The Fine Art Society in Mayfair in London is the oldest in situ gallery on Bond Street, the original home of the British art trade. Founded in 1876 to publish and sell prints, it helped give Whistler his big break. (He was the first artist to produce a print in a signed, limited edition). The society was also instrumental in cementing the reputation of Samuel Palmer, whose long association with the FAS was celebrated in 1881 with a memorial exhibition.From the start, the FAS showed contemporary artists alongside their predecessors and has always displayed catholic tastes – watercolors, oils and sculptures alongside prints, and modernists mixing with traditionalists.To celebrate its 140th anniversary, the FAS has put together an exhibition highlighting some of the artists it has long been associated with and reflecting something of its history as an exhibiting and selling institution. There has always been a scholarly bent to its selling shows: “The Aesthetic Movement and the Cult of Japan” in 1972, for example showed a more than mercantile focus. While some of the works in the current exhibition are for sale, others have been borrowed from the families who originally purchased them. It makes for a fascinating overview of both British art and taste: the FAS is, after all, a particularly British entity.This is a pick-and-mix exhibition that takes in artists as different as the Scottish Colorists J.D. Fergusson and Francis Cadell and the Victorian classicist Albert Moore. Of the sculptors Sir Alfred Gilbert is represented by a beautiful 1985 casting of the Shaftesbury Memorial Eros, while Geoffrey Clarke is illustrated by a 1952 scrap-metal-and-slate assemblage “Daedalus”. Walter Sickert’s legacy is also shown: the first of his pictures to be shown in public was at the FAS in 1881.The FAS was instrumental in establishing the watercolorists Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden as central figures in the mid-20th-century pastoralist revival and they are represented too. The former is represented with a little seen 1942 picture of “HMS Actaeon,” a Georgian warship repurposed as a training vessel for the navy in the Second World War; the latter with an untypically perspective-skewing street view, “The House at Ironbridge” (1956). Both are fine examples of the artists’ facility and the quirks of their vision in finding the hidden forms in seemingly unpropitious subjects.It is Samuel Palmer though who dominates, and expression of the FAS’s continuing warmth towards its “house” artist. There is a fine display of his prints: good early impressions of his major etchings from “Christmas” (1850) to “The Bellman” (1879) which in their inky blackness perfectly demonstrate how in printmaking Palmer rediscovered something of the poetic intensity of his years in Shoreham in the 1820s. There are too a couple of the highly-colored watercolors characteristic of his post-Shoreham output. “In the Chequered Shade” (1861) is a nice piece of Italianate imagination, while “Going to Evening Church” (1874) is an affecting, elegiac remembrance of his visionary years, a picture of a slashing red sunset and a shaded church amid ripening corn.The FAS did Palmer and the other artists proud during their lifetimes and, with this handsome reminder of their shared history, it does so again.“The Fine Art Society: A Celebration 1876-2016” runs from June 6 through July 7 at the Fine Art Society. Information: http://thefineartsociety.com
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