Given his undisputed central place in the history of British art, it is surprising that the three-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Joshua Reynolds is not being celebrated this year with more éclat. The principal tribute will be an exhibition Family & Friends: Reynolds at Port Eliot (24th July–5th September) at the Box in Plymouth, the city where Reynolds made his reputation – he was born on 16th July 1723 at Plympton, on its outskirts. The exhibition will explore the patronage he enjoyed from the Eliot family of Port Eliot, St Germans, and will be supplemented by the museum’s collection of paintings by Reynolds, the largest outside London.

If asked to name the most successful exhibition of contemporary German art, few people would intuitively think of an exhibition presenting vivid reconstructions of the polychromy of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture. In part, this is due to the tendency to see the exhibition’s principal attractions, the colourful sculptures produced by the archaeologists Vinzenz Brinkmann and Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann, as something more akin to pedagogical tools rather than works of art.