Lucian Freud and John Craxton met at art college in 1941 when they were 19 years old, and they were soon living together, painting together, and drinking together, enjoying what there was to enjoy in wartime London, both exempt from military service.

Simon Casson went to the National Gallery, aged ten, and stood in front of a Titian. He hasn’t been the same since.

If Adrian Heath’s audacious attempt to escape from Stalag 383 in Bavaria in 1942 had succeeded, British abstract art might have taken a different course. As it was, he was captured, and put into solitary confinement, where he experimented with abstract techniques (there wasn’t much to draw). Once out, he met fellow-POW Terry Frost, and encouraged him to develop his artistic style.

“White is the whole reason for me painting”.So says John Blackburn, who is celebrating his ninetieth birthday with his seventh exhibition at Mayfair gallery Osborne Samuel (September 8 – 23).

Mark Johnston was brought up in the north-east of England, and has lived most of his adult life in Sussex. He has spent long periods of time sketching in other parts of the country (Cumbria, for example; the Munros in Scotland) and Europe (he has lived in Greece, Andalucia and Barcelona).

In 1951, on the eve of his first art exhibition, in London, the 19-year-old painter David Tindle thumbed through the phone book, to help sprinkle some stardust onto the occasion. He discovered that one of his heroes – John Minton – was listed, and gave him a cold call.

Olivia Stanton has worked at the Chelsea art materials shop Green & Stone for 50 years; as an artist she is represented by Candida Stevens, the Chichester-based gallerist. This two-week show is a collaboration between Green & Stone Gallery and Stevens, and displays work produced by the Hastings-based abstractionist over the last four years.

Cynthia Corbett’s Summer Exhibition is a vibrant affair, reflecting a love for style, glamour… and cool Modernist buildings. We’re particularly taken by the work of two of the artists she is showing, Deborah Azzopardi and Andy Burgess.

A familiar face has been chosen to publicise the Summer Exhibition at Long & Ryle in Pimlico. It’s a watercolour by Mark Entwisle of the actress Anya Taylor-Joy, in the role of Emma in the 2020 film adaptation of Jane Austen’s much-loved novel.

Barbara Rae CBE RA, who had until 2020 been travelling widely for artistic inspiration – latterly in the Arctic - found herself grounded in Scotland by the pandemic. But what wonderful ground to be grounded in. She turned her attention to home territory: the Lammermuirs, the hills running from East Lothian to the borderlands, in the south-east of Scotland.

The Redfern Gallery, in Cork Street, is one of London’s longest-established Modern and Contemporary art galleries, founded back in 1923, when Mayfair was a rather less salubrious place.

You might be forgiven for taking PJ Crook’s painting Oneday for an early ModBrit work from the 30s, with the stylised newspaper readers betraying their social class by the hats they are wearing.

If Martyn Mackrill hadn’t been a marine artist, he would almost certainly have become a marine engineer.

Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious met on their first day at the Royal College of Art in 1922, and immediately became firm friends.

The exhibition includes Freud’s only known sculpture, The Three-legged Horse (1937) and early paintings, including The Palm Tree (1944), gifted to his aunt, Anna. There will also be better-known works, drawn from galleries and private collections, ranging across the artist’s 60-year career.

Browse & Darby have represented the painter Diana Armfield since 1979, and the Cork Street gallery will display her Centenary Exhibition – postponed since 2020 – until July 28.

Kerry Harding lives in Cornwall, and the Cornish landscape is the subject of her work.

The Mayfair gallery Timothy Taylor has announced its representation of the Estate of Victor Willing.

How did the horrors of WW2 change the shape of British art?

Towner Eastbourne has unveiled two interconnected exhibitions which reveal the galvanising role played in the birth of Modern British art by a little-remembered art-world pioneer, Lucy Wertheim.