I highly recommend going along to the Garden Museum's superb exhibition of Cedric Morris and some of his circle including Lucian Freud. 'Ratatouille,' was painted in 1954 and is on loan from the Philip Mould Gallery.
'Breakfast.' (1940) Léon de Smet
painted interiors, still lifes, things on tables, and in cupboards. He painted his family, and when they refused to pose for his work, he made pictures of their absence.
Walter Sickert's 'Noctes Ambrosianae,' (1906) holds a pun. Ambrosian Nights: ambrosia is the food of the gods; 'the gods' is the nickname for a theatre's gallery, the high place where the cheap tickets are, where the impecunious, sit.
Up to 1938, Adrian Allinson usually spent part of each spring and summer in the Mediterranean. This landscape is most likely Ibiza. Allinson would make initial sketches in situ, and then each winter, he painted the scenes at his north London studio.
Elioth Gruner's paintings from the era of the First World War reveal the influence of Whistler in his ability to capture the ephemeral effects of light and heat, beautifully depicted in this painting of a day at Bondi Beach, Sydney from 1915.
'Seven Brussels Sprouts.' (1955)
Delicately painted with meticulous detail, Eliot Hodgkin captures the crisp waxy green beauty of a vegetable that in the year this work was painted was very often boiled to a puree.
William Nicholson lived at Harlech in North Wales towards the end of the First World War. This view looks across Tremadoc Bay to the mountains on the Lleyn Peninsula; Nicholson painted the view by moonlight after rain.
'Breakfast.' (1940) Léon de Smet
painted interiors, still lifes, things on tables, and in cupboards. He painted his family, and when they refused to pose for his work, he made pictures of their absence.
'Baron H.H. Thyssen-Bornemisza.'
Lucian Freud said his idea of portraiture came from portraits that resembled people. I wish my portraits to be of people, not like them.' It was Cedric Morris who taught Freud a portrait should be 'revealing in a way that was almost improper.'
A Man Docking his Boat (1878) is one of several scenes Gustave Caillebotte painted along the River Yerres. The tilted perspective is characteristic of many of his compositions, in which he employs a low vantage point to frame the water.
