Stella

Dorothy Hepworth was involved in one of the strangest deceptions in British art history. Her work was passed off as that of her lover, Patricia Preece. Even Augustus John was taken in, praising Preece’s talent. Hepworth continued signing Preece’s name long after her death.

John Minton was a gifted draughtsman and graphic artist but he is possibly best known today for his lean and angular face, familiar from his doleful self portraits and from Freud’s great likeness of his friend, the glassy eyes filled with sorrow and shifting reflections.

There's an almost ineffable sense of harmony and lyricism that characterises Zinaida Serebriakova's work. This is a portrait of her son Evgeny from 1917. Several years after the October Revolution, she moved to Paris and didn't see Evgeny for 40 years, 8 months before she died.

'Speakeasy Corner.' (1928) Martin Lewis died in obscurity in 1962; he found some success in his early career, but was largely forgotten after the Great Depression leaving him to spend last three decades teaching etching including his famous pupil Edward Hopper.

'Girls Outside the Gaiety Cinema, Newlyn.' (1925) Throughout the first two decades of the 20thC, a love of his native Cornwall dominates Harold Harvey's work. The 'impressionist' touch of his early work gives way to a crisp delineation of forms in pictures produced after 1920.

'Ten Cents a Ride.' (1942) Louis Bouché is known as a painter of the American scene. In a 1962 New York Times review, the art critic Stuart Preston described him as 'an American realist who finds poetry, but not obvious poetry, in the commonplace.'

In the wake of the far-reaching loss of WW1, pictures which had an emphasis on continuity and nostalgia had enormous appeal in Britain during the inter-war years. The clarity of definition in James Walker Tucker's 'An Idle Chat,' (1936) is down to his use of egg tempera.

'Blackberrying.' (1917) Harold Harvey used the theme of fruit picking throughout his career; the women and girls in the work of this period are absorbed in their own thoughts, something which reflects the preoccupations of the time with the ongoing war across the water in France

In 1882, Claude Monet spent seven months painting on the Normandy coast, working on as many as eight separate pictures in one day. This picture depicts the sailors' church in Varengeville at the precipice of a monumental cliff in the mid-morning sun.

Stanley Spencer achieved a remarkable feat with this picture (1921) of Margaret Slesser, his first commissioned portrait, painted at the age of 29. He received the commission from her husband, Henry; she comes across as a friend, with a face full of character.

Reginald Brill had an indefatigable interest in the everyday lives of people, and they're often captured off-guard as in this work of an orange seller at Sudbury, Suffolk from around the mid-1950s.

'Studland Bay.' (1911) Roger Fry championed the Post-Impressionist movement, establishing himself as its leading advocate. This work was painted the year after he had introduced the work of Cézanne to the British public through the 'Manet and the Post-Impressionists,' exhibition.

Evan Charlton was closely associated with Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden, a virtuoso at capturing everyday scenes and little details from English provincial life. This work (1944) depicts a couple of 'canal girls,' who transported vital goods on the canal system during WW2.

Along with other members of the Boston School, William McGregor Paxton was known to admire the paintings of Johannes Vermeer. In 'The House Maid,' (1910) the triangular composition, muted palette and a sense of quiet absorption all have parallels in Vermeer's work.

Following the success of a trip to Sweden in 1912 which spurred him into a bout of creativity, the following year Harold Gilman visited Norway and again produced a large number of pictures, both landscapes and urban scenes, including this interior.

The art critic John Berger once wrote that men in paintings act, women appear: 'Men look at women whereas women watch themselves being looked at.' And so it is with Harold Knight's prosaically titled 'Woman Reading,' from 1932.

During the Great Depression, Douglass Crockwell made several paintings for the Works Progress Administration including this work from 1932, which celebrates the industrial workers at the newspaper plant in the town of Glens Falls, New York.

In 1924, the year this picture of the Grand Canyon was painted, Gunnar Widforss exhibited a large group of works depicting scenes from US National Parks. An art critic at the time considered Widforss as 'possibly the greatest watercolorist in America today.'

The crisp differentiation of each element in the composition, the taut design, the modelling of the face in angular planes of bright colours and the tender characterisation are typical of Harold Gilman's portraits of women around 1916-1917.

When Sorolla painted 'Niña en mar plateado,' in 1909, it was amongst the most luminous and freely handled works he had produced. In 1906, the newspaper 'La Nación' had written: 'Sorolla is one of the glories of Valencia...one of the glories of modern Spain.'