Richard Green is delighted to lend two paintings to the exhibition ‘Dame Laura Knight RA – In the Open Air’ at Penlee House Gallery & Museum in Penzance (until 8 September).

Both works date from the decade when she and her husband, the artist Harold Knight, were living in the Cornish fishing village of Newlyn. It was there that Knight established herself as a painter of sunlight and shadows with a series of airy, radiant paintings of women and children beside the sea, as exemplified by In the Sun, Newlyn (c1909) in which a group of children pause on a sunlit headland overlooking the bay. The boy and girl in The two fishers (c1915-18), on the other hand, are shown playing by a stream and this setting was probably chosen in response to wartime regulations restricting depictions of the British coastline.

During the Second World War, Laura Knight served as a war artist in Britain and afterwards at the Nuremberg Trials. She was much acclaimed in her lifetime (1877–1970): she was the first woman elected to the Royal Academy and the first artist to be appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

Above: 'In the Sun, Newlyn' (c1909). Signed lower right, 25 x 30 in (63.5 x 76.2 cm)

147 New Bond Street, 20th September - 23rd October 2011

Dame Eileen Atkins, the multi-award winning actress and co-creator of the original television drama, Upstairs, Downstairs, was invited by Richard Green to open his latest exhibition for Victorian painter, John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836-1893). At the opening, Dame Eileen, who had chosen a painting by Grimshaw as her luxury item on Radio Four's Desert Island Discs, entertained guests by delivering a heartfelt speech that conveyed her great love of the artist with genuine feeling and charm.

The exhibition, which celebrates the 175th anniversary of the artist's birth, includes outstanding paintings that depict scenes for which Grimshaw is most beloved; hauntingly beautiful works that conjure up romantic Autumnal leafy lanes of suburban Leeds and moonlit dock views of London, Scotland and the north of England. Prime examples of his work, some generously loaned from distinguished private collections, and others, for sale from the gallery's own collection, hang side by side, demonstrating Grimshaw's distinctive style. James Abbott McNeill Whistler, himself celebrated for his nocturnal Thames views, is reputed to have said of these scenes: "I thought I had invented the nocturne until I discovered Grimmy's moonlights."

View the paintings

Richard Green is delighted to loan the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art a key painting by the celebrated Scottish Colourist, Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell (1883-1937).   'Interior, the Red Chair' will be included in Cadell’s first solo exhibition to be held at a public gallery since his Memorial Exhibition at the National Gallery, Scotland, in 1942. It will be shown with about seventy of his most important paintings, loaned from public and private collections, at The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Two, the sister building of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, formerly The Dean Gallery.   

Born in Edinburgh, Cadell was the youngest of the four Scottish Colourists - including J.D. Fergusson, G.L. Hunter and S.J. Peploe - and is celebrated for his stylish portrayals of Edinburgh New Town interiors and the elegant society that occupied them.  'Interior, the Red Chair,' dates from the late 1920s and encapsulates Cadell’s celebrated post-war Fauvist style that famously juxtaposes flat ares of intense, bold colour and thickly applied paint.

Cadell used his drawing room at 6 Ainslie Place, Edinburgh, as a studio in which to paint, and a number of the features portrayed in Interior, the Red Chair, can be found in other of his works - the fireplace, the blue and white pot, the Persian ceramic tile, the black lacquer Japanese cabinet and the bright red chair.

Richard Green has a long history of handling works by the Scottish Colourists and always stocks fine examples. In addition to this important interior by Cadell, currently in the Richard Green collection for sale is ‘Still life with silver tea-pot’ c.1915-1920, by George Leslie Hunter.  Combing the influence of Seventeenth century Dutch masters of the genre with the palette and application characteristic of modern French art, these vital works led to his initial association with the other Scottish Colourists.

Another important work on view and for sale at Richard Green is JD Fergusson’s stylish Art Deco portrait of Grace McColl. Beautiful women were Fergusson’s favourite subject and this half length portrait of the wife of his friend and patron, Harry McColl, with its strong, rhythmic lines, colours and patterns, portrays the sitter as a fashionable icon of the day.

Richard Green is among the first London galleries to embrace the digital era by unveiling their own iPhone App, allowing for exclusive browsing from an unrivalled stock of pictures dating from the 17^th - 21^st Century.  Free and simple to download from iTunes, the App offers an innovative opportunity to explore high quality oil paintings and works on paper from the palm of your hand and to keep up to date with news releases and forthcoming exhibitions.

The App is a perfect companion, giving users as much time as they need to familiarise themselves with paintings that have been carefully selected by the gallery.  The undisputed fact that Richard Green are highly specialised in what they do, enables collectors to view a wide range  of art, safe in the knowledge that the pictures they are looking at are of the highest quality and in excellent condition.  The Directors of the gallery take great pride in their long-standing connoisseurship in Old Masters, including 17^th and 18^th Century Dutch and Flemish paintings; 18th Century British paintings; Sporting and Marine pictures; 19^th Century European paintings, French Impressionists; Victorian pictures and Modern British art.

Richard Green is proud to sponsor three loan exhibitions currently on view at museums around Britain. We are delighted to support the Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle; the Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate and Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury, all of which have very fine permanent collections and lively exhibition programmes. The shows present the work of three artists – Henri Fantin-Latour, John Atkinson Grimshaw and Sir Alfred Munnings - with which Richard Green has a long association.

Painting Flowers: Fantin-Latour and the Impressionists

15 April – 9 October 2011 The Bowes Museum Barnard Castle, Co. Durham DL12 8NP www.thebowesmuseum.org.uk → Read more Henri Fantin-Latour’s technique places him among the giants of nineteenth century French painting; his subject matter – flowers – endears him to the British, a nation of gardeners. The Bowes Museum, an extraordinary Louis XIV-style structure built to hold the collection of John and Joséphine Bowes, houses a superb permanent collection of French art. The exhibition explores Fantin-Latour’s genius as a flower painter and places him in the context of his famous friends and contemporaries, including Renoir and Courbet. Richard Green has lent Fantin-Latour’s Chrysanthèmes and Raisins dans un panier by his wife, Victoria Dubourg.

Atkinson Grimshaw: Painter of Moonlight

16 April – 4 September 2011 The Mercer Art Gallery, Swan Road, Harrogate HG1 2SA www.harrogate.gov.uk/museums 19 September 2011 – 15 January 2012 The Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/Corporation/LGNL_Services/Leisure_and_culture/Museums_and_galleries/Guildhall_Art_Gallery/ → Read more Over fifty major works from the supreme Victorian painter of moonlight, to whom even his friend and rival Whistler gave place in the creation of night-time effects. Beginning his career as a Pre-Raphaelite, Atkinson Grimshaw in his mature works conjured up the leafy lanes of suburban Leeds and walked in the shadowy dockyards of Liverpool and London. He struck a note of chill with his views of Whitby under the full moon – a landscape immortalized in prose in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Landscape Paintings by Sir Alfred Munnings

5 March – 4 June 2011 Gainsborough’s House 46 Gainsborough Street, Sudbury, Suffolk CO10 2EU www.gainsborough.org → Read more Sir Alfred Munnings is perhaps best known as a sporting painter, but, a countryman through and through, he made highly sensitive landscape paintings all his career. Gainsborough’s House has brought together a group of landscapes on loan from Munnings’s home at Castle House, Dedham, now The Sir Alfred Munnings Museum, together with one loan from Richard Green entitle The mill pond at Dedham. They vividly evoke the East Anglian landscape of Munnings’s birthplace, as well as the dramatic wildness of Exmoor, where Munnings spent many a season hunting.

Golden: Dutch and Flemish Masterworks from the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection

Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts 26 February – 19 June 2011 Then travelling to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco 9 July – 2 October 2011 www.pem.org → Read more Richard Green is delighted to be one of the Circle of Friends which has co-sponsored Golden, the first public exhibition of one of the finest collections of Dutch and Flemish Old Masters to be formed in the last quarter century. Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo’s collection reflects the extraordinary artistic flowering in the Low Countries in the seventeenth century, an era which has justly been dubbed a ‘Golden Age’. Among the highlights are a Still life with roses, c.1619, by Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder and a Glass vase with flowers, 1655-60, by Jan Davidsz. de Heem, both artists crucial to the development of flower painting in the Northern and Southern Netherlands. Also included is a major work by the deaf-dumb painter Hendrick Avercamp, inventor of the winter scene, and an exquisite genre scene by Gerrit Dou, Sleeping dog, 1650. Rembrandt towers over this era and a supreme treasure of the collection is his tender, humane portrait of an elderly woman, Aeltje Uylenburgh, 1632.

Report in The Daily Telegraph:

Duncan Grant’s The room with a view at Radical Bloomsbury: Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant 1905-1925 (Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, 16 April – 9 October 2011)

John Piper, Sea buildings at John Piper in Kent and Sussex (Mascalls Gallery, Paddock Wood, Kent; Tunbridge Wells Museum; Scotney Castle, Lamberhurst, 9 March – 21 May 2011)

Professor Ken Howard’s, Dora, Venetian interior and Lay figure and discus thrower at the 123rd Paisley Arts Institute Annual Exhibition (Paisley Museum & Art Galleries, Scotland, 7 May- 5 June 2011)

A Munnings mystery

Harold Knight’s portrait of Alfred Munnings reading is on loan from Richard Green to the Sir Alfred Munnings Art Museum at Castle House, Dedham until 31st October. An extraordinary discovery, the painting was recently found hidden beneath a canvas by Harold Knight’s wife, Laura. Before the First World War, Munnings and the Knights were part of a circle of painters at Lamorna who found inspiration in the rugged terrain and exquisite light of Cornwall. Young and high-spirited, they also gathered for poetry readings at which the ebullient, attractive Munnings was a leading light. For Laura, somewhat smitten, Alfred was ‘the stable, the artist, the poet, the very land itself!’ Alfred Munnings reading is a large-scale study for Harold Knight’s The sonnet, 1911 (whereabouts unknown), which depicts Alfred declaiming at an alfresco tea party to a group of young women. On the extreme right of The sonnet is art student Florence Carter Wood, whom Munnings married the following year. The union was disastrous and Florence committed suicide in 1914. Harold Knight was no admirer of Alfred but painted the beautiful, ethereal Florence several times. Laura, by contrast, was a staunch friend who helped the grief-stricken artist. The complex involvement of the Knights in the tragedy may explain why Harold’s portrait was hidden for so many decades behind Laura’s canvas. Alfred Munnings reading captures a moment of youth, of joy, of spring before a personal tragedy and a World War engulfed the carefree band of artists at Lamorna. The Sir Alfred Munnings Art Museum, Castle House, Dedham, Essex CO7 6AZ www.siralfredmunnings.co.uk