Victorian London : Mapping the Emergence of the Modern Art Gallery

Data » Gallery List


Lawrie’s Gallery


The inaugural exhibition at Lawrie’s Galleries at 15 Old Bond Street was warmly greeted in the press. A notice in the Saturday Review began: “The loan collection of English and foreign paintings with which Messrs. Lawrie and Co. open their new Gallery in Old Bond Street is of exceptional quality and interest.” The exhibition included works by Velasquez, Gainsbourgh, Romney, Constable, Corot, and Millet. The article also noted that a “handsome catalogue has been published by Messrs. Lawrie, illustrated with photo-prints of all the paintings in the exhibition.” (“Messrs. Lawrie’s Exhibition,” Saturday Review 11 March 1893, 268.)

The gallery moved to new premises at 159 New Bond Street c. 1902, and the new space was described at some length in the British Architect: “One may combine a sight of many of Turner’s works in oils and watercolour with an inspection of one of the London’s most recently finished pictures galleries by a visit to Messrs. Lawrie’s in Bond Street. The architects, Messrs. E. W. Wimperis & East have transformed the premises into nicely arranged small galleries, entered through a barrel-vaulted vestibule with glazed lights from the front gallery. The only place in which an architect can show his hand, beyond in the general proportion, in a picture gallery, is on the ceiling treatment, and in these small galleries Messrs. Wimperis & East have designed coved ceilings with ventilator lunettes decorated with dainty plaster ornament, which are admirably effective. The glazed panels in the main entrance doors to the larger gallery are well worth notice, as capital specimens of jewel-like glazing, designed by the architects, in which the leaded lines are worked in a great number of small divisions separating bits of brilliant natural-coloured glass.” (“Notes on Current Events,” British Architect, 13 June 1902, 413.)

Address: 159 New Bond St

Start Date: by 1902

End Date: at least 1905

Other Locations:

15 Old Bond St (1893 – at least 1900)

Selected exhibitions

Inaugurative Exhibition in March of French Work of 1830 (1893) [TYA 1894, 95]

Works by Burne Jones and Others (February 1894) [TYA 1895, 96]

Albert Moore (May 1894) [TYA 1895, 96]

Portraits and Pictures of the Early Italian School (1900) [NAL]

Selected Pictures by Dutch Artists of the Seventeenth Century (1903) [NAL]

Exhibition catalogues: National Art Library, London (1893-1903)

Unless otherwise noted, the documentation of a gallery’s start and end dates at a location is drawn from listings in The Year’s Art.


How to cite:
Pamela Fletcher and David Israel, London Gallery Project, 2007; Revised September 2012.
http://learn.bowdoin.edu/fletcher/london-gallery/

Bowdoin College