Exhibitions
The Chocolate Detective: hazelnut praline & salted caramel bird eggs £14.50
Rebecca Mays Winter Wreaths
Christmas at Town House: Pollocks Toy Museum, see events page
Pollocks Toy Museum are in the gallery for Christmas with a selection of their Theatres and photos on display. Make your own Pollocks theatre kits, cards and wrapping paper are on sale in the shop too…
Tickets for the performances are available on Eventbrite here: Pollocks performance tickets
And the Chocolate Detective is back with Chantal Coady’s bird eggs that were so popular here last year: hazelnut praline or salted caramel in dark milk chocolate – mixed boxes also available
We’ll also be selling Rebecca Mays lovely Christmas wreaths here from the beginning of December….
So come and have a look, we’re open until 5.30pm on Sunday 22nd December, re-opening Tuesday 7th January 2025. Have a great holiday season!
Submissions invited for Town House Open 2024 deadline April 26th.
It’s time for submissions to the Town House Open exhibition again and please tell anyone you know who might be interested in submitting! The deadline is Friday 26th April CLICK HERE TO SUBMIT
It’s open to a wide range of media: paintings, mixed media, drawings, cut paper collage (sorry not photo montage), and original prints (ie works created solely as a print at the outset, not giclées). This year it will be in one exhibition only in July and August and I’m sorry, there is not sufficient space to include photographs.
The maximum size is A1 including any frame and although there is no minimum size, very small works (below say 15 x 15cm), are difficult to hang here. Just a reminder too that any work submitted must not have been exhibited before and should have been created within the last twelve months
Looking forward to seeing the submissions….
Eleanor Crow’s Shopfronts of London
An exhibition to accompany publication of the book of the same name featuring over eighty of Eleanor’s watercolours from the book, including some new ones
At a time of momentous change in the high street, Eleanor’s witty and fascinating personal survey champions the enduring culture of Britain’s small neighbourhood shops. Eleanor’s collection includes eighty of her watercolours of the capital’s bakers, cafés, butchers, fishmongers, greengrocers, chemists, launderettes, hardware stores, eel & pie shops, bookshops and stationers. Her pictures are accompanied in the book by the stories of the shops, their history and their shopkeepers – stretching from Chelsea in the west to Bethnal Green and Walthamstow in the east.
The watercolours are £150 framed (A5) and larger ones are £210 framed.
The exhibition opens on the 3rd October with a book launch and signing that evening 6 – 8pm and the exhibition continues at Town House until Sunday 20th October. 
Lost Time: Doreen Fletcher’s East End 1983 – 2003
Doreen Fletcher arrived in the East End of London in the early 1980s and was immediately aware that the dilapidated buildings and small businesses in the streets around her were about to disappear. The sense of community in the area reminded her of her Midlands childhood and inspired by the excitement of being somewhere new, she started a series of paintings of the East End that continued for the next twenty years.
Aware that she was documenting an urban landscape that would be lost forever, she regularly contacted galleries and magazines to promote not only her paintings, but also an awareness of what was happening in the East End. Their negative response reflected the wider attitude at the time: a complete lack of interest. It was the culmination of centuries of neglect of an area that had long been regarded as a vast slum and dispirited by the rejections and the overwhelming changes to the area, Doreen stopped painting.
As perceptions have changed and we have come to realise what has been lost, Doreen’s work can now be seen as a poignant record of the time at which so much of the legacy of the East End disappeared. It is not only a record of the built environment of the 19th century and earlier, but also of a community that had survived the bombs of the Second World War. This community was in many ways the last vestiges of a late 19th century, tight knit society, in which life revolved around the streets of one’s birth and around family and friends living nearby.
These paintings depict a lost time that has gone and cannot be recovered, but perhaps this exhibition will encourage us to make up for that lost time and demand a new way of looking at future development in our cities, before it really is too late.
A Throw of the Dice
A little over a year ago I stood before Picasso’s ‘Desmoiselles d’Avignon’ in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and for the first time I got a slight sense of what it might have been like to be one of the first to see that painting a hundred years ago. With its complete negation of classicism and of the decorative in painting, in its brutality and aggression it baffled the first of his friends to see it and received a hostile reception from the Parisian public when it was first exhibited in 1916. Picasso himself continued to receive a hostile reception in Britain until after the Second World War. It is easy for us to see with hindsight the impact this painting had on 20th century art, to see it as the beginning of modernism, yet at the time whether loved or loathed, it would probably have been regarded by most as unimportant, and Cubism as a short lived aberration.
The impact of the painting stayed with me and when I bought a cubist paper collage a few months later, indistinctly signed, but British and dating from just before the First World War, I started to look for the influence of Cubism in some of the other paintings by British artists I had been putting aside for exhibitions. During a long period of thinking and reading it eventually became clear that the thread I was following was not the influence of Cubism, but of Stéphane Mallarmé (1842 – 1898), the French poet whose ideas inspired Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism in France and Europe. There was (almost) no equivalent British ‘-ism’ however, despite the complex network of connections, which existed between London and Paris from the 19th century through to the 1930s.
During this period Paris was still the place to go for artistic training and after the First World War was a cheap place to live, with a thriving artistic community. George Bissill was a young miner until after the First World War when he studied art in Nottingham, but as soon as he had his first successful exhibition in London in 1925, he left to spend some time in Paris. Many British artists had visited Paris and knew Picasso and the Paris avant-garde well, yet their ideas apparently failed to take hold. In a modest way this exhibition is an exploration of that theme until around the time of the Second World War.
I also realised during the course of putting this exhibition together, that Mallarmé’s ideas had a strong personal resonance for me as a dealer and collector (most works in the exhibition are for sale, but not quite all). The idea that the juxtaposition of two things each with their own associations for the audience can produce a new, chance idea is as relevant for curators, dealers and collectors as it is for poets, writers and artists. Hence the title for the exhibition is taken from the central idea of Mallarmé’s last great poem: ‘all thought is a throw of the dice’.