Exhibition of the week
Henry VIII’s Lost Dagger
A curious quest for the Tudor tyrant’s lost, highly phallic dagger in the house where modern gothic began.
• Strawberry Hill House, London, until 15 February
Also showing
Sufi Life and Art
From portraits of dervishes and saints to modern abstract art with a Sufi spirit, see how this fascinating religious tradition has inspired creativity for centuries.
• British Museum, London, until 26 July
Paula Rego
This show explores a period when Rego renewed her art with dedicated drawing, partly inspired by the writings of Martin McDonagh.
• Cristea Roberts Gallery, London, until 17 January
Cristina Iglesias
Massive sculptures inspired by geology, which look like rugged rock formations by the sea.
• Hauser & Wirth, London, until 20 December
Selves and Stand-Ins
Robert Mapplethorpe and Gillian Wearing are among the artists here who question what a “self” actually is.
• Modern One, Edinburgh, until 25 January
Image of the week
From ASMR prophets to Soviet hypnotists and mountaintop rituals, the Uzbek artist and film-maker Saodat Ismailova invites you in to an unforgettably strange psychic dreamspace in this first solo exhibition in the UK where there is scene after scene of breathtaking beauty, elemental ambience and disorienting anxiety. Read the review.
What we learned
A Fabergé egg made for the mother of Russia’s last tsar sold for £23m
A new exhibition seriously captures photography’s silly side
The Empire State Building was built by daredevils
Norman Foster’s new New York skyscraper is obscenely large
French artist JR has plans for Pont Neuf
A long-lost Rubens went under the hammer
The Grateful Dead’s psychedelic artwork has long told their story
Masterpiece of the week
Portrait of a Man by Gerrit Dou, c.1635-40
He looks at you with disarming openness, as if you were relaxing together over a pipe in a Dutch tavern, chatting about the price of tulips. Long ringlets, a colourful cap and sloppy clothes mark him out as being more louche and bohemian than the sombre merchants who appear in many 17th-century Dutch portraits. Is he an artist? Surely this is suggested by the delicate but precise way he holds his pipe, as if it were a brush. The more you look, the more it replicates exactly how an artist at that time would wield a fine brush. I think that’s a giveaway. Gerrit Dou, a pupil of the great self-portraitist Rembrandt, was in his early 20s when he painted this, just like the man in the painting. It is surely a self-portrait in which Dou greets us as a friend.
• The National Gallery, London
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