Seeing Each Other: Portraits of Artists, Pallant House Gallery

Six works from the Katrin Bellinger Collection are currently on view at Pallant House Gallery (in Chichester) in the exhibition Seeing Each Other: Portraits of Artists (17 May–2 November 2025). Featuring twentieth- and twenty-first-century British art, the exhibition explores how artists engage with one another—as friends, rivals, and sources of inspiration. Since the topic is so clearly in dialogue with the Artists at Work theme, the Katrin Bellinger Collection happily loaned three prints, two photographs, and a charcoal and watercolor drawing to the exhibition.

The earliest drawing in this selection is by Thérèse Lessore, the British modernist artist who was a founding member of the London Group (Fig. 1). In her charcoal and watercolor drawing from 1919, Lessore depicts the painter Walter Sickert in front of a window. The artists were close friends and had frequented the same British modernist circles since c. 1910; they would go on to marry in 1926. Bill Brandt’s photograph Ben Nicholson at His Studio in St. Ives shows the abstract painter from behind, focusing on his hands as he draws. Nicola Bensley also zooms in on Frank Auerbach’s hand in her photograph, emphasizing the artist’s creative power (Fig. 2). All of these works present exchanges between artists that feel like intimate conversations.

The exhibition also embraces imagined relationships, where artistic influence crosses generations and national affiliations: for example, two of the prints that the Katrin Bellinger Collection loaned to the show rethink Velázquez’s Las Meninas (Prado inv. P001174). Michael Craig-Martin transposes the iconic Velázquez painting into an explosion of color, while Richard Hamilton’s Picasso’s Meninas looks at Velázquez via Picasso, who also reinterpreted the scene in the 1950s (Figs. 3). David Hockney also cites Picasso as an important influence in The Student: Homage to Picasso.

These works—and the many others in the show—make evident the intricate networks of influence that profoundly shape the lives and careers of artists.

Seeing Each Other: Portraits of Artists is on view at Pallant House Gallery from 17 May – 2 November 2025.