EXHIBITIONS / Critic's Choice

Goya

The RA's show, with its preponderance of minor and little known works, is fascinating despite its limitations. It presents the spectacle of an artist working against the grain of his own temperament. . .Strange and alienated and incorrigibly weird, pictures of pastoral idylls where things always seem slightly but nastily awry. Royal Academy, Piccadilly, W1

Richard Wilson

The works of Richard Wilson are as peculiar and inevitable as the things seen, heard and felt in dreams, and that is how they survive in the memory: vivid, enigmatically portentous, illogically logical, more like sleeping than waking experiences. Matt's Gallery Copperfield Rd, E3

Gainsborough and Reynolds

Reynolds said that he would have liked to be Michelangelo and Gainsborough painted as if he would have liked to be Watteau. What united them was their desire to be other than they were, and their subtle defiance of a society whose tastes they found restrictively narrow. Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace, SW1

ANDREW GRAHAM-DIXON