Welcome to not just the tutors and 2022. It's a new year. What looking back can we look

forward to in this coming year? Well, the year starts strong with exhibitions. Franz

Harz, the male portrait exhibition, is at the Wallace Collection until the 30th of January.

Harz is the Dutch golden age painter who should be mentioned in the same

breath as Vermeer and Rembrandt, and this is a beautifully intimate exhibition of his work.

I've visited and the exhibition features on the podcast this January. We thought long

and hard about should we just focus on the male portraits and in the end we

decided to do just that. We thought we don't have a massive exhibition space, so we have

to work with the space that we have. We can put on very focused exhibitions that make an

effective point. And we decided to focus on the male portraits because our own picture

is a male portrait. So surround him with pictures like it, all half length like him or three

quarter length independent portraits. There are group portraits, portraits of women,

but I think if we started expanding it, it would have been difficult to know where to stop.

And so we just said, okay, keep it clean, keep it focused to really put our laughing

heavily in context. Meanwhile, over at the British Library in London,

Elizabeth and Mary, Royal Cousins, rival queens, is open until the 20th of February. And it's

a must see. I visited just before the New Year to speak to its curator, Dr Andrea Clark,

and that podcast will also go out this month.

What we try to do is tell their story, the story of two powerful women bound together

by their chair, tutor, ancestry and their experiences for low, suffering queens, but divided

by their opposing Protestant Catholic faiths and ultimately their rivalry for the English

and Irish thrones. And we try to tell their story in their own words. So we have the largest

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