BLOOMSBURY GALLERY
The first notice of the Bloomsbury Gallery at 34 Bloomsbury Street, London is an exhibition of the works of M. Alexandre Troin (7 October 1893–11 November 1978) of Favière near Toulon in September 1929 when the gallery was described as 'new' with the director a Miss Joan Cross Druce (22 March 1899-40 December 1996). Joan Druce married at Holborn, London in 1932 Stanislas Frydman Osiakovski (20 June 1894-10 December 1972) and they ran The Bloomsbury Gallery at 34 Bloomsbury Street, which specialised in then unknown, artists whose works they exhibited. Mary Potter had her first solo exhibition at the gallery in 1931 and the following year the works of Asphodel Fleischmann (5 April 1910–22 January 1981) were being exhibited. In 1936 they had an exhibition of the works of Charles Mendelssohn Horsfall (2 September 1865-29 May 1942) and in 1938 the gallery is recorded at 24 South Molton Street, Mayfair with an exhibition of the works of Theophile Lucifer Gardini who changed his name in 1953 to Baron Avro Manhattan (6 April 1914-26 November 1990). This gallery does not seem to have survived the Second World War.
There was an earlier Bloomsbury Gallery at 29 High Street, Bloomsbury, London with a sale of wokrs on 19 February 1891 and of 300 works from the Huckle Collecton from the Bloomsbury Gallery on 23-24 April 1884. Frederick Thomas Huckle (25 June 1832-23 July 1886) was the owner of the gallery. Historically, his core business model relied on assembling large collections of Old Master paintings, high-class modern oil paintings, and watercolor drawings. He used his London base to source and authenticate works before circulating them to regional art markets. Instead of keeping them strictly in a single London showroom, Huckle was known for dispatching these extensive collections to local auctioneers across the United Kingdom, from Aberdeen to Ramsgate and Cheltenham, to be sold at major multi-day public auctions.