A MESSAGE FROM THE CEO

Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry Acquires a Painting by Vanessa Bell

Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry has acquired from Richard Green Vanessa Bell’s The pond at Charleston looking towards Tilton, c.1948-50. Modernist pioneer Bell, nurturing centre of the Bloomsbury Group and sister of the novelist Virginia Woolf, absorbed the shock of Post‑Impressionism, the bold experiments of European abstraction and the energy of modern design, transforming them into something entirely her own. Recently the subject of a major retrospective at MK Gallery and Charleston Lewes, Vanessa Bell: A World of Form and Colour,she is shortly to be the co-star of an exhibition at Tate Britain alongside Duncan Grant.

Charleston and Tilton, on the Firle Estate in East Sussex, were woven into the history of the Bloomsbury Group. Vanessa Bell rented Charleston in 1916; her friend the economist Maynard Keynes took a long lease of Tilton House in 1925, at the time of his marriage to the Russian ballet dancer Lydia Lopokova. In Bell’s painting the side of Tilton House can be seen – white wall and grey roof – among farm buildings. At the time this work was painted, c.1948-50, the widowed Lydia was living in Tilton, its rooms adorned with Post-Impressionist works collected by Maynard.

As Richard Shone writes, ‘The view of Tilton from Charleston appears in many paintings by Bell and Grant. The present work, with its spring-time flourish of fresh greens, contains two elements that Bell particularly doted on – she liked subjects…that were not far from her door and enjoyed water in a landscape with its subtle reflections and suggestion of movement. Here, she has taken her easel a little way from the house and looked across the farm pond on a late spring day…It is a perfect encapsulation of the tranquillity Bell savoured at Charleston’.

The painting will be on view at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry later this year. 

Richard Green supports Winston Churchill: The Painter at the Wallace Collection

We are delighted to be a supporter of Winston Churchill: The Painter at the Wallace Collection, London (23^rd May-29^th November 2026). Bringing together over fifty paintings, around half from private collections, this is the most important retrospective of his work since 1958. Churchill was defined by politics but sustained by a lifelong passion for art. It began in 1915 when the catastrophe of the Dardanelles Campaign, masterminded by him as First Lord of the Admiralty, brought about personal and national crisis. Painting was a blessed escape.

Among the themes are deeply personal views of his beloved Chartwell House in Kent, his refuge from the storms of life on the international stage. Other works reflect his travels, particularly in southern Europe and Morocco, where he revelled in light and colour, forging a new boldness in his painting. Churchill was the first British Prime Minister to have works exhibited at the Royal Academy of Art. Other paintings were used as diplomatic gifts, such as the view of Marrakech which he made for President Roosevelt. Works by Churchill’s mentors, including Sir John Lavery and Sir William Nicholson, throw further light on his painting milieu. Echoing our gallery’s own interest in these three remarkable artists, we look forward to a revelatory display of the great statesman’s skill in his off-duty hours.