Dates for your diary

Andrew Lambirth looks forward to some great exhibitions in the year ahead

There’s a very full year’s viewing ahead to cheer the eye and gladden the heart however bleak the financial prospects. For a start, the National Gallery is mounting a major exhibition focusing on the fascinating relationship that Picasso had with the art of the past. His reworkings of Goya, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Chardin and Delacroix, together with responses to more contemporary masters such as van Gogh and Gauguin, provide a riveting dialogue of minds. Picasso: Challenging the Past (25 February to 7 June) will offer new ways to look at the Old Masters as well as a different take on Picasso. The autumn blockbuster is The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture 1600–1700 (21 October to 24 January 2010). Featuring such artists as Velázquez, Zurbarán, Alonso Cano and Pedro de Mena, and juxtaposing paintings with polychrome sculptures, this should be something of an intensely focused revelation.

At the National Portrait Gallery, two exhibitions stand out: Gerhard Richter Portraits (26 February to 31 May) and Constable Portraits: The Painter and His Circle (5 March to 14 June). I think Richter is overrated, but some of his best and most memorable work may well be in portraiture, much of it consisting of paintings based on photographs. Constable’s portraits are often overlooked in the excitement over his landscapes, but anyone who can paint with the directness and psychological acuity of the famous study of a Suffolk child (in the V&A) deserves to be celebrated as a portraitist. Eagerly anticipated.

The Tate and its various regional outposts always have plenty to offer, and the following is merely a selection. Van Dyck and Britain at Tate Britain (18 February to 17 May) is a welcome re-appraisal of a 17th-century artist much thought-of in the past but somewhat out of-fashion today.