British Museum, London, until 5 January 2015
Following Edinburgh’s major Ming show this summer, our review of which you can read here, London’s British Museum now turns its attention to the Chinese dynasty that has most captured Western imagination. The exhibition focuses on the first 50 years of the fifteenth century, and features truly jaw-dropping objects of artistry, including a table whose entire surface is exquisitely carved in lacquer, Xia Chang’s transcendental scroll paintings of bamboo (a wonderful discovery for me), and finely wrought gold filigree, in the form of two hairpins once worn by a princess.

Estorick Collection, London, 24 September - 21 December 2014
And anyone yearning for Roman art following the British Museum’s standout show last year, Life and death in Pompeii and Herculaneum, should visit Islington’s Estorick Collection, where many sculpture, mosaics and other antique items excavated near Rome travel to London for the first time. These works are juxtaposed with paintings and sculptures by the 20th-century-born Italians Umberto Mastroianni and Ettore De Conciliis.

Wallace Collection, London, from 19 September
As the British Museum praises the ingenuity of Asia, the Wallace Collection presents its vision of a very European type of grandeur: the Great Gallery, sumptuously restored over the last two years, and now rehung and opening to the public today. I’ve yet to see it in its new form, but those who have say it’s breathtaking – and the paintings, of course, include great works by Titian, Hals, Poussin, Velázquez and Rubens that are worth repeated visits whatever the context.

Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 20 September - 11 January 2015
Fred Cuming RA writes in the latest issue of RA Magazine that John Constable is an “elusive inspiration”; the V&A’s exhibition puts plenty of flesh on the enigmatic Englishman’s artistic bones, with a show of his landscape paintings, prints and drawings paired with other artists who influenced him. We see Suffolk’s finest artist inspired by figures such as Poussin and Ruisdael, taking their sense of light, colour and composition and, with his own brushwork, making them his own.

Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London, until 9 November 2014
“Lights appear to inhale and exhale, replicating the rhythm and cadences, intervals and textures of a score.” So says the Serpentine’s press release for Cerith Wyn Evans’s new installation in the Sackler Gallery space, where light tubes and filaments wind their way across the interior in free-standing sculptures, chandeliers and text works. As well as the body and music, the Welsh-born conceptualist’s works are charged with a range of other references, but whether they carry or not, one enjoys his objects’ refined forms.

Frith Street Gallery, London, until 31 October 2014
New Dehli-born collaborators Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta – known collectively as Raqs Media Collective – are artist-historians, the works on view in their show at London’s Frith Street (titled Corrections to the First Draft of History) comprised of material such as archived newspapers and a video re-enactment of a run on a Shanghai bank, which took place during the Chinese Civil War and was captured by Cartier-Bresson.

Sam Phillips (@SamP_London) is Editor of RA Magazine.