James Beechey
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jamesbeechey.bsky.social
James Beechey
@jamesbeechey.bsky.social
Art historian. Liberal.
Reposted by James Beechey
Walter Richard Sickert, Sir Thomas Beecham Conducting, c. 1935
https://botfrens.com/collections/14377/contents/1135302
November 12, 2025 at 3:13 PM
Piano Nobile’s excellent exhibition of paintings, drawings and prints by Walter Sickert from the Lucas collection includes this drawing of c.1912 - enigmatically titled The Handicap - of a young Enid Bagnold and a not-so-young Harold Gilman locked in an amorous clinch.
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November 12, 2025 at 10:23 AM
Reposted by James Beechey
🔍 This month, our former placement student, Caitlin Johnson (BA Museum Studies and Archaeology, 2021-2025), provides a closer look into Walter Sickert’s intriguing drawing — featured in our current exhibition ‘Paint, Pencil, Print: 10 Artworks for 10 Years’

collections.reading.ac.uk/art-collecti...
November 11, 2025 at 4:38 PM
Reposted by James Beechey
It is early in the morning, and there are few people about in this 1919 work by William Nicholson of the Cenotaph in London. It is the original white-painted wood and plaster structure designed by Edward Lutyens, it stands out in stark relief against the Foreign Office.
November 9, 2025 at 10:52 AM
David Hockney’s exhibition, opening tomorrow at Annely Juda’s chic new gallery in Hanover Square, contains radiant new paintings made this summer of chairs, flowers and fruit which joyfully convey his undimmed zest for life (and art).
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November 6, 2025 at 10:47 PM
The answer is probably yes. Tate's 1999 exhibition The Art of Bloomsbury received a critical mauling - very unfairly in my view. (Full disclosure: I wrote an essay in the catalogue.) The gist of most reviews was 'why should we care about these ghastly people about whom we've heard far too much?'
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‘It’s not that the art, writing and design of the Bloomsbury Group isn’t often wonderful.’ It’s rather, writes Matthew Sperling, that it all takes up ‘a disproportionate amount of cultural space’.
Have we reached peak Bloomsbury yet?
The cultural legacy of Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and co. is undeniable, but with the design, fashion, art and literary worlds forever ‘rediscovering’ them, Matthew Sperling says it’s time to move on
buff.ly
November 2, 2025 at 6:40 PM
This is not, in fact, his first wife Grace Canedy - who had returned to America a year before this painting was made - but his younger sister Irene Battiscombe. It was painted at the Battiscombes’ house in Warwick in spring 1910.
November 2, 2025 at 11:51 AM
I’m not sure I share John-Paul’s hatred of Cezanne’s Les Grandes Baigneuses; but having caught the Cezanne exhibition at the Musée Granet in Aix just before it closed earlier this month, I would trade it for almost any other picture on show there.
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Weary of how amazing and excellent art is, all the time, everywhere?

I wrote about hating a painting, and found it liberating.

open.substack.com/pub/jpstonar...
A painting I hate
In the National Gallery, London.
open.substack.com
October 31, 2025 at 12:20 PM
Reposted by James Beechey
#RIP Prunella Scales. Photo by John Deakin, 1964.
October 28, 2025 at 10:53 AM
Who is this baby painted c.1912-13 by Harold Gilman? I make a very tentative suggestion in a catalogue note for Bonhams Modern British sale next month:
www.bonhams.com/auction/3071...
October 27, 2025 at 7:00 PM
My catalogue note on this rediscovered Interior by Harold Gilman, in Bonhams Modern British sale on 19 November:
www.bonhams.com/auction/3071...
October 27, 2025 at 6:57 PM
Reposted by James Beechey
'The Vineyard.' (c1938) Throughout the interwar years, Vanessa Bell lived predominantly in London and travelled to Europe, taking extended stays in Italy and France. Her paintings at this time consist of warm, sunny landscapes that document her travels abroad.
October 24, 2025 at 11:28 AM
Leonard Woolf, in a 1964 BBC interview, when asked to define his wife’s ‘genius’:
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October 23, 2025 at 5:20 PM
Happy 80th birthday to my not-at-all-fearsome friend Maggi Hambling.
October 23, 2025 at 11:02 AM
Denton Welch (1915-48) belongs to a small band of British artists who were also novelists or poets - including William Blake, Wyndham Lewis, David Jones & Alasdair Gray. His 1945 autobiographical novel In Youth is Pleasure is a minor masterpiece.
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October 23, 2025 at 10:33 AM
The second of four portraits Harold Gilman made of the Polish-born artist Stanislawa de Karlowska, the wife of his great friend and fellow member of the Camden Town Group, Robert Bevan. To be sold in Christie’s Modern British sale in London tomorrow evening.

www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6...
October 21, 2025 at 1:47 PM