HEFFER GALLERY

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In 1876 Heffers Books were founded by William Heffer in Cambridge and they also became publishers and in the late 1990s they had six shops in the city, each catering to different areas of the business including an art gallery at 18 Sidney Street, Cambridge. The Sidney Street shop at that time was for new best sellers and stationery on the ground floor with an art gallery on the top floor and in 1937 they held an exhibition of the works of the Ipswich Watercolour Society. In 1949 Bryan Robertson (1925-2002) became curator at the Heffer Gallery in Cambridge and for a year he hired the Newnham student and cookery writer Jane Grigson (1928-1990) to help run the gallery. Although he was only there for three years, he helped bring in fashionable artists and ceramicists and helped change the gallery from selling reproduction prints of the university colleges and Victorian watercolours. One of his first exhibitions was of New Paintings by Francis Cyril Stanley Rose (1909-1979), Cecil James Henry Collins (1908-1989) and Merlyn Oliver Evans (1910-1973) held in 1950, and the following year Josef Herman exhibited in a solo show. In April 1952, Robertson became Director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Another notable curator from 1963 was Roy Turner Durrant who later became a director of Heffer's and as curators changed over the years the gallery would have a routine of exhibitions of historical works, maps, and archaeological prints, plus ceramics by Lucie Rie (1902-1995) and Bernard Howell Leach (1887-1979). They had their own picture framing department, so it’s common in East Anglia to find the Heffer’s label on the back of pictures that were framed there. The fate of the gallery came when Heffer’s sold the business to Blackwells in Oxford who closed the Heffers shops in the city in order to focus only on the Trinity Street bookshop. Suffolk artists who exhibited at Heffers Gallery include Margaret Arthur, John Reginald Brunsdon, Mark Copeland, Roy Turner Durrant, David Green, Gill Green, Josef Herman, Geoffrey Marsters, Elaine Nason, Trevor Sowden, Julia Sutton, Algernon Mayow Talmage and Michael Tingle.

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Works by This Artist