Never out of print in Spanish, this new edition of Gregory Rabassa’s 1969 translation comes as a welcome chance to read a book that, in prospect at least, is mouthwatering – above all for devotees of early modern Italy. Framed as the memoirs of the real-life 16th-century nobleman Pier Francesco Orsini, Bomarzo is a paean to the era, and to one of its strangest creations: the so-called Sacro Bosco…