Tacoma Art Museum’s exhibition What Is a Trade? Donald Fels and Signboard Painters of South India presents sixteen large-scale paintings that explore trade and globalization in India. Fels’ conceptual starting point for this exhibition was Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama’s 1498 voyage to Malabar, India, in search of a direct sea route for the spice trade.

The Denver Art Museum announced the joint acquisition of Cowboy Singing, an 1892 painting by renowned American painter Thomas Eakins. The Museum is partnering with the Denver-based Anschutz Collection to purchase the work from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In addition to Cowboy Singing, the DAM will independently acquire two sketches related to Eakins' 1888 painting Cowboys in the Badlands. The three new works will be on view at the Denver Art Museum immediately.

Museum of fine arts, Boston presents an exhibition of Chinese paintings, on view through September 14, 2008.

The Art Gallery of New South Wales has acquired an important 17th century painting Mars and the Vestal Virgin by Jacques Blanchard, who was one of the most important Parisian painters of his time.

The redevelopment this year of The Model Arts and Niland Gallery in Sligo presents an opportunity for the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin to exhibit a selection of works by Jack B. Yeats from the wonderful Niland Collection.

The National Gallery of Ireland has placed on view its recent acquisition, 'Young Woman in White Reading' by French nineteenth-century master, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919). The painting, which is the first Renoir to enter the collection, was purchased at auction, at Sotheby's Sale of Impressionist & Modern Art in New York (November 2007).

American Impressionism: Paintings from The Phillips Collection opens at the Memorial Art Gallery and remains on view through June 15. This major traveling exhibition showcases 54 rarely-seen paintings from the golden age of American Impressionism (ca. 1880–1920), from one of the country's premier museums.

A watercolour painting by one of Britain's best-loved artists has returned to the location where it was originally painted.

The last and greatest work by Edward Burne-Jones, The Sleep of Arthur in Avalon (1881-1898), will return to the UK from Puerto Rico for the first time in forty years when it goes on display as part of the major re-hang of the BP British Art Displays at Tate Britain.

The world was in shock when in 2001 the Talibans destroyed two ancient colossal Buddha statues in the Afghan region of Bamiyan. Behind those statues, there are caves decorated with precious paintings from 5th to 9th century A.D. The caves also suffered from Taliban destruction, as well as from a severe natural environment, but today they have become the source of a major discovery.

David Hockney has gifted Bigger Trees near Warter 2007 to Tate. The oil painting, his largest ever, was made on fifty canvas panels and was executed outside, en plein air. Measuring 4.6 x 12.2 metres (15x 40 feet), its subject is a typical Yorkshire landscape, west of Bridlington.

The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting, opening at Tate Britain on 4 June, is the first exhibition to survey the history of British painters' representations of the Middle East from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries. It will explore the great range of artistic responses to the peoples, cities and landscapes of the regions lying just across the Mediterranean from Europe.