ALPINE CLUB GALLERY

1957 - ?

Alpine Club was founded as a gentleman's club in 1857 at 8 St. Martin's Place, just off Trafalgar Square, where it rented rooms in 1858. Its first president and chairman were John Ball (1818–1889) and Edward Shirley Kennedy (1817–1898) and in 1895 it moved to 23 Savile Row, where it remained until 1937 when it moved to 74 South Audley Street in Mayfair, London. In 1990 the club sold its lease and moved to its current address at Charlotte Street near Old Street Underground. Throughout its existence, the club has also been used as an exhibition venue with famous and relatively unknown artists showing there and other societies have used the club premises for meetings including the Friday Club and the Dudley Gallery Art Society. Mountaineers have historically carried sketchbooks on their many trips and a huge collection of paintings and drawings have been amassed and deposited in the club's archive. In December 1907, a group of ladies who were climbers in the Alps met in London and agreed to form a new club, like the long-established Alpine Club, which at the time did not accept women members on account of their supposed physical inabilities in mountain climbing. The Ladies Club's first president was the Bishop of Bristol, and the second in 1908 was Elizabeth Le Blond (1860-1934). The Alpine Club had long resisted admitting women members, and in 1973 an attempt to have this policy reversed was defeated, the necessary two-thirds majority had not been achieved but in May 1974, another vote was held, and women were finally allowed to join the club which made the need for a separate women's club unnecessary when the Ladies' Alpine Club merged with the Alpine Club. Suffolk artists who have exhibited at the Alpine Club Gallery include Elinor Proby Adams, Winifred Austen, Harry Becker, Alfred Richard Blundell,Maurice Chesterton, Eleanor Every, Delphis Gardner, Ethel Alice Kirkpatrick, Ida Marion Kirkpatrick, Joan Lever, Paula Nightingale, Cuthbert Julian Orde and Alfred William Rich.

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Works by This Artist