Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Left: David Remfry watercolours. From top: Dancers, 2001; Cabaret Night, 1995; Three Heads, 1998

Above: from Seafaring, Hastings Contemporary. Top: Cecily Brown’s Oinops, oil on linen, 2016; below: Chris Orr’s The Small Titanic, etching, 1993

EXHIBITIONS HUON MALLALIEU DAVID REMFRY: WATERCOLOUR Royal Watercolour Society, Whitcomb Street Gallery, to 30th July SEAFARING Hastings Contemporary, to 25th September

In 1822, the not-yet-Royal Watercolour Society negotiated a ‘very advantageous’ seven-year lease of £250 per annum (around £33,000 today) for a gallery. It was being built by John Nash to the north of Pall Mall East, which remained its base until 1938.

Four years ago, the Society did it again, negotiating a still-more advantageous return to part of the building, now in Whitcomb Street, beside the National Gallery. Initially, the developer Alaska offered a 25-year free tenancy of the extensive vaults for exhibitions and storage.

Everyone knows that artists, especially watercolourists, are unworldly folk. They turned it down but eventually secured a rent-free 250-year occupancy of the vaults, together with the ground floor for a reception area. The Society has also kept its tenancy at the Bankside Gallery, by Tate Modern.

The new spaces, which opened to the public on 12th May, will be used for exhibitions by individual members or drawn from the Society’s diploma collection. That collection dates back as far as 1804 and includes many of the greatest of the English School. Bankside, also home to the Royal Society of PainterEtchers, will house larger group shows.

David Remfry, who will be 80 on 30th July, began as an oil painter but, in 1979, he contracted the lung condition sarcoidosis which made the medium impossible for him. He did not change his approach, still using an oil painter’s techniques and working on a scale generally thought unfeasible for watercolour. His portraits are superb, whether of individuals or of blended groups. He is obsessed by nightclubs, dancers, grotesques, tattoos, hats and, most recently, lift shafts. This retrospective show makes one sway to the beat of the figures on the walls. It is a joy.

Seafaring at Hastings is a serious pleasure too. The ubiquitous James Russell has curated both it and the Remfry show, which guarantees intelligent quality. About 50 paintings, drawings and prints, from 1820 to date, and from Turner and Tissot to Maggi Hambling and Chris Orr, deal with all aspects of the sea. Shipwrecked sailors, luxury liners, mythical creatures, bathers, gulls, submariners, fishermen … they are all here.

Several of the modern pictures refer directly to their great predecessors Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa and Delacroix’s Christ on the Sea of Galilee.