The painting is on loan for an exhibition that opens this weekend in the Provençal city where the painter became obsessed with the night sky and eventually descended into madness

In September 1888, shortly before he descended into the madness that led him to cut off part of his left ear, Vincent van Gogh completed one of his early starry night paintings. Fascinated by astronomy and the solar system, the insomniac painter had obsessed over the work in his mind, asking a fellow painter: “When shall I ever paint the starry sky, this painting that keeps ­haunting me?”

Now the scene he finally captured, Starry Night over the Rhône, has been returned to Arles, where he painted it, for the first time in 136 years.

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© Photograph: Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais

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© Photograph: Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais

Richard Wright hits Glasgow, London Gallery Weekend brings the glamour and fashion photography claims its place as art – all in your weekly dispatch

London Gallery Weekend
The capital’s commercial gallery scene perhaps needs this booster celebration that features talks, openings and fun in a host of glamorous venues.
• Galleries across London, until 2 June

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© Photograph: David Regen/© Matthew Barney. Courtesy the Artist, Gladstone Gallery, Sadie Coles HQ, Regen Projects, and Galerie Max Hetzler.

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© Photograph: David Regen/© Matthew Barney. Courtesy the Artist, Gladstone Gallery, Sadie Coles HQ, Regen Projects, and Galerie Max Hetzler.

Spike Island, Bristol
As sickle cell anaemia attacked his body, the artist made political drawings on X-rays and used his own skin for sculpture

Donald Rodney died as an artist in the ascendant. With Keith Piper, a fellow student at Trent Polytechnic in 1981, Rodney was foundational in the politically acute BLK Art Group, committed to pressing social issues within an art world hung up on form and theory. After the success of his 1989 solo show at Chisenhale Gallery, in 1997 he had an exhibition across town at the South London Gallery (in the year Tracey Emin’s show there was considered career-making). He died the following year, aged 36.

Donald Rodney: Visceral Canker, at Bristol’s Spike Island, is a scholarly survey of the few works that survived a brief career punctuated by multiple hospitalisations and invasive surgery. In a vitrine are 10 of the sketchbooks that acted as a portal back to the creative space of the studio when Rodney was bedridden. Through them he developed a compelling personal iconography. By necessity, most work in this show is the result of long reflection and refinement on Rodney’s part before he had the physical liberty to go about the actual making.

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© Photograph: Lisa Whiting

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© Photograph: Lisa Whiting

Commercial galleries across the capital open their doors to showcase work by their most important artists, from American football and fountains to porn theatres and Palestine

This weekend (and beyond), commercial galleries all over the city will be showcasing work by their most important artists – and admission is free. Here are 10 great shows to drop in on if you’re in the capital, from a film by Nan Goldin to images of Palestinian youth.

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© Photograph: Courtesy the artist

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© Photograph: Courtesy the artist

Museum’s experts realised painter’s Ecce Homo had been misattributed in auction catalogue

Four centuries after it was painted, three and a half centuries after it arrived in Spain and three years after it came perilously close to going under the hammer for just €1,500, a lost, luminous and lovingly restored Caravaggio has gone on display at the Prado in Madrid.

The Ecce Homo, painted in the Italian master’s dark and desperate last years, made headlines around the world after experts at the museum spotted it in an auction catalogue and rang Spain’s culture ministry to share their suspicions that the painting had been misattributed.

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© Photograph: Pierre-Philippe Marcou/AFP/Getty Images

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© Photograph: Pierre-Philippe Marcou/AFP/Getty Images

An arts centre in the Ugandan capital, Kampala, has given some of Sudan’s best known creatives a chance to work in peace – and find inspiration again

Among the paintings that Nusreldin Eldouma left behind when he fled Sudan is a watercolour portrait showing a Sufi sage, a popular figure from Sudanese folklore. Painted last year – just before Sudan was dragged into war after a power struggle between two factions of the country’s military – it shows the 17th-century sheikh Farah wad Taktook, an icon of peace, says Eldouma. Now he only has photographs to show, the canvases that are his life’s work left behind in the ruins of the city of Khartoum.

Photographs of Nusreldin Eldouma’s work displayed at 32° East (above) and his watercolour of a Sufi man, entitled Inner Peace (below; image courtesy of the artist)

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© Photograph: Courtesy of 32 East

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© Photograph: Courtesy of 32 East

Two people arrested over theft of José Capelo portraits in Madrid in 2015 – one of which is still missing

Police in Madrid have recovered a portrait by Francis Bacon, valued at €5m (£4.3m), which was one of five works by the famously thirsty and hell-raising artist that were stolen from the home of the painting’s subject almost a decade ago.

The pictures, whose total value has been put at €25m, disappeared in 2015 after a break-in at the Madrid home of José Capelo, a Spanish banker and close friend of Bacon who sat for the painter.

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© Photograph: SPANISH INTERIOR MINISTRY/AFP/Getty Images

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© Photograph: SPANISH INTERIOR MINISTRY/AFP/Getty Images

Painting by Hannah Uzor is a ‘portrait of strength and dignity’, says the magazine

A new portrait of the Princess of Wales has been unveiled on Tatler’s July cover, with the artist behind it saying the painting was influenced by Catherine’s video about her cancer diagnosis.

The painting, by the British-Zambian artist Hannah Uzor, depicts Kate at the first state banquet of King Charles III’s reign during the South Africa state visit in 2022.

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© Photograph: Hannah Uzor/Tatler/PA

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© Photograph: Hannah Uzor/Tatler/PA

Exclusive: Potentially thousands of signed works from Currency series were mass-produced by artist’s team after 2016, sources say

At least 1,000 paintings that the artist Damien Hirst said were “made in 2016” were created several years later, the Guardian can reveal.

Hirst produced 10,000 of the paintings, each comprising colourful hand-painted dots on A4 paper, as part of a project called The Currency that was born from the idea of creating a form of money from art.

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© Photograph: Amer Ghazzal/Alamy

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© Photograph: Amer Ghazzal/Alamy

Cook’s curvy characters are glamorous, comfortable in their skins and uncompromising. In real life, I am constantly bombarded with fatphobia

With an exhibition of Beryl Cook’s work having just opened at Studio Voltaire in London, I have been thinking about what it means to occupy a fat body. I love Cook’s paintings and all their chubby glory. They are celebratory, glamorous, from the sassy half-moon of bum cheek dipping out of well-filled leopard-print shorts, to a gaggle of women, all dressed up and piling into a taxi. Cook frames the nights out we hold tight in our memories, the warmth of friends as you huddle together against the wind, heading towards the next bar and next potentially brilliant thing, perfume and hairspray following you like sparkly, scented fog.

So why, when we stop looking at paintings and move into the real world, does a fat body incite such hatred? I have worked out an equation: reactions to my body operate in eight-pound fluctuations. My body can be perceived as hyper-sexualised and curvy, the type of body that men feel is OK to slide a hand down at the pub as they push past you to the bar. Yet if I put on half a stone, as people often do, I become disgusting, with the kind of body shape about which strangers feel the need to comment. People you have never met suggest better menu options in restaurants; drunk groups of men follow you shouting things that destroy you with every step. The reaction my body generates in others is inescapable.

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© Photograph: Courtesy of the Beryl Cook Estate

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© Photograph: Courtesy of the Beryl Cook Estate

Vincent Namatjira’s painting in the NGA of Australia’s richest woman has been seen by millions around the world, appearing on CNN and the BBC and getting the attention of Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Fallon

If Gina Rinehart was trying to make sure no one saw a portrait of her, recent moves have had the opposite effect.

Last week, media – including Guardian Australia – reported that Australia’s richest woman had demanded the National Gallery of Australia remove a portrait of her. The painting by the artist Vincent Namatjira is one of numerous portraits on display at the Canberra gallery in Namatjira’s first major survey exhibition.

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© Composite: AAP; Getty Images

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© Composite: AAP; Getty Images

It’s never been easier to take a flattering image of yourself. So why do people commission professional portraits of themselves or loved ones?

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They’re the artwork the public rarely sees: the custom personal portraits hanging in homes, maybe above a mantelpiece, in a study or a bedroom; images of ourselves, family and other loved ones, sometimes even our pets.

With selfies available to anyone with a smartphone and professional photography affordable and accessible, the desire for a painted portrait speaks to the pull of tradition and its unique process – the artist’s interpretation of the subject that often reveals more than just a likeness.

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© Photograph: Nadir Kinani/The Guardian

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© Photograph: Nadir Kinani/The Guardian

There’s been high drama in Ambridge and a great start for Today’s new presenter. Plus, a delightful Lee Krasner documentary and an amusing study of unfinished art

The Archers (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
Today (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
Death of an Artist: Krasner and Pollock | Pushkin Industries/Samizdat Audio
Archive on 4: Gareth Gwynn Hasn’t Fin- (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds

Pray for this week’s radio reviewer, allergic since time immemorial to the theme tune of The Archers, finding herself writing in the thick of a blockbuster storyline. But with a crack consultant to hand (my mother-in-law, who remembers listening to Grace Archer dying in a stable fire in 1955: thank you, Lill) I’m braving the challenge.

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© Photograph: Jeff Overs/BBC/PA

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© Photograph: Jeff Overs/BBC/PA

When on holiday in Berwick the artist often gave his work away. Now a new exhibition reveals the value of drawings that survived in a shoebox

A 1958 drawing of a family with their dogs by LS Lowry from one of his many holidays in Berwick-upon-Tweed is to go on public display for the first time. But the sketch is lucky to have survived: it was kept in a shoe box for 43 years, emerging somewhat creased because its recipient had little idea of Lowry’s significance.

The signed and dated drawing on headed notepaper from the Castle Hotel, where the artist stayed for most summers from the 1930s until the 1970s, was given to hotel receptionist, Anne Mather. “I didn’t think much about it, and only after he died did I remember it,” Mather told the Berwick Advertiser in 2001 when she put the sketch up for auction. “He was quiet and reclusive, but I can still visualise him in the lounge. He would sit and doodle, with his glasses at the end of his nose.”

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© Photograph: The Estate of LS Lowry, All Rights Reserved, DACS 2024

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© Photograph: The Estate of LS Lowry, All Rights Reserved, DACS 2024

Jonathan Yeo’s divisive painting of the king raises the question of whether paintings of the monarchy have become irrelevant and anachronisitic

Why do reports always say that a portrait of someone great and good has been “unveiled”? The word is an empty metaphor that turns the first viewing into a ceremony; it also mystifies the entire procedure and makes it somewhat morbid.

Portraits of kings, presidents, prime ministers and the like are effigies, meant to replace the mortal being. Once the official image has been fixed in place, the living subject can be sent off to die. The unveiled portrait draws a veil over another ceremonial occasion: what we are looking at is posterity’s verdict, so in effect we are attending a funeral.

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© Photograph: Aaron Chown/AP

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© Photograph: Aaron Chown/AP

The Bloggess (Jenny Lawson) has posted about finding art made by a woman, Laura Perea, who was in a psychiatric hospital from the 1940s. She describes what she has discovered about Laura Perea's life and family, and reproduces her art, in three posts: Help me solve a haunting art mystery?; Art mystery possibly solved?; Uncovering the mystery of L. Perea and trying to erase the stigma of mental illness. Content warning: death by suicide of one of Laura Perea's family members.

The San Antonio Express-News has some more information. Lawson is planning an exhibition of Laura Perea's art.

Edward Burne-Jones was the last Pre-Raphaelite. Frank Cadogan Cowper was the last Pre-Raphaelite. Christiana Herringham was so late in the game, she was more of a Pre-Raphaelite Renaissance painter.

None of them, of course, were anything near as late as the television portrayals of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, such as Desperate Romantics, Dante's Inferno, or The Love School.