Lent courtesy of Liss Fine Art

This is the first ever Brangwyn exhibition in Japan and comprises 120 works assembled from 30 museums and collectors from eight countries. The show centers on Brangwyn's relationship with his Japanese patron Matsukata, and the (unfulfilled) plans for the Kyoraku Art Museum, which would have housed the remarkable Matsukata Collection of Western Art.

Liss Fine Art are delighted to announce that their forthcoming Stanley Lewis (1905-2009) exhibition will take place at The Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford, from the 12th June - 5th September 2010. The exhibition - the first ever Stanley Lewis retrospective - will be accompanied by a full colour catalogue.

103-year-old Stanley Lewis with Paul Liss.

"When my exhibition is up and running, open a good bottle of champagne and celebrate and think of me. No doubt I will be there in spirit to keep an eye on things" .... (Stanley Lewis's last wishes, email to Paul Liss 24th September 2009)

Liss Fine Art in association with Harry Moore-Gwyn Fine Art are delighted to announce the dates of their forthcoming Walter Bonner Gash exhibition: 19th Feb 2011 to 2nd April 2011 to be held at Kettering Museum and Art Gallery.

Liss Fine Art are delighted to announce a sale of drawings and watercolours from the collection of Peyton Skipwith, to be held in April 2010.

"Art enhances life and I have been lucky enough to have spent my life surrounded by it. I was born in a large Victorian house in a remote part of Hampshire with good furniture and generations of family portraits; not necessarily great, but stimulating. At school, at Canford, I haunted the Art Room presided over by Robin Noscoe, a polymath and enthusiast. After leaving Canford I went to Salisbury School of art and also spent a summer as a guide at Wilton House with its great Double-Cube Room furnished by William Kent and hung with marvellous Van Dycks. There were also beautiful paintings by Richard Wilson, the odd Rubens oil sketch and paintings by Rex Whistler. National Service followed - not much art there - but it gave me a breathing space, and by the time I was demobbed I knew that I wanted to spend my life in the art world. Luck intervened: I had been back in the UK for just a few weeks when I saw an advertisement in the Times for a West End art dealer requiring an assistant - ‘no previous experience required’. It was The Fine Art Society in New Bond Street and I spent the next forty-four years working there.

One of my early mentors was a great mediaevalist, and I still retain a strong enthusiasm for North European mediaeval and gothic art, but exposure at The Fine Art Society in the early 1960s to a whole swathe of largely forgotten 19th and early 20th century British painting and sculpture and decorative arts enthused me and largely shaped my aesthetic life. Indeed, I could omit the word aesthetic and just say ‘shaped my life’, because I was to meet my wife, Anne, at the Fine Art Society, which leads on to why we are de-accessioning some works. Twenty-three years ago, with a growing family, we knocked together two terraced cottages in North London; now we are reversing the process, making them once again into separate homes, and giving one to our elder daughter and family, with the result we will have less wall-space. As everyone knows, two into one won’t go and so, after much agonising, we have decided to relinquish certain items, in the hope and expectation that they will give as much pleasure to others as they have to us.

Each of these drawings and watercolours reflect some aspect of my research and collecting over the last half-century. Edward Stott and the early years of the New English Art Club was an early enthusiasm leading me to Amberley in the 1960s and thence to the Slade School, where so many members had studied, including William Rothenstein. In 1968 I organised an exhibition, The Early Years of the New English Art Club, which led on directly to a centennial exhibition of the Slade in 1971 and, the following year to a celebration of William Rothenstein’s centenary, Men and Memories. In the meantime The Fine Art Society had mounted seminal exhibitions devoted to British Sculpture 1850-1914, and The Earthly Paradise, the latter devoted to Joseph Southall and the largely forgotten Birmingham School. I got to know Southall’s niece, Elizabeth Baker, and visited her on a number of occasions; she sold works by ‘Uncle Jo’, as she called him, when she needed a new car; I acquired a number of drawings from her, and also mounted an exhibition, Southall in Suffolk, at the 1981 Aldeburgh Festival, largely culled from her extensive collection of his sketchbooks. A number of these, which had been purchased by Alan Fortunoff, reappeared on the market in 2005 in the last exhibition I mounted at the Fine Art Society before my retirement.

Over the years collectors such as Alan Fortunoff and his wife became good friends, as did many artists - Ethelbert White, Edward Bawden, Richard Eurich, Bernard & Diana Dunstan, Leonard Rosoman, Elisabeth Vellacott, John Ward, Anthony Green, Norman Blamey, James Butler, Peter Blake - the list goes on. I bought, and was given, works. As I write this I have beside me a drawing by Bernard Dunstan of the 1976 Camden Town Exhibition at The Fine Art Society inscribed ‘To Peyton from BD’ and another by Peter Blake inscribed: ‘given as the result of a coincidence. Christmas 1977’. Such works remain sacrosanct, while others, which may be intrinsically superior, are easier to part with; but in a way one never parts with works one has collected and loved, they become ingrained and an element of their beauty and spirit remains part of one."

Peyton Skipwith, Hampstead January 2010

Throughout 2010 thirty new works will be offered for sale every three weeks (exclusively through our website). These virtual exhibitions will alternate between themes, (such a war, interiors etc) and selections featuring the work of artists in whom Liss Fine Art have a particular interest. The majority of these works are sourced directly from Artist's Estates and Private Collections.
The following Artists will be featured during 2010: 
ROBERT SERGENT AUSTIN • ALBERT DE BELLEROCHE • FRANK BRANGWYN • ROSALIE BRILL • PETER BROOK • MICHAEL CANNEY • DEAN CORNWELL • CHARLES CUNDALL • HARCOURT MEDHURST DOYLE • KATHLEEN GUTHRIE • EDWARD HALLIDAY • PERCY HORTON • CHARLES MAHONEY •  SIR THOMAS MONNINGTON • SIR GERALD KELLY • WINIFRED KNIGHTS • JOHN MCKENZIE • LILIAN AND STANLEY ROWLES • CECIL STEPHENSON • RAYMOND SHEPPARD •  ARTHUR STUDD • ROY TURNER DURRANT