Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam

Royal Academy of Arts · London

More than a hundred works by the Victorian painter who killed his father, spent the remaining four decades of his life in Bethlem and Broadmoor, and there produced watercolours of a delicacy the asylum system did nothing to blunt. Dadd's work was all but forgotten until it resurfaced in the 1960s, and a survey on this scale does not come round often. It closes on 25 October; tickets are fifteen pounds.

Out of the Sand: Ancient Egypt Rediscovered

Colnaghi · London

Colnaghi has arranged Egypt as a chain of custody rather than a civilisation - Predynastic jars and a Saite bust at one end, Maxime Du Camp's 1850s photographs and Frederick Bridgman's Nile sunsets at the other. Here there will be antiquities and the nineteenth-century pictures painted in their company placed in the same room, which is exactly what tickles The Collector's bones. It comes down on 17 November.

Works for sale

The Bayeux Tapestry

British Museum · London

Seventy metres of eleventh-century wool embroidery, back in England for the first time since it was made — a loan negotiated between governments rather than between curators, which is a fair measure of what it took. The seminal and founding document for those who collect or covet objects made to record power. One practical caveat: tickets to 31 December have gone, and the next release, covering January to March, opens on 21 October.

Metamorphoses: Porcelain Sculpture by Rachel Kneebone

The Wallace Collection · London

Nine white porcelain contemporary sculptures distributed through, and in dialogue with the Wallace's eighteenth-century interiors, two of them - Bower and Temple - made for these rooms and shown for the first time. Porcelain pressed into writhing, tangled, glazed forms rather than shepherdesses is a fair test of how elastic that decorative tradition actually is, a test that has captured The Collector's interest as well. Free, and running until April.

Romanesque

Sam Fogg · London

A refactoring of that which is 'Romanesque', an otherwise nineteenth-century antiquarian's label which flattens a style actually assembled from Byzantine enamel, Scandinavian interlace and Andalusi ornament. The exhibition's objects are chosen assiduously, and The Collector's shared tastes are hard to hide: go to see the Toulouse double capital of affronted lions, a Mosan plaque of the Virgin Annunciate, and a pair of stylobate lions from Campania. See until 22 October.

Works for sale

Salman Toor: Someone Like You

The Courtauld Gallery · London

Nineteen paintings, none of them previously shown in Britain, by an artist whose debt to Baroque and eighteenth-century painting is stated rather than implied — 'The Bar on East 13th' reworks Manet's 'A Bar at the Folies-Bergere', one of The Collector's favourite oils residing in London, and hanging only a few rooms away. Seeing the source and the answer under one roof is a thing the Courtauld can do and almost nobody else can. This isn't the first time Toor has flirted with a major institution, helping out the Frick in his home town of New York whist it was undergoing its renovations a few years ago, though certainly this is his most expansive show of that ilkl to date. You might spot The Collector there at Friday late openings on 2 October, 6 November and 4 December.