“Translated Daughter, come down and startle/Composing mortals with immortal fire.” So W H Auden invokes heavenly Cecilia, patron saint of music, and it seems she did just that with Benjamin Britten, who set Auden’s text for unaccompanied choir and happened to be born on the saint’s day 100 years ago.

The precise nature of the photographic portrait has always been contested, and this year’s Taylor Wessing Prize only fuels the debate. While historically photographers have questioned the portrait’s ability to go beyond physical fact to reveal a subject’s character, this exhibition of shortlisted entries challenges the notion that a portrait should tell us about its subject at all, while also raising questions about the ethics of picture-taking.

A chronological hang of its permanent collection instead of the once so modish thematic one, a show devoted entirely to contemporary painting, which was not at all modish until quite recently – things are definitely astir at Tate Britain.

The Georgians are in our marrow, and two of them in particular. The dawn of the age gave us Handel, who came over from Hanover with George I. Then at the sunset came the ever-exalted Jane Austen, who dedicated Emma in mock deference to the bloated Prince Regent. And in between there are all those elegant terraces in dark-brown brick, desirable survivors of the Industrial Revolution and the Luftwaffe.

Masterpieces of Chinese Painting 700-1900 is just what it says: a spectacular collection of nearly 80 banners, handscrolls, hanging scrolls and fans, gathered from major collections in China and Japan – many of which have never travelled west before – as well as the United States and Europe. 

There’s a giant spider in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s new exhibition of Louise Bourgeois. Her trademark spider and the fact that she lived to 98 – working into her final days – are probably two of the best-known things about her. The story spun by the spider and the other exhibits, in an exhibition entitled A Woman Without Secrets, makes a fascinating walk through the final years and lifelong obsessions of the French-born artist who did not come to real prominence until her early 70s in her adopted USA.

This year, if you don’t live in Ireland, you’ll have to take a plane or a boat to see the Turner Prize exhibition. But the effort will be nicely rewarded, for Derry (or Londonderry/Doire – wherever your affiliations take you) is a beautiful city, and it’s also the first UK City of Culture, so there’s plenty going on. And aside from the tempting premise of the exhibition, the building that’s been specially converted to house it is an inspired choice, not only because it makes for a very good exhibition space, but because it carries such symbolic weight.

It is amazing how perceptions and attitudes change. Think of a nude and the chances are you will imagine a naked woman since, nowadays, the female body virtually monopolises the genre; naked men scarcely make an appearance in mainstream culture. This changed briefly in the 1970s, when American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe brought the male nude into focus with countless images celebrating masculine beauty. After his death in 1989, though, the naked male returned to the closet, relegated to porn movies and gay magazines.

From Hogarth through to Gillray and Cruikshank, it was Georgian England that gave rise to a graphic tradition of satire. The powerful were lampooned and the pretensions and avarice of the upper and aspiring classes duly ridiculed. But the poor did not escape moral censure. Far from it. Then as now we had the virtuous and the feckless poor, and it was the love of gin that often bought the latter down.

Dulwich Picture Gallery, the oldest publicly accessible painting collection in England, is hardly on the bank of the Thames, but its compilation of prints, drawings, watercolours and paintings by James McNeill Whistler (1834-1902) concentrates on his absorption with London’s river. The shifting light of sky and water, not to mention working dockside life, which obsessed him during his lifelong residence in the city provides not only an overview of Whistler’s evolution as an artist but an evocation of the working life of the river which is long gone.