London Art Week

London Art Week 2014: Master Paintings Week and Master Drawings & Sculpture week have combined to provide a feast of Old Master delights across London galleries

London Art Week looks set to become a ‘must’ in the cultural Season. It’s divided into two parts, Master Paintings and Master Drawings & Sculpture; the first will be a London-wide parade of Master oils, and the well-briefed visitor will be able to enjoy some understated beauty in the second. 

Master Paintings

London’s Fine Art gallery scene is unrivalled in both dynamism and erudition, and so it’s not surprising that the Master Paintings division has drawn the Director of the National Gallery, Nicholas Penny, to write a welcome. Twenty of London’s galleries - including Philip Mould, Richard Greene and Colnaghi, which claims to be the oldest art dealership in the world - and the auction house triumvirate Christie’s, Bonham’s and Sotheby’s, will stage special exhibitions and events. Look out for Rafael Valls Ltd’s show Architectural Painting: Fantasy and Reality, following hot on the heels of the National’s own exhibition looking into the architecture within Renaissance art. The Valls show focuses on later dates, and promises to entertain with some tricky ‘perspectival conundrums’ as well as admire the painstaking painterly precision needed to depict vast architectural spaces, real and imagined. BNB Art Consulting Ltd will open its Dover St doors for a charming show of bucolic Italian 17th and 18th century life; a highlight will be Franz de Paula Ferg’s lively performance by the influential Italian dramatic form Commedia dell’Arte.

Master Drawings & Sculpture

Jeremy Warren, Collections and Academic Director of London’s Wallace Collection, has written the foreword  for the Master Drawings & Sculpture catalogue, a must for navigating these obscurer pieces. Some of the same names will be participating in this side of the Art Week, plus some more specialised outfits, such as the German Katrin Bellinger installed at Colnaghi, on Bond St., specialising in works on paper. The Bellinger show German Landscape Drawings of the 19th Century, also following a recent spate of London shows dealing with German art, will surely feature typical gem-like offerings of exquisite drawings. Look out for Charles Lucien Léandre’s superbly leering 1900 portrait of the artist Maurice Eliot at Day and Faber’s Portraits from Four Centuries. Sculptures on show also cross the ages, from a medieval French Virgin and Child Enthroned at Sam Fogg to a late-eighteenth-century Italian bronze Bacchus and Ariadne at the Tomasso Brothers. 

Our view…

In this metropolitan summer fête for aesthetes, London’s finest art institutions invite the public in to contemplate the beauty of the objects on show outside of the museum context. This is also a showcase for how London’s old art market still drives taste and the canon, setting precedents for the academy and museums worldwide. Usually, dealing in pictures and sculpture occurs behind Mayfair and St James’s genteel façades in a city that coined the term ‘Old Master Painting’, so this is an unmissable chance to really look inside.