WHEN WE PICTURE Henri Matisse at work, two scenes generally come to mind, and in both he is bedridden. In the first, known only through his own account, he is a callow twenty-year-old recuperating from appendicitis who finds his vocation when his mother gives him a box of paints to pass the time. In the second, at the other end of his career and documented in countless photographs and eyewitness reports, he is a venerable master, white-bearded and bespectacled, propped up against a pillow and scissoring into sheets of colored paper.

Matisse worked hard to place these images in our heads. He

What did Peter Doig paint before he became the artist we all know? “Peter Doig: Early Works” showed, in twelve paintings and thirty-eight works on paper, his development from the early 1980s, when he was an art student in London, to the more contemplative and romantic landscape works he started to make later in the decade.

The earlier works evoke a young man who enjoys urban bustle and nightlife, who is eager to study art but quick to mock a too-serious approach to the classics. The lines and brushstrokes are rapid, the figures cartoony, as in Mr. Courbet, 1984, which shows a guy ready to lick

She’d already been profusely exhibited in British galleries and institutions for at least five years by then, but my initial encounter with Eva Rothschild’s sculpture was via “Early One Morning: British Art Now.” That 2002 Whitechapel Gallery exhibition proposed a link between some of the rising sculptors of that moment—along with Rothschild, they included Shahin Afrassiabi, Claire Barclay, Jim Lambie, and Gary Webb—and the artists associated with the new British sculpture of the 1960s: Anthony Caro (from whose wonderful 1962 piece the Whitechapel borrowed the title), Phillip King,