Autumn Exhibition 2024

British art critic and collector Douglas Cooper was an early supporter of Cubism. He was friends with Picasso, Braque, Gris and Léger and amassed a fine collection of their works, including Leger’s Composition à l’échiquier. Cooper’s collection is an example of connoisseurship along with an intimate understanding of these artists'oeuvres. As a scholar as well as collector, Cooper was held in great admiration. His legacy has been cemented through numerous museum exhibitions such as Douglas Cooper and the masters of Cubism and Picasso, Braque, Gris, Léger: Douglas Cooper Collecting Cubism, in which Composition à l’échiquier was shown. 

Henri Matisse is renowned for his draughtsmanship. His use of line journeyed though many different iterations, developing and adapting as his work progressed. In early odalisques, the artist used shading for three dimensionality and realism, while in later works such Tête de femme avec voile, there is a greater focus on the simplicity of line.

In 1949, suffering from ill health, Henri Matisse took  residence in an apartment at Hôtel Régina in Nice-Cimiez, staying there until his death in 1954. Here he focused on bold ink drawings and cutouts, sometimes using the painted paper for the cutouts to do the ink drawings as with Tête.

Boudin exhibited at the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874, his work forming a bridge with their predecessors, the Barbizon school. He was one of the first artists to take to plein air painting, inspiring Monet in 1858 to work outdoors to study nature and its changing effects directly.

From the 1860s Boudin became known for painting the Parisian middle class, who took to the coast of Northern France as a fashionable escape from the city with one critic noting how “Boudin… has even invented a type of seascape which belongs entirely to him and which consists in painting, along with the beach itself, the exotic high society which gathers in our sea resorts during the summer”. 

More closely aligned with left wing politics, Pissarro chose to depict the working classes and their everyday lives in their local environment, rather than the elite on holiday. As in Paysanne assises causant, Pissarro’s work elevates what would then have often been considered a humble subject. Here, Pissarro is revolutionary in depicting the working class women with the same gravitas as a bourgeoise subject, eloquently depicting them without sentimentality or placing them on an unattainable pedestal.

Born in Munich in 1860, but then raised in England from a young age, Walter Sickert is one of the very few British artists to be welcomed into the exclusive circle of Parisian modernist painters in the late 1800s. He first studied under James McNeill Whistler, who in turn introduced him to Edgar Degas in Paris in 1883. This relationship was incredibly formative, with Degas encouraging Sickert to work with a wide range of subject matter, from the urban streets of London, Paris and Dieppe, to boisterous music halls, which hold a great affinity to the Impressionist’s paintings on the same subject.