Looking Forward to the Past: An Illustrious 275 Years

Gladwell & Patterson is proud to be London’s oldest art gallery. Founded in 1746, by the greatest print merchant of Georgian London, John Boydell, our business has always had the goal of dealing with the finest artists of their generation. We value quality and integrity very highly, and we understand the passion and creativity that comes hand-in-hand with being so talented.

Founded in the City of London, the gallery is proud to have remained an essential destination for anyone in search of fine paintings and sculpture. It has become apparent everyone remembers their first encounter with the gallery, and no wonder - over our centuries of history we have been committed to delivering wholesome and enjoyable experience to anyone who walks through our doors or visits our stands at Art Fairs across the globe.

The gallery’s history traverses many artistic movements, it contains incredible beauty, the wonder and power of artistic creation and its ability to bring such joy, contentment and unity to the World. The foundations of this fine art gallery are based on the pioneering and passionate work of many giants of the art world over the past 275 years. Their number include two Lord Mayors of London, a man who is credited with being the driving force behind the establishment of the National Gallery, the Head of the Fine Art Trade Guild and Masters of several of the Worshipful Companies in the City, amongst many other accolades.

The earliest custodians of our business, John Boydell in the eighteenth-century, and Henry Graves in the nineteenth-century, were the most successful print merchants in London at the time, specialising in publishing engravings from pictures by Joseph Mallord Wiliam Turner, John Constable, John Everett Millais, and other contemporary painters.

T. H. Gladwell was opened by Thomas Henry Gladwell, the son of a very talented carver and gilder, at 21 Gracechurch Street, in 1836. Initially the gallery specialised in fine prints, books, and stationery, but with his father’s knowledge of carving and gilding, it wasn’t long before they had added frame making to their repertoire. By the time of Thomas Gladwells’s death in 1879, the business had firmly established itself as one of the leading art galleries and frame makers in London. Thomas’s three sons, Henry, Arthur and Alfred Thomas took over the business and renamed it Gladwell Brothers in 1880. Their extensive network of fine artists continued to expand and through their connections with European dealers and publishers such as the dealer Théodore Vibert, the publisher Alfred Cadart, and the dealer Adolphe Goupil, were vital in maintaining their position as one of the most ground-breaking, interesting, and knowledgeable art gallery in London.

Harry Gladwell, the eldest grandson of Thomas Henry Gladwell, would eventually take over the business at the start of the twentieth-century. Brought up as a hard-working, inquisitive, and religious lad, he yearned to join his father and uncles in the business. In 1875, aged eighteen, the intrepid Harry travelled to Paris to be apprenticed with the art dealer Adolphe Goupil in Paris. There, he became firm friends with another apprentice, Vincent van Gogh, who took the young Harry under his wing and showed him around the city. Vincent delighted in Harry’s idiosyncratic appearance, describing him as "thin as a stick with a pair of large red protruding ears", and his joie de vivre. Van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo reveal the close relationship between the two young men.

Harry moved the gallery to its new home on the corner of 70 & 71 Cheapside, in the City of London, which soon became known as Gladwell’s Corner. With Harry’s experience gained through his various apprenticeships with his uncles and father and his spell at Goupils in Paris, he would go on to become the most successful art dealer of his time.

Two of Harry’s sons, Ernest and Algernon, joined their father at Gladwell & Company, learning the trade at the various branches of the company. In 1928, a year after Harry Gladwell died, the brothers went their separate ways. Algernon remained in the City and moved to a new gallery at the corner of Queen Victoria Street and Watling Street, where the gallery remained until 2012.

In 1968, Algernon retired and sold the business to Herbert Fuller, who had managed the gallery for him since 1932 and had been instrumental in steering the gallery through the hardships of the 1930s and then the blitz of London during the Second World War. Following the War, Algernon and Herbert regularly travelled to the Salons of Europe, meeting the best and most highly regarded artists with whom they started prosperous relationships. Herbert brought renowned French masters such as Georges Robin, Alexandre Jacob, Charles Perron, Edouard-Léon Cortès and Auguste Bouvard into the Gladwells fold. He introduced these artists to the British art market and subsequently around the world.

The same year that Herbert acquired Gadwell & Company, in 1968, his son Anthony Fuller joined him in the business. Father and son continued to take the gallery from strength to strength, cementing Gladwell & Company’s place as the most discreet and discerning Fine Art Gallery in London. It was the destination for any art collector wanting to build an honest and beautiful collection.

Upon Herbert’s untimely death in 1980, Anthony took over the company, and worked tirelessly to keep the old established gallery going. Anthony’s love of art soon found him his own group of clients, and there are precious few people who have met him in the gallery over the years who don’t comment on the infectious joy that paintings give him. Many people’s love of art has been founded on a few minutes in Anthony’s company with some paintings.

Anthony’s son Glenn joined the business in 1995, followed by his daughter, Cory, in 1998, following a successful and invaluable Masters degree at the Courtauld Institute of Art. In 2004 the Fuller family acquired the prestigious Mayfair gallery W H Patterson at 19 Albemarle Street. The gallery was opened in 1964 by Bill Patterson and became known as the premier gallery for contemporary artists painting in traditional styles, and artists from around the world wished to be represented by them.

In 2012, our two galleries in the City and in Mayfair were brought together under one roof in the equally distinguished environment of Knightsbridge. It is here, with the opening of Gladwell & Patterson, that two illustrious legacies combined in our new space at 5 Beauchamp Place, where we remain to this day.

In 2020 we opened the doors to Gladwells Rutland in the exclusive market town of Oakham in Rutland, offering a new and intimate space in which to show the works of our wonderful artists in the British countryside.

The Gladwell & Patterson ethos has been shaped by an informed yet fresh approach to what the separate parts have always done: presenting the finest works of art to those who appreciate them most, our perceptive, valued clients.

david leverett

British, (1938-2020)

Composition No. 2

Numbered ‘2’ (along top edge)

Gouache and Pencil on Card 55 x 80 cms / 21” x 31" david leverett

Provenance Estate of the Artist. Gladwell & Patterson, London; acquired from the above in 2022.

British, (1938-2020)

Composition No. 7

Numbered ‘7’ (along top edge) Gouache and Pencil on Card 55 x 80 cms / 21” x 31"

Provenance Estate of the Artist. Gladwell & Patterson, London; acquired from the above in 2022.

David Leverett’s abstract paintings are emblematic of the avant-garde 1960s British art scene. With their large scale and irregularly shaped geometry, executed in vivid acrylics, Leverett’s paintings burst with vibrancy and dynamism.

Born in Nottingham in 1938, Leverett studied at Nottingham College of Arts in the late 1950s, where his early work demonstrated a predilection for bold, abstract forms. In 1961 he moved to London to complete his training with a further three years study at the Royal Academy, immersing himself in nascent movements of the 1960s, from Pop Art to Op Art. Upon graduation, Leverett began exhibiting almost immediately with a series of shows at the Redfern Gallery, followed by one man shows at the John Moores Liverpool Exhibition in 1967 and the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1968. In the same year, still only thirty, his work was included at the Royal Academy Bicentenary Exhibition.

Leverett’s landscapes have enormous vitality. Preoccupied with the natural world, his compositions seek to combine the elements of water, air, sky, and earth which are always in a state of change and motion. Leverett abstracts and distorts the landscape, giving viewers the opportunity to travel in their imagination as they choose.

In his later years, he would begin to pull back slightly from abstraction, producing bold landscapes that reflect a growing concern with environmental causes. While he was perhaps best known for the geometric work he produced in the sixties, he continued to remain an important force in British art, winning the inaugural Sargant fellowship at the British School in Rome in 1990.

Alongside his painting, David was for many years a leading teacher at the Slade School of Fine Art, a role for which he is fondly remembered by numerous students. Education was clearly a passion of his, and in addition to his work at the Slade, David would often travel internationally to give workshops. David passed away in 2020 at his Kentish Town home after a career of over fifty years. During that time his work had been shown around the world, from Venice to New York and today his paintings are in multiple museum collections, most importantly at Tate Modern in London.

Donald Hamilton Fraser

British, (1929-2009)

“The West Coast of Scotland and the Highlands are the last wilderness in Britain, the last place where you feel alone with the landscape around you. You have a sense of being the only person alive on the planet; it awakens emotions that one didn’t know were there. I like that feeling because there is nothing to impede your reaction, it’s just you and the sand, you and the tide.”

- Donald Hamilton Fraser

Faraid Head IV Oil on Paper 23 x 30 cms / 9” x 12”

Provenance Private Collection, UK. Gladwell & Patterson, London; acquired from the above in 2022.

Boats on the Foreshore, Portskerra

Oil on Paper

39 x 58 cms / 15½" x 22¾"

Provenance

Private Collection, UK.

Gladwell & Patterson, London; acquired from the above in 2021.

Donald Hamilton Fraser

British, (1929-2009)

Donald Hamilton Fraser is a highly acclaimed British painter. Fraser dramatised his subjects with bold colours and a confident brush. His work employs a language of visual metaphor in which abstract and descriptive elements combine to express a heightened experience of the subject.

Inspired by the Scottish Highlands of his ancestors, Fraser depicted the rugged landscape like no other artist. Captured in all its myriad guises, according to the fleeting effects of light and atmosphere, he transformed the Highland landscape into vivid swathes of colour.

Fraser was a master at capturing an array of subjects, from the natural landscape to vibrant still lives. He adored the expressive nature of paint and the striking juxtaposition of primary colours, often layering them onto the canvas with a palette knife to produce an almost collage-like effect. Under his deft brush, the tradition of landscape painting is distorted to form abstract almost dream-like fields of colour.

Fraser was born in London to Scottish parents. His father was an antiques dealer, and Fraser’s childhood was spent surrounded by beautiful objects and art. Fraser developed a keen interest in literature, reading voraciously and writing poetry, and he began to train as a journalist with Kemsley Newspapers before completing a period of national service in the Royal Air Force in the late 1940s.

Fraser studied at the prestigious St. Martin's School of Art from 1949 to 1952 alongside notable contemporaries including Jack Smith, Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach and his close friend Peter Kinley. For many young artists in the early 1950s, they felt a need to become either an abstract or a figurative artist. Fraser did not feel these had to be mutually exclusive, and an exhibition of the work of Nicolas de Staël at Matthiesson's on Bond Street in 1952 acted as catalyst to reconcile these two styles within his work.

Over the course of his career, Fraser had frequent one man exhibitions at Gimpel Fils in London and Paul Rosenberg Gallery in New York. From 1958 to 1983 Fraser taught at the Royal College of Art. During this fellowship, he taught many notable young artists that would go on to be leading figures of their generation, including David Hockney, Ronald Brooks Kitaj, Patrick Caulfield and Thesese Oulton. Fraser became a Fellow of the Royal College of Art in 1970 and was elected as a member of the Royal Academy in 1975. In Fraser’s later years, he received many private and public commissions and took part in frequent gallery exhibitions throughout Britain. Shortly before he passed away, two major retrospectives of his work were held in London at Arthur Ackerman and the CCA Galleries.

Peter Wileman

British, (Contemporary)

“For me, painting is as much a part of the day as eating and sleeping. In fact, it’s more important than that, more like breathing! I could not imagine a single day passing without talking about, reading about, or actually taking part in some kind of activity concerning art. Like a moth is drawn to a flame, a painter is drawn to the light, and although I have tried to express myself with painting in many different forms, mediums and styles over the years, my path has lead me inexorably, like so many others before me, to try and capture that elusive quality of light, that only a shimmering sunset, dawn of a new day, dazzling sparkle of reflection off both sea and river presents to one who is prepared to both look and see.”

- - Peter Wileman

Peter Wileman

British, (Contemporary)

Across the Bar

Oil on Canvas

40 x 40 cms / 15¾" x 15¾"

Highly acclaimed British abstract artist Peter Wileman is one of the UK’s leading contemporary landscape artists today. Known for his dazzling abstracted oil landscapes, Wileman’s style is bold and vigorous, both in the use of colour and handling of paint, as he explores the effect of light on his subject. Seeking atmosphere through light and colour, he works in varying degrees of abstraction.

Interested in painting from a young age, upon leaving school he went straight into his first job at Hallmark Cards, a card company, where his innate artistic talent was immediately recognised. Here Peter spent five years studying lettering and design, his first artistic training - which gave him a solid grounding in colour awareness and formal structure. Wileman later became the art editor on a number of magazines. Looking for an opportunity to develop his own artwork, Peter left his budding design career to become a freelance artist; a decision from which he has never looked back.

Peter Wileman

British, (Contemporary)

A Dream within a Dream

Oil on Canvas

80 x 80 cms / 31½” x 31½”

Music for Those that Listen

Oil on Canvas

40 x 40 cms / 15¾" x 15¾"

Wileman’s style is bold and vigorous, both in the use of colour and handling of paint, as he explores the effect of light on his subject. Working exclusively in oils, the medium most adaptable to changes of light and mood, he evokes atmosphere through light and colour through varying degrees of abstraction. Wileman’s work is reminiscent of the great master Joseph Mallord William Turner through its atmospheric quality. His work has a superb energy, with paint applied in washes and also with areas of impasto. The foregrounds are complex, but not disctracting to the subject within his work.

Over the last two decades Wileman has exhibited regularly at a number of prestigious art venues including the Royal Society of Marine Artists, the New England Art Club and the Royal Institute of Oil Painters of which he is an associate member. Wileman has built a distinguished reputation as one of the finest landscape artists practising in the UK today.