Nestled on the third floor of London’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG) between Lord Byron’s amazing decorated folding screen of actors and boxers and a plethora of paintings from the early 1600s art including The Somerset House Conference (1604), one comes across a room of portraits by one of Poland’s most important artists, Stanisław Wyspiański (1869-1907). Critics have widely praised the works.
The annual Lebanese designers’ exhibition - ‘From Beirut to London’ - is underway again, at the Arab British Chamber of Commerce in the heart of Mayfair.
Presented by the UK Embassy of Lebanon, the event showcases the very best of the country’s underrated heritage craftsmanship, featuring stalls and stands from leading Lebanese designers in the fields of fashion, jewellery, art, home décor and artisanal works.
It runs until November 26th, and will be back again in 2024 if you’re not able to make it on this occasion.
Michelle Pearson Cooper’s delicate flower studies, made when Covid meant escape to Africa was forbidden, are another highlight of her exhibition.
These paintings of wildflowers, butterflies and bees, were inspired during the pandemic.
The exhibition, inserted like a ship in a bottle into the domestic proportions of the Osborne Studio Gallery, comprises a collection from the sixty of more Climping beach scenes, and one eight footer of the Arctic, following Baker’s Cummingøya expedition.
Lincoln Seligman has an almost umbilical link with India. His family is connected with some of the great names in the country’s history and literature, from Mahatma Gandhi (a close friend of his paternal grandmother Hilda Seligman) and Rudyard Kipling (his mother’s godfather) to the shepherd boy Chandragupta, who became the first Emperor of the Indian Mauryan dynasty around 320 BCE. A bronze sculpture of the boy, created by Hilda Seligman, now sits in majesty on a red sandstone plinth in front of the Indian Parliament in New Delhi.
Frippy Jameson (born 1978), who now lives and works in the Scottish Borders, studied Fine Art Sculpture at Camberwell College of Art and Design, but, as she explains when telling her own story, she didn’t follow the mood of that moment in the early nineties, when YBAs such as Hirst and Emin were generating all the critical excitement, controversy and headlines, with their conceptual new art.
Daniel Crane, born in Norfolk in 1969, is the youngest son of a farming family, always surrounded by animals and the countryside, with a respect and love for them both.
St. Stephen's Cathedral roof tiles, depicting the Imperial double-headed eagle and coat of arms of the city of Vienna, were nicely framed by the original wood beams and window-scape of my suite in ‘The Leo Grand’ boutique hotel, itself a baroque masterpiece that has been looking out towards the cathedral’s spires since the 12th Century.
A tenth solo show celebrates one of the world’s most admired and collected equestrian artists. Joie de vivre, draughtsmanship, and brilliant colour in the paintings of Hubert de Watrigant shine out of thirty new works at Osborne Studio Gallery, in London’s Belgravia.
Madeleine Bunbury, (born 1997) is a travelling equestrian portrait painter, classically trained in Florence; available for private commissions anywhere in the world she paints life size horses, directly from life, under a natural north light. She does not use photographs, but devised her own creative process to keep her subjects comfortable during the hours of posing ‘Sometimes 1 have to whisper to them a little’ A portrait can take as many as ten sessions.
