Sir Muirhead Bone: Artist and Patron
The Fleming Collection, 13 Berkeley Street, W1, until 5 September
The Fleming Collection mounts loan exhibitions of artists represented in its permanent collection, its focus on Scottish artists a strength rather than a limitation. (Would there were an institution in London which just showed American artists. Perhaps then we’d get decent exhibitions of Wayne Thiebaud, Nancy Graves or Martin Puryear.) In recent years the Fleming has shown James Pryde and Joan Eardley to good effect, and now the great etcher Muirhead Bone is given the same treatment.
The chronological survey begins in the downstairs gallery, where a fine drypoint portrait of Bone by his great friend Francis Dodd depicts the artist leaning over his etching press in a curly-brimmed hat. There’s lots of useful documentary material here in the wall-length display case — historic exhibition catalogues and paper-covered volumes of his war drawings from the Western Front, published in ten parts.
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