The Piccadilly Gallery was a London-based

art gallery An art gallery is a room or a building in which visual art is displayed. In Western cultures from the mid-15th century, a gallery was any long, narrow covered passage along a wall, first used in the sense of a place for art in the 1590s. The long ...

that operated from 1953 until 2007. The gallery was founded in 1953 as the Pilkington Gallery by

art dealer An art dealer is a person or company that buys and sells works of art, or acts as the intermediary between the buyers and sellers of art. An art dealer in contemporary art typically seeks out various artists to represent, and builds relationsh ...

Godfrey Pilkington and his wife, Eve. Christabel Briggs joined as a partner in 1956. The gallery first opened in a bomb-damaged section of the

Piccadilly Arcade Piccadilly Arcade runs between Piccadilly and Jermyn Street in central London. It was opened in 1909, having been designed by Thrale Jell, and is a Grade II listed building. The arcade is composed of twenty-eight shops on the ground floor. T ...

. In 1954, the gallery moved to 16A

Cork Street Cork Street is a street in Mayfair in the West End of London, England, with many contemporary art galleries, and was previously associated with the tailoring industry. Location The street runs approximately north-west from the junction of Burl ...

, moving again in 1978 one address over. In 1999, the gallery moved to a temporary location on Dover street. The gallery ceased operations in March 2007, just prior to the death of co-founder Godfrey Pilkington four months later, at the age of 88. The Piccadilly Gallery focused on exhibiting and selling works by figurative

artists An artist is a person engaged in an activity related to creating art, practicing the arts, or demonstrating the work of art. The most common usage (in both everyday speech and academic discourse) refers to a practitioner in the visual arts o ...

, with a focus on

Art Nouveau Art Nouveau ( ; ; ), Jugendstil and Sezessionstil in German, is an international style of art, architecture, and applied art, especially the decorative arts. It was often inspired by natural forms such as the sinuous curves of plants and ...

and 19th and 20th Century

Symbolism Symbolism or symbolist may refer to: *Symbol, any object or sign that represents an idea Arts *Artistic symbol, an element of a literary, visual, or other work of art that represents an idea ** Color symbolism, the use of colors within various c ...

. The gallery promoted artists such as

Adrian Berg Adrian Berg (12 March 1929 – 22 October 2011) was an English painter known for his landscapes, many of them images of Regent's Park, London. Although some of his works appear almost naturalistic, typically they defy conventional notions of per ...

Max Beerbohm Sir Henry Maximilian Beerbohm (24 August 1872 – 20 May 1956) was an English essayist, Parody, parodist and Caricature, caricaturist under the signature Max. He first became known in the 1890s as a dandy and a humorist. He was the theatre crit ...

Gwen John Gwendolen ''Gwen'' Mary John (22 June 1876 – 18 September 1939) was a Welsh people, Welsh artist who worked in France for most of her career. Her paintings, mainly portraits of anonymous female sitters, are rendered in a range of closely relat ...

Eric Gill Arthur Eric Rowton Gill (22 February 1882 – 17 November 1940) was an English sculptor, letter cutter, typeface designer, and printmaker. Although the ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'' describes Gill as "the greatest artist-craftsma ...

Colin Self Colin E Self (born 1941 in Rackheath, Norfolk) is an English Pop Artist whose work has addressed the theme of Cold War politics. As a student at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1961 to 1963 Colin Self received encouragement for his drawing ...

, and William Roberts (many of whom were members of the British Brotherhood of Ruralists). The gallery also hosted major exhibitions including works by

Gustav Klimt Gustav Klimt (14 July 1862 – 6 February 1918) was an Austrian symbolist painter and a founding member of the Vienna Secession movement. His work helped define the Art Nouveau style in Europe. Klimt is known for his paintings, murals, sket ...

Egon Schiele Egon Leo Adolf Ludwig Schiele (; 12 June 1890 – 31 October 1918) was an Austrian Expressionist painters, painter. His work is noted for its intensity and its raw sexuality, and for the many self-portraits the artist produced, including nude sel ...

, and artists involved in the German art movement

New Objectivity The New Objectivity (in ) was a movement in German art that arose during the 1920s as a reaction against German Expressionism, expressionism. The term was coined by Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, the director of the ''Kunsthalle Mannheim, Kunsthalle' ...

. Listings of the gallery's exhibitions and correspondences were held by the

Tate Tate is an institution that houses, in a network of four art galleries, the United Kingdom's national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is not a government institution, but its main sponsor is the UK ...

Modern Gallery.

References

Citation

{{authority control Defunct art galleries in London Art museums and galleries established in 1953 1953 establishments in England