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Piano Nobile

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Established in 1985, we specialise in 20th-Century works of art, ranging from international, modern British and post-war paintings, drawings and sculpture.

10/04/2026

Ben Nicholson, one of the few British modernist artists to win international recognition in his lifetime, was born on 10 April in 1894.

For a sustained period between 1945 and 1958, Nicholson often made sophisticated cubistic still-life paintings—many of them on a large scale—and these won him critical recognition in the United States and Europe. Among them was Nov 9–53 (walnut), which appeared in our 2024 exhibition Ben Nicholson: Defining Works 1929-1954.

14/03/2026

Peter Doig, Figure in Mountain Landscape (1999) is currently on show as part of our TEFAF Maastricht presentation.

Peter Doig’s paintings of the nineties reference the snowy landscapes of Northern Canada. Following brief periods in Edinburgh and Trinidad, Peter Doig’s (b. 1959) family settled in Canada and he spent his childhood there between 1966 and 1979. After moving to London in 1979, he went back to Canada and lived in Montreal for two-and-a-half years before starting a graduate course at Chelsea School of Art in 1989. Speaking about this period with Lauren Laverne on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 2023, Doig said ‘I went back into my own biography’. In Canada, he turned to the country’s ‘great landscape tradition’, which ‘wasn’t really known here [in Britain] too much’. ‘I never really planned it but I realised that maybe this was something that could become a way of working for me.’

Learn more about Figure in Mountain Landscape, the focus of this week’s InSight article, and sign up to receive future InSights on our website.

TEFAF Maastricht⁠
Booth 430
12 - 19 March ⁠
MECC, Forum 100, 6229 GV Maastricht, The Netherlands⁠

04/01/2026

Augustus John was born on this day in 1878. ⁠
⁠
Referring to his prodigious natural talent, William Rothenstein wrote that Augustus John was born ‘with a whole series of silver spoons between⁠
his gums’. ⁠
⁠
He studied at the Slade School of Art between 1894 and 1898. In the summer holidays of 1897 he went to practise his diving from Giltar Point—a rocky promontory south of Tenby, Wales, where he grew up—and dashed his scalp open on the rock. A legend spread that he thereafter grew in confidence, bombast and talent. He lived in London at the turn of the⁠
century, mixing with the likes of McEvoy, Orpen and the brothers Will Rothenstein and Albert Rutherston, but he was often away from the city⁠
and lived variously in Liverpool, Matching Green in Essex, Paris, Dorset and finally Fordingbridge, Hampshire, where he settled in 1927. ⁠
⁠
John and Orpen established the Chelsea Art School, which operated between 1903 and 1907. At the Café Royal in Regent’s Street, John held court and attracted a wide following. Many admired his striking physical presence and Osbert Sitwell once described him as being ‘like some kind of Rasputin-Jehovah’. ⁠
⁠
He won acclaim for his informal, vividly characterised figure paintings⁠
and portraits including those of his wife Ida, whom he married in 1901, his mistress and later common law wife Dorothy (‘Dorelia’) McNeill, whom he met in 1903, and his children. Beyond his immediate circle he painted definitive portraits of William Nicholson (1909), George Bernard Shaw (1915) and Thomas Hardy (1923). He was elected a Royal Academician in 1928 and received the Order of Merit in 1942.

01/01/2026

From all of us at Piano Nobile, Happy New Year! ⁠
⁠
⁠
Image:⁠
Barbara Hepworth⁠
Three curves with strings (Gold Mincarlo), 1971⁠
22-carat gold and gold strings on wood base

31/12/2025

As 2025 draws to a close we are taking the opportunity to look back at some of our highlights from the year. In October we exhibited at Frieze Masters with a curated display illustrating key episodes in British art of the last century. ⁠
⁠
We showed work by early modernists Walter Sickert and Christopher Wood, mid-century work by William Coldstream, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and Ben Nicholson, School of London painters Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, R. B. Kitaj and Leon Kossoff, three signature works by Howard Hodgkin. and more contemporary objects by Grayson Perry and Edmund de Waal.⁠
⁠
Pictured here left to right:⁠
William Coldstream, Standing N**e, 1977–78⁠
Grayson Perry, Layers of Meaninglessness, 1994⁠
Euan Uglow, Mouse Loaf, 1991–92

29/12/2025

Another highlight of our 2025 at Piano Nobile: In September we opened our most recent exhibition Sickert: Love, Death and Ennui, featuring The Herbert and Ann Lucas Collection—the most significant collection of Walter Sickert’s work to become available on the market for twenty years. ⁠
⁠
Sickert was one of the most original and provocative printmakers of his generation. At the heart of the Herbert and Ann Lucas Collection was a large group of prints that includes important examples from every period of Sickert’s career as a printmaker. Ever restless to experiment, he mastered a variety of media—lithography, soft- and hard-ground etching, engraving—and deployed them in unexpected combinations. He explored different papers and inks, and reworked his plates with such frequency that certain works were printed in ten different states, some of which exist in unique impressions. The Lucas collection includes multiple impressions and different states of particular prints and provides a rich sense of the haphazard way that Sickert developed his plates.⁠
⁠
⁠
Follow our link in bio to learn more about the exhibition and watch the exhibition film featuring art historian Dr Kate Aspinall and Piano Nobile directors Robert and Matthew Travers.

27/12/2025

Continuing our review of our 2025 programme, at the end of June we exhibited at Treasure House fair in Chelsea, highlighting paintings, drawings and sculpture by twentieth-century British artists.⁠
⁠
The gallery presented paintings spanning from Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, Paul Nash, Walter Sickert and Christopher Wood to Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and Ben Nicholson, and examples of post-war works by William Coldstream, Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach and Euan Uglow, alongside ceramics and a recent print by Grayson Perry.⁠
⁠
Pictured here, left to right:⁠
Barbara Hepworth, Turning form (blue), 1960⁠
Walter Sickert, Ennui, c. 1913–14⁠
Leon Kossoff, King's Cross, Summer, 1998⁠
Vanessa Bell, Portrait of the Artist's Mother, c. 1950–55⁠
Christopher Wood, The Yellow Man, 1930

25/12/2025

Season's greetings from all of us at Piano Nobile. We wish you a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year!⁠
⁠
Edmund de Waal⁠
jade steps grievance, 2018⁠
Porcelain, gold, alabaster, aluminium and plexiglass⁠
52 x 94 x 12 cm

23/12/2025

Looking back at our programming throughout 2025, in June Piano Nobile staged an intimate presentation exploring the interconnections between Chaïm Soutine and twentieth-century British painting. ⁠
⁠
The painter Chaïm Soutine (1893–1943) was a leading contributor to the expressionist movement and a key figure of the École de Paris in the inter-war period. He was also a dedicated student of nature. He worked from life and typically adopted subjects that belong to the traditional genres of still life, landscape and portraiture. Yet he transformed his subjects into roiling, turbulent images, and his paintings are suffused with an acute sense of psychological animation. ⁠
⁠
With notable examples of Soutine’s work, including one of his Céret landscapes, Soutine & British Painting used a mixture of comparison and juxtaposition to reflect on his direct inspiration of artists such as Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff, as well as the broader similarities of style and approach that can be detected in the work of David Bomberg, Peter Coker and Paula Rego.⁠
⁠
Download the free digital catalogue produced to accompany the exhibition on our website.

20/12/2025

Looking back at the highlights of our 2025: in March we exhibited at TEFAF Maastricht with selection of work which explored the deep ties between British twentieth-century art and continental Europe.⁠
⁠
In the late fifties Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson were both making work connected to place and inspired by their travels in Europe. Hepworth had journeyed to Greece while mourning the death of her son, and Nicholson had moved to Switzerland and continued to explore and draw inspiration from the wider continent including Greek islands. Piano Nobile’s display included two works from these fertile periods — Barbara Hepworth’s Aegean and Ben Nicholson’s Nov 59 (Epidaurus).⁠
⁠
Represented in our stand was work by Frank Auerbach, Vanessa Bell, Lynn Chadwick, Edmund de Waal, Duncan Grant, Barbara Hepworth, R. B. Kitaj, Leon Kossoff, Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Bridget Riley, Chaïm Soutine and Stanley Spencer. We also showed works on paper including drawings by Lucian Freud, Augustus John and Auguste Rodin.⁠
⁠
Pictured here, left to right:⁠
Barbara Hepworth, Preparation, 1949⁠
Barbara Hepworth, Aegean, 1956⁠
Ben Nicholson, Nov 59 (Epidaurus), 1959

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