2024 EXHIBITORS
GALLERIES/David Messum Fine Art
About
The history of David Messum Fine Art is one of innovation and commitment to vision; a vision that is epitomised by the company's promotion of figurative art and artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who largely instituted the Post-Impressionist movement in Britain. This has formed the core of David Messum's business since he began selling fine art in 1963, and dealing in British Impressionist paintings continues to be our focus today. From the gallery in the heart of St. James's, as well as at the Studio Gallery in Marlow, David Messum Fine Art offers the chance to view exhibitions of British artists on whose names the reputation of the company was founded.
Exhibition
In Search of a Golden Age: Lucien Monod and Wilfrid de Glehn
David Messum Fine Art will present a major new exhibition of drawings and paintings from the Studio Estates of Lucien Monod (1867-1957), Wilfrid Gabriel de Glehn RA (1870-1951) and Jane Emmet de Glehn (1873-1961), to be held at their gallery in St. James's this October.
Lucien Monod and Wilfrid de Glehn were cousins and, for a while in the 1890s, shared rooms as students in Paris. This joint exhibition reveals their shared roots in Pre-Raphelitism and Symbolist painting as Wilfrid and Lucien, as well as Jane, became master practitioners in later became called Impressionism. Their paintings share a love of light and colour combined with a playful, joyful mood as they explored and painted rural landscapes centred around Lucien's home in Cannes. There is the simple adoration of nature and the great outdoors, gardens and arcadian visions. Though world wars would twice intrude upon their lives, it never intrudes upon their art. The world of their paintings may, at times, be mystical (and occasionally mythical), but it is never dangerous and constantly resists the radical modernist movements of the 20th Century.