GRAFTON GALLERIES
The Grafton Galleries was incorporated in London on 16 June 1891, and opened in February 1893, firstly at 8 Grafton Street, and from 1896 in Bond Street. The manager was Francis Gerard Prange and from around 1905, Roger Fry was an advisor to the gallery, and he asked William Rothenstein to advise him on exhibition content. Numerous exhibiting societies used the premises including the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, the Ridley Art Club, Royal Society of Miniature Painters, International Society of Sculptors Painters and Gravers and the Women's International Art Club. In 1905 the Parisian dealer Paul Durand-Ruel showed the first substantial exhibition of the Impressionist paintings seen in London. This show achieved little publicity and it was not until 1910 that Roger Fry mounted the first of his two Post-Impressionist exhibitions introducing a shocked public to Cézanne, Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh. Two years later in 1912, rubbing salt into a still open wound, he attempted to convert them to Matisse and Picasso. This notoriety achieved unrivalled publicity for the Grafton. During the period 1916-20 the Gallery hosted exhibitions mounted by the London Salon of the Allied Artists' Association. The last exhibition appears to have been in 1930 after which the building became a jazz club and cabaret venue.