Patrick Bourne & Co

They read, pray, wait, think, withdraw. Reduction, repetition, simplification. Gwen John’s critics feel her serial method risks diminishing returns. That her art can feel hermetic or overly restricted. And as is STILL the case with so many female artists, biography threatens to overpower the work; people remain fascinated by her affair with Rodin, her solitude, religion and emotional instability. Curators of the current large retrospective ‘Gwen John: Strange Beauties’, currently showing in Cardiff @museumwales , successfully move attention back to the paintings themselves. Their quiet emotional force. How psychologically large they feel. The show travels to @nationalgalleriesscot @yalebritishart #gwenjohn #modernbritishart

We visited Margate this week to see the Bridget Riley show @turnercontemporary and highly recommend it. The spacious galleries, with their even, shadowless light, are the ideal environment in which to view her work. Riley holds a unique place in 20th century British art, having developed a rigorous visual language through Op Art that explores perception, rhythm, and optical sensation with extraordinary precision. Her bold black-and-white works and later vibrant colour compositions expanded the boundaries of abstraction and influenced generations of contemporary artists in the UK and beyond. On her birthday, we celebrate the discipline behind her vision, and how she turned lines, curves, and colour into a distinctly British language of modern art that still feels alive and exacting today. #bridgetriley #turnercontemporary #modernbritishart

TEFAF Maastricht Early Access opens today. TEFAF is an unmissable annual fair for collectors, art lovers and museum curators. Dealers reserve previously unseen and exceptional paintings and objects for the occasion; many of the most important acquisitions by international museums are first shown the market at TEFAF. If you haven’t yet been, we urge you to hop on a train or plane to come and discover what is happening at the top of the market. Visit us on Stand 334. ______________________________________ Dame Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975) Five Standing Nudes, 1950 (details) signed and dated Barbara Hepworth, 9/9/1950 TEFAF Maastricht March 14th to 19th Early Access 12th to 13th @tefaf #tefafmaastricht #barbarahepworth

Last night in Chichester for the opening of WILLIAM NICHOLSON @pallanthousegallery which we are delighted to have supported. Nicholson’s paintings refuse to fit into any of the main narratives of early 20th Century art history - the “isms” and innovations like Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, and the myriad forms of abstraction. He was an artist who decided that there were enough possibilities in representational painting to detain him indefinitely, probing art’s capacity for poetic distillation rather than literal transcription. Pallant have gathered a very impressive number of loans from private and public collections as well as HM The King to offer a show as enjoyable as it gets. Ravishing still lives that are the most deft examples of the genre (no one captures the visual qualities of lustrous brass, glazed ceramic or glass quite so masterfully) but also slyly subversive, where shadows stand in for objects and compositions tumble out of the frame. In his sparse landscapes there is a sleekness but also an abstractness, like in slide 3, ‘Snow in the Horseshoe’, sold by @patrickbourneco into its current private collection. In his profoundly-studied portrait of Gertrude Jekyll and his separate painting of her gardening boots, there is as much revelation of character in the boots. Slide 1, Sports on the SS Cedric (1921), shows the artist in one of his “hidden” self-portraits, leaning over for a look at shipboard life. As @simonmartin_art points out in his excellent essay in the sumptuous new book which accompanies the exhibition, it is striking that Nicholson ‘employed a vertiginous vertical perspective to depict the distinction between figures on the first-class upper decks observing the crowds gathered to watch and participate in sports on the lower decks, which appears to be where the fun is all happening.’ As ever, Nicholson is subverting the norm, producing a witty and offbeat image very different to glamorised depictions of transatlantic travel in the 20s. You would be very foolish to miss this show. Book your tickets to Chichester today - and pick up a copy of the book in @pallantgallerybookshop on your way out to give this Christmas.

A portrait of Haidee Becker by @miketamman for @patrickbourneco Her exhibition opens on Tuesday at 6 St James’s Place, London SW1. Please DM for a catalogue.

A beautiful evening to celebrate our forthcoming exhibition of Haidee Becker’s paintings, ‘flowers, fish, and other offerings’. The exhibition opens at 6 St James’s Place, London SW1 on Tuesday 18th November. DM for a catalogue.

We are delighted to announce an exhibition of Haidee Becker’s paintings will open on 18 November. Please visit our website for further information or DM us for a catalogue. Venue: 6 St James’s Place, London SW1A 1NP 18 - 26 November 10am to 5:30pm Monday to Friday 11am to 4pm Saturday and Sunday #haideebecker #londonexhibition

Would you like to sail away with an Alfred Wallis? We currently have a group with exceptional provenance, including ‘Mary Waters’ (pictured, now sold). Do get in touch if you’re a collector who’d like to see the others, we’d love to hear from you. Alfred Wallis began painting in 1925 at the age of 70, shortly after the death of his wife. With no formal artistic training, he painted intuitively, drawing from memories of his life at sea, the Cornish coastline, and the harbour town of St Ives. His works—typically rendered on salvaged cardboard or scraps of board—are rich in nautical detail and capture a vanishing maritime world that, by the 1920s and ’30s, was already in decline. Wallis’s direct, untrained style profoundly influenced a generation of modern British artists. The story of the “discovery” of Wallis has become almost mythologised in the timeline of modern British art. It began with a chance meeting with Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood, who stumbled across the old man’s cottage on a day trip to St Ives in Cornwall. They were instantly convinced of his talent, of his authenticity as a naive painter able to capture experience without artifice or pretence. Suddenly, British modernism had its very own Henri Rousseau. Wallis’s work would go on to form a cornerstone of Jim Ede’s collection at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge. Ede, a friend of the Nicholsons and an early champion of Wallis, acquired many of his paintings and displayed them throughout the house. #alfredwallis #alfredwallisartist #tatestives #modernbritishart #modbrit #bennicholson #christopherwood #stives #cornishartist

Some paintings come through our doors and leave quite quickly, such is their impact and rarity to the market. We wish ‘Winter Sea’ (1958) by Joan Eardley could have stayed a little while longer - the experience conveyed by the painting, and the elemental energy it communicates, is immense. Joan Eardley discovered Catterline, a little fishing village a few miles south of Aberdeen, by chance in May 1951. She visited it regularly thereafter, spending the rest of her time in Glasgow. It offered, she once said, “just vast waste and vast seas, vast areas of cliff”. The moment she heard from a weather report, or via a phone call from a neighbour in the village, that a gale was approaching, she caught the next train to Stonehaven where, for the next stage in her journey, she eventually kept a Lambretta. Many of Eardley’s paintings were made within a two-minute walk of her rented cottage - either in the fields behind, or directly in front, where her cottage overlooked the bay. That is the scene we see in ‘Winter Sea’. It was not until 1958 that she felt able to paint the sea with conviction – previously she found it too difficult a subject. In February 1958 she made the breakthrough in the form of a series of paintings, most of which are in museum collections. In them she sometimes focused on the area around the pier and sometimes presented a wider panoramic view, as here. The dark, elongated block in the centre left is the pier, which gave the fishing boats shelter. Behind it is the village boat shed, and to the right is a tall rock form known as the Kale Tap. Perched on the cliff, high above the beach, is The Watchie, where Eardley had first stayed when visiting the village. The sea is presented as a raging, boiling amorphous mass, pounding the coastline. Dating from 1958, our painting shows Eardley at a breakthrough moment, finding her voice in spectacular form. We love this photo (image 3) of Eardley painting. When she worked in snowstorms and gale-force winds she wore an RAF flying suit and boots, with her easel held in place by means of ropes and boulders. #joaneardley #modernbritishart

Edward Lear (1812–1888) Tree Roots, 1838 Oil and gouache on paper This wonderfully fresh oil study - a recent sale for Patrick Bourne & Co - is a rarity for Edward Lear, whose preferred medium for studies was pencil and watercolour. The base of the tree trunk depicted here might have been intended as a compositional element for a larger work, but the focus on the roots suggests that Lear treated it as a stand-alone subject, and was compelled to study it as a dendrologist would – examining its specific characteristics. Perhaps because of his renown as a writer of nonsense poetry, verse such as ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’, and later his success as a landscape painter, it is easy to forget that Lear was also one of most accomplished painters of natural history subjects in the nineteenth century. He worked closely with British scientists, collectors and publishers, contributing to Britain’s preeminence as a hub for scientific investigation and the circulation of knowledge. Lear had studied under the Pre-Raphaelite William Holman Hunt (1827–1910), who taught him the importance of precisely transcribing the light and colour of a particular time and place while sketching. Leaves, in particular, provided the ideal opportunity to grapple with the ephemeral effects of light. As he has done here, Lear often inscribed his sketches with the place, date and the time when they were made, emphasising his commitment to capturing the moment with scientific precision. Examples of Lear’s oil sketches can be found in the collections of @themorganlibrary @metmuseum and the @yalebritishart Text ©️ Patrick Bourne & Co #edwardlear #britishart

At @studiolo.projects , Patrick Bourne & Co. presented two exceptional works by William Stott of Oldham and F.C.B. Cadell. The presentation featured William Stott of Oldham’s La Tricoteuse (1880), an exceptionally important painting in the British Impressionist canon once owned by John Singer Sargent’s patron, the Chilean Consul Ramon Subercaseaux, and a beautiful Iona seascape by the Scottish Colourist F.C.B. Cadell.  Patrick Bourne & Co is a private gallery based in St James’s, London specialising in British Art from the eighteenth century through to the mid-twentieth century and also a range of important European masterworks. Studiolo 2025 was presented in collaboration with Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler (@sibylcolefax @lucyhammondgiles ) _______________________________________ William Stott of Oldham (1857–1900) La Tricoteuse Oil on canvas 67 x 54 cm (26 ¼ x 21 ¼ in) Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell (1883–1937) Looking West from the South of Iona Oil on board 37.5 × 45.7 cm (14 3⁄4 × 18 in) S. #CollectingAcrossTheCenturies

Patrick Bourne & Co are delighted to be taking part in the inaugural edition of @studiolo.projects - a one-day showcase of fine art and historic objects taking place at @spencer.house on 26th June. Named after the Italian ‘Studiolo’, the room dedicated to the display of art and treasured objects in Renaissance palaces, the event is presented in collaboration with @sibylcolefax #londonevents #londonart