Eardley Knollys Biography

An exceptionally talented and charismatic man, Eardley Knollys tried his hand at many things - even directing silent films in Hollywood - before eventually establishing himself as a respected art critic and dealer in modern British and French art. Raffish, and socially lithe, Knollys was known for his exceptional taste and style, and together with Desmond Shawe-Taylor, Raymond Martinez, Edward Sackville-West, and Patrick Trevor-Roper formed a noted salon. While Knollys was never part of any of the famous ‘groups’ of the time, he could count among his friends Picasso, Duncan Grant, Edward Le Bas, Lady Ottoline Morrill, and Frances Partridge, as well as several other Bloomsbury and Euston Road figures.

His father Cyprian Knollys, was descended from the titular Earls of Banbury, but from a minor branch of the family, so after Winchester and Christ Church, Oxford, Eardley was expected to earn a gentleman’s living. He worked in advertising for Lever Brothers, and for the legendary J. Walter Thompson, after which he travelled throughout the USA, pausing in Hollywood for an unsuccessful stint as a filmmaker.

After further travels throughout Europe, Knollys returned to England, and in 1929, he became private secretary to Viscount Hambleden, owner of W. H. Smith & Son. He was entrusted with with managing Lord Hambleden’s personal finances, investments, and charitable donations, as well as his London house and grounds. Knollys eventually ensured that his employer’s affairs were in such good order, that with Lord Hambleden’s agreement, Knollys was able to entertain his own ambition of becoming an art dealer.

In 1936, using part of his modest inheritance, Knollys took over the Storran Gallery on Old Brompton Road and, along with his partner Frank Coombs, transformed it into one of the most fashionable avant-garde venues in London. Along with solo shows of Picasso, Chaim Soutine, Amedeo Modigliani, Vaslav Nijinsky, and James Thurber, the gallery also mounted group exhibitions that included works by Grant, Victor Pasmore, Graham Bell, and Ivon Hitchins. Their inaugural exhibition carried the deceptively innocuous title of 'Flower Paintings', and featured works by Renoir, Gauguin, Picasso, Grant, Smith, and Hitchins. The gallery continued to go from strength to strength in reputation, if not profits, until 1941, when Coombs, who had signed up when Britain entered the war, was killed in a Belfast bombing raid. Utterly bereft, Knollys closed the Storran Gallery for good.

After doing significant work for the National Trust, Knollys, now well into his fifties, retired and decided to finally follow his friend Le Bas’s repeated advice to become a painter in his own right. Knollys had dabbled before, but now painting became his full time pursuit. He moved out of Long Crichel, the Dorset home he had made with Shawe-Taylor, Mortimer and Sackville-West, and into Slade Hill House in Hampshire with the picture framer Mattei Radev, who would remain Knollys’s close friend for the rest of his life. He devoted himself to painting still lifes and landscapes in a style derived largely from the Bloomsbury painters, whose work he had handled as a dealer. But Knollys’ delight in the possibilities of strong, even hectic colour keys was also indicative of his delight in the wilder aspects of Post-Impressionism, particularly the Fauves, whose utter rejection of local colour he shared. His paintings also show a keen knowledge of the Pont-Aven school and the Nabi group of painters, particularly the Breton pictures of Gauguin, which Knollys especially admired. Knollys wrote in an introductory note to one of his early exhibition catalogues: “I have always loved strong, bright colours – muddy ones seem to me symbols of gloom. This led me to the Pont Aven and Fauve painters, and they remain my favourites… I try to drive along the splendid road they opened – in my own car of course and with some personal diversions.”

With his startling palette and bold use of pattern, Knollys never tired of paraphrasing the cozy and the picturesque into something chic and surprising, while always retaining in his paintings a keen sense of style and eye for the sensual. Whether his subject matter was a bowl of lemons or the undulating hills of the Drôme valley, Knollys always attacked it with brio and the sheer wonder he felt for the possibilities of colour. Grant himself described Knollys’s work as marked by “such courageous enthusiasm… he is one of the purest painters I know.”

Knollys had his first one-man show in 1960 at the Minories in Colchester. Perhaps because he came to it so late in life, he proved a tireless artist and painted almost constantly up until his death at the age of eighty-nine. His last exhibition was in 1986 at the Southampton City Art Gallery.

Throughout his career as a dealer, and beyond, Knollys also amassed a splendid collection of modern masters. This collection, which includes works by Grant, Hitchens, Gaudier Brzeska, Modigliani, Winifred Nicholson, Lucien Pissarro, Graham Sutherland, and Matthew Smith, among others, was augmented when Sackville-West died and bequeathed his own collection to Knollys. Eventually the collection passed upon Knollys’s death to Mattei Radev, who preserved it in its entirety. Coinciding with the exhibition of Eardley Knollys’s work at Messum’s Cork Street, which opens in November 2011, will be an exhibition of this collection at Pallant House in Chichester. 'The Radev Collection: Bloomsbury and Beyond', will be on display from 1 Oct 2011 through 22 Jan 2012 and, together with the Cork Street show, will provide the public with a rare opportunity to both experience and acquire Knollys’ work, as well as view the paintings that inspired him as a painter, and made his name as an art dealer.

The Eardley Knollys Studio Estate is represented by Messum’s. There was a major retrospective exhibition of Knollys’ work at Messum’s in 2002.