Shepherd & Derom’s English colleagues—dealers Christopher Wood, Campbell Wilson and Abbott & Holder—have brought 89 pictures by English Romantic artists to New York. Simeon Solomon, William Etty, John Byam Shaw and others may not be household names, but there are also pictures by the better known Burne-Jones (a chalk drawing of St George, as well as an exquisitely delicate pencil drawing of his only son Philip), by Alma-Tadema, and by George Frederick Watts. Bringing a decidedly Romantic note to the show is a painting in oil and tempera of the moon god Endymion by Harry Morley, A.R.A. (1881-1943); there is also Atkinson Grimshaw’s 1879 spooky, moonlit view of the docks at Glasgow. But arguably the star of this show (until 25 October) is the elegant portrait by Will Powell Frith, R.A. (1819-1909) of Annie Gambart, the wife of the Victorian art dealer and print publisher, Ernest Gambart, who exhibited Frith, Alma-Tadema and others in the 1860s at his gallery in St James’s.
Originally appeared in The Art Newspaper as 'English Romantic Art 1850-1920: pre-Raphaelites, Academics, Symbolists, Shepherd & Derom Galleries'