New Drawing Room Display: Artists' Letters

The new Drawing Room Display Artists' Letters: Three Stories from the Paul Mellon Centre Archive Collections uses letters from artists to tell three fascinating art-historical stories, pieced together from materials found in the Paul Mellon Centre Research Collections.

More specifically, Artists' Letters has been generated by fragments of correspondence, newspaper pages, notes and diaries found in the archives of the art critic Brian Sewell (1931–2015), the art historian and editor Lionel Benedict Nicolson (1914–1978) and the librarian Frank Simpson (1911–2002).

The display focuses, in turn, on the twists and turns of the relationship between Sewell and the artist Maggi Hambling; the story of a fledgling Oxford University arts society called the Florentine Club; and the history and provenance of a little-known painting by Augustus John. It is our hope that these stories capture your imagination, as they have ours, and that they might entice you to take a closer look at the archives we hold at the Paul Mellon Centre.

The Display is free to visit during our opening hours, Monday to Friday from 10am to 5pm.