There is not a single Georgia O’Keeffe in any UK public collection. In October 2027 the Courtauld will hang almost two dozen of them, most never shown in this country, in the first exhibition ever devoted to the landscapes she painted at Ghost Ranch. That is the headline of a 2027 programme that also brings back Paula Rego’s Dog Woman pastels for the first time in thirty years.
Georgia O’Keeffe: Ghost Ranch
1 October 2027 to 30 January 2028. O’Keeffe first went to northern New Mexico in 1929, found Ghost Ranch in 1934 and bought the Rancho de los Burros there in 1940. The paintings she made over the next two decades, of the red and yellow cliffs, the flat-topped Cerro Pedernal and the bones she picked up off the desert floor, are the reason she is not simply a painter of flowers.
The loans are the impressive part: the Whitney, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Yale, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, the Norton in West Palm Beach, and a group from the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Because nothing of hers is held publicly in Britain, this is effectively the only way to see this work without flying.
Alongside it, in the drawings gallery, around twenty photographs of O’Keeffe at Ghost Ranch from Life magazine shoots by Philippe Halsman in 1948 and John Loengard in 1966, including unpublished images and rare colour.
Paula Rego: Dog Woman
5 February to 23 May 2027. The Dog Woman pastels, made in 1994 and 1995, are the works that changed how Rego was read and arguably how women get painted. They show monumental, physically powerful women crouched and sprawled in stripped-bare rooms, and Rego made them by getting down in front of a mirror herself, as she put it, “turning myself into an animal”.
“In these pictures every woman’s a dog woman,” she said, “not downtrodden but powerful. To be bestial is good.” This is the first exhibition devoted to the series since it was shown thirty years ago, and it will include work not seen publicly in the UK since the 1990s. It was also the series that started her working in pastel, and the one on which she began her thirty-year collaboration with her model Lila Nunes.
In the Project Space at the same time, Paula Rego: Pendle Witches, the 1996 etchings and aquatints she made out of Blake Morrison’s poems. The title points at the 1612 Lancashire trial that hanged eight women and two men for witchcraft; the prints are her own stories rather than illustrations of his.
Turner, Constable, Girtin and Cotman in one room
18 June to 5 September 2027. Turner and the Landscape Generation: Journeys in Watercolour puts four artists together who were born within a few years of each other, trained the same way and went to the same sketching clubs, which produced both the friendships and the rivalries. It follows them on the road: Turner in Switzerland and Germany, Cotman round Yorkshire, Constable in the Lakes, and Girtin, Turner and Cotman across Wales.
The two drawings shows
Drawing in the Age of Bruegel: New Discoveries, 5 February to 16 May 2027. Flemish drawings from the Courtauld’s own collection, timed to a new catalogue of the holdings and carrying the results of technical analysis that has turned up fresh evidence about materials and methods.
Rubens: The Master and his Circle, 26 May to 12 September 2027. Rubens drew to think, and this puts his rapid pen sketches and chalk studies next to work by Van Dyck, Jordaens and Van Diepenbeeck. The centrepiece is his chalk portrait of Helena Fourment, his second wife, done when she was still a teenager.
And a pair of doors nobody knew existed
Vanessa Bell: A Rediscovery, October 2027 to February 2028. This is the quiet one and possibly the best story in the announcement. A pair of painted wooden panels attributed to Vanessa Bell, made at the Omega Workshops between 1913 and 1916, originally the doors of a wardrobe. They were bought in 1919, the year Omega closed, stayed in the same family ever since, and have not been seen in public in over a century. The family has given them to the Courtauld, which has conserved them.
What you can see for nothing right now
Ella Walker’s two new commissions, The Studio and Verdaccio Wall, are already up in the John Browne Entrance Hall and the Ticketing Hall, and they are free to walk in and look at. They are big, chalky, fresco-like canvases that borrow poses from Gothic sculpture and Renaissance painting and put them somewhere unplaceable. It is the second Courtauld Commission, after Rachel Jones in 2025.
Our take: put the O’Keeffe in the diary now and expect it to be the hardest ticket the Courtauld has had in years, because there is genuinely no other way to see these paintings in Britain. The Rego is the one we would go to twice, once for the scale and once for the drawing. And the thing worth doing this month rather than next year is the Ella Walker: it is free, it is in the entrance hall, and you can see it without buying a ticket to anything. The Courtauld is also the rare central London gallery that is better late in the day than early, because the Impressionist rooms upstairs empty out after four and Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère is worth having to yourself.
Need to know
- Where: The Courtauld Gallery, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN
- Hours: daily 10am to 6pm, last entry 5.15pm
- Price: tickets from £14. Members, students and under-18s go free to the collection, other concessions available. Ticket on-sale dates for the 2027 shows are still to be announced
- Free now: Ella Walker: Courtauld Commission 2026, entrance and ticketing halls, from 3 September 2026
- Nearest station: Temple, or Covent Garden
More of this season in our guide to London exhibitions, more free art in our guide to London’s free museums, and the rest of the building in our Covent Garden guide.
