Coming soon at The Fine Art Society is Lasting Impressions, an exhibition of 50 works – largely prints – curated by Director, Gordon Cooke. After twenty years at The Fine Art Society and over forty years in the business, Cooke will retire at the end of the year and this will be his final exhibition at the gallery.
The show will feature a number of works by James McNeill Whistler, Samuel Palmer and Walter Sickert, reflecting Cooke’s own interests as well as the gallery’s long history of exhibiting these artists. These will include Whistler’s ‘Nocturne: Palaces’, one of his greatest Venice etchings, and Palmer’s ‘The Lonely Tower’, gifted by the artist to Frederic George Stephens, who was the first critic to write about Palmer’s Shoreham paintings in the catalogue of his memorial exhibition at The Fine Art Society in 1881. The show will also present a unique etching by Whistler’s pupil Sickert, ‘ Venice, The Horses of St Mark’s’.
Ben Nicholson, Profile, 1933. Courtesy of The Fine Art Society
With a group of three Ben Nicholson prints: ‘Profile’ (1933), ‘I.C.I Shed’ (1948) and ‘Tree, Column and Moon’ (1967), the exhibition will reflect the three distinct phases of Nicholson’s career as a printmaker. It will also feature five works by Graham Sutherland including the astonishing early drawing ‘Hop Fields’ (c.1925), created while he was still a student at Goldsmiths’ College.
A number of further works in the exhibition mirror Cooke’s own enthusiasms: ‘The Chamber Idyll’ (1831) by Edward Calvert, a small masterpiece; two prints by sculptor Geoffrey Clarke, an artist that Cooke has championed; and lithographs by John Copley and Ethel Gabain, whose estates Cooke has represented for over thirty years. Peter Lanyon and Kenneth Martin – wonderfully talented printmakers working in the 1950s – and William Larkins, the subject of Cooke’s first exhibition in 1978, are also included.
There is a suite of lithographs by Harry Holland, ‘Homage to Electricity’, commissioned by Garton & Cooke in 1980, and etchings by Robin Tanner, a Goldsmiths’ artist from whom Cooke learned a great deal in his early career. Cooke has included works by Norman Ackroyd from the 1980s, by Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden, CRW Nevinson and Paul Nash.
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