Master Painters & Pioneers: | 8 Duke St, St James', London

Master Painters & Pioneers: 19th - 20th Century returns on the strength of an exhibition that, in 2025, drew hundreds of visitors and reminded us how much appetite there is for pictures of real ambition shown in the company of one another. Working closely with private collectors, we have the privilege of presenting exceptional artworks, many of which have not been seen in public for decades.

The exhibition opens in Regency London with four rare watercolours by Thomas Rowlandson — a small Rowlandson cabinet within the larger show — before moving into the great Victorian project of imagining beauty for its own sake, led by Edward Burne-Jones’ Aurora, holding the goddess of dawn in perpetual annunciation.

Concurrently, new generations were arriving with new ideals. Philip Wilson Steer's A Summer Evening from 1888 is one of those. A monumental work and held in the same breath as Seurat's Les Poseuses (1886–8, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia) when exhibited at the avant-garde Les XX exhibition in Belgium in 1889, it stands as one of the most radical paintings of its generation. The Impressionist connections continue with Alfred Sisley's Le Pont de Moret, effet de neige (1890), part of a series-long occupation with light effects from his last decade, which hangs alongside Henri Martin’s working canvas for the Conseil d’Etat of Marseille port, rendered in broken, pure pigment.

The European dialogue carries into the twentieth century. The ‘genius’ of the pre-war Slade School generation, Mark Gertler, in his The Sari, embraces a muscular European modernism, which pays homage to Picasso. The Scottish Colourists are present in a complete quartet – Cadell, Fergusson, Hunter and Peploe – with early works indebted to their time in France and encountering the post-Impressionists and Fauves.

Elsewhere, tales of sporting prowess are represented by two of the great British equestrian painters of their generation: John Frederick Herring Snr and Alfred Munnings – two exceptional paintings executed a century apart.

The exhibition closes on a single, extraordinary object: Francis Bacon’s front door at 7 Reece Mews, the threshold he passed through daily between 1961 and 1992, offered in unrestored original condition. It is the only such object outside the Hugh Lane in Dublin, and the only one likely ever to come to market. Its inclusion is, we recognise, a departure: not a painting, but a relic, made significant by sustained physical contact with one of the most important painters of the twentieth century.

 

8 Duke Street St James's

London

SW17 6BN

10 am - 6pm Daily

Out of hours by appointment