The Leicester Galleries

The Leicester Galleries was a leading venue for the presentation and sale of European modern art in the early twentieth century. Run by the brothers Cecil and Wilfred Phillips with Ernest Brown (operating as Ernest Brown & Phillips Ltd.), the Galleries introduced the British public to French and British avant-garde art.

In 1902, the Phillips brothers opened The Leicester Galleries in London’s Leicester Square. They were joined a year later by Ernest Brown. In its early years, the Galleries primarily showed the work of academic artists, such as Philip Connard and Harold Sutton Palmer. Beginning in 1917, through the efforts of Cecil as well as Brown’s son Oliver, who also participated in gallery operations, it presented the work of European avant-garde artists. With a series of “first in Britain” solo exhibitions, it sold prewar work by such artists as Paul Cézanne (1925), Edgar Degas (January 1922, February and March 1923), Paul Gauguin (July 1924), Fernand Léger (1926), Henri Matisse (November 1918), Berthe Morisot (1930), Pablo Picasso (January 1919), and Vincent van Gogh (December 1923). In 1926, it organized the largest ever display of work by Pierre-Auguste Renoir in the United Kingdom. The Galleries also supported the work of London-based artists Jacob Epstein and Henry Moore beginning in 1917 and 1931, respectively, despite their lack of critical success.

The Galleries held solo exhibitions by major avant-garde artists and also showed works from private collections. Despite growing anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe, it exhibited paintings and gouaches by Jewish artist Marc Chagall in 1935, and, at the height of the First World War in March 1941, organized a show of work by Paul Klee, another artist targeted by the Nazis. Three years later, it exhibited holdings from historian Michael Sadler’s private collection, ranging from French Neoclassical painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot to the Surrealist Max Ernst. In November 1953, the Galleries exhibited part of art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler’s collection, including works by Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Léger, André Masson, and Picasso.

In its seventy-three years of operation, The Leicester Galleries organized more than fourteen hundred exhibitions. It rarely bought works for its stock directly from artists, instead relying on percentages of sales from exhibitions and admission income to generate revenue for operations. It also purchased works from private collectors and other dealers, and quickly resold them. A number of works in The Met collection, including two by Juan Gris—Checkerboard and Playing Cards (1915, Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection) and Cup, Glasses, and Bottle (Le Journal) (1914, Promised Gift from the Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection)—passed through The Leicester Galleries in this way. These practices, as well as their ambitious and financially taxing exhibition schedule, would result in the gallery’s closure in 1977.