With the Friezeart fair two and a half weeks away, London is effervescent. Museums and galleries are pulling out the big guns. Artists Tacita Dean and Gerhard Richter are soon to be at Tate Modern; gallery White Cube is to open a third venue in the capital, and anyone who's anyone is desperately trying to get attention for their exhibition, pop-up project, screening, or performance — you name it.

So it was particularly refreshing to leave town for a day. For many years, art programming in the West Country has been punching above its weight. And now is a perfect time to experience it: the pluridisciplinary space Arnolfini in Bristol is celebrating its 50th anniversary with an exhibition dedicated to artists' museums, and Bath's recently redesigned Holburne Museum has crafted a bijou exhibition of landscapes by 18th-century painter Thomas Gainsborough. The subjects couldn't be less alike, but the quality of the art on display is consistently good.

Bath is a mere 13 miles away from Bristol. Its manicured Georgian city center, with its Royal Crescent, bridges and fountains, makes it one of Britain's most picturesque cities, the pretty sibling of the boisterous port of Bristol. "Bristol is very different from Bath," says Holburne Museum's Katie Jenkins. "Bristol has its own world, but we are working on this divide."

The Holburne Museum's "Gainsborough's Landscapes: Themes and Variations" is the first show dedicated to the painter's landscapes in 50 years. It tackles a much more personal aspect of an artist better known for his highly praised (and prolific) portraiture. The six pictures on display bear the influence of Dutch 17th-century painting as well as the marshy land of East Anglia where the artist spent his childhood, but they are first and foremost the products of his imagination, the "creations of his own brain" (to borrow Gainsborough's own words).

Landscape painting was Gainsborough's "private garden," a space free from the demands of his high-society commissioners. In this focused exhibition, each painting is presented with a large selection of drawings, some predating the main work, others done later as Gainsborough again and again returned to his favorite motifs. Humor isn't absent: the two elegant women in the drawing "Two Ladies Walking Arm-in-Arm" (1751-52) are redolent of the milkmaid in the left hand corner of the monumental "River Landscape with a View of a Distant Village" (c. 1750).

Seeing these works together, with their lush foliage shimmering against the gallery's saffron walls, gives a sense of the precision with which Gainsborough worked on composition, which he called the arrangement of objects "in friendship." The fair patch of a white animal — a horse, a cow, a piglet — often occupies the center of the painting. It traps the eye, forces it to start its exploration of the canvas at a very precise point before allowing it to drift to other characters hidden in the leafy darkness, and, at last, to a proto-Romantic, almost sublime horizon.

In Bristol, the Arnolfini stands proudly on the waterfront. This part of town, which is now bustling with cafés and cinemas, owes a lot to the art center's relocation to the area in the mid 1970s. "It's a classic story of culture-led regeneration", says Arnolfini's Artistic Director Tom Trevor. For its 50th anniversary, the institution has devised a yearlong program, looking, Trevor explains, "at the apparatus of the art world: how we choose what to value." "Museum Show – Part 1" gathers 21 "artist's museums," ranging from Marcel Duchamp's iconic "Boite en Valise" — a collection of his main pieces reproduced in portable format — to Bill Burns' absurd "Museum of Safety Gear for Small Animals."

The show brings to mind the Museum of Modern Art's seminal 1999 exhibition "The Museum as Muse," which examined the work of artists inspired by the idea of the institution. The two shows have a couple of works in common, but Arnolfini's "Museum Show" is particularly pointed: it is about artists creating museums as autonomous entities, like Robert Filliou's Duchampesque "Galerie Légitime" (1968), a collection of miniature works the Fluxus artist used to carry in his hat.
 
Marcel Broodthaers's polymorphous installation "Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles" is, as could be expected, a cornerstone of the exhibition. Its attack on the meaninglessness of institutional taxonomy echoes the "Art and Religion Room" of Meschac Gaba's "Museum of Contemporary African Art," but the two pieces also make two very distinct points: one calling for a destruction of the authoritarian organization in the revolutionary spirit of 1968, the other highlighting the lack of contemporary art museums in Africa (and perhaps questioning its relevance to the continent).

What is a museum? This is the question asked by the Arnolfini (somewhat ironically since the institution doesn't hold a collection and thus isn't, technically, a museum). With the model of an exhibition "History of Art in the Arab World: Part 1_Chapter One. Section 139: The Atlas Group 1989-2004," Walid Raad dreams up his ideal retrospective; Herbert Sistel's "The Museum of Drawers," with its 500 miniature reproductions of contemporary artworks, is an obsessive, unabashedly fetishistic collection. What's more striking in this show is the variety of discourses the "museum apparatus" can serve, from institutional critique to personal mythologies. But both its detractors and supporters are attracted to the same, indefinable aura that a museum holds.

To see some of the pieces in the Thomas Gainsborough exhibition at the Holburne Museum, click on the slide show at left.