Godfrey Pilkington, the grandson of a founder of the St Helens glassmaking firm Pilkington Bros, was the doyen of British gallery owners. The family is Norman by descent but the glassmaking business, which made Pilkington’s a household name, was a product of the 19th-century industrial revolution.
Godfrey Pilkington was born in 1918, the eldest of five siblings, and brought up at Fairfield, the family home, in Lancashire. He was educated at Clifton and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read English, which he later considered the best training for an art dealer because it taught practical criticism.
On the outbreak of the war he volunteered for the infantry but was transferred to coastal artillery. Later he served with The Royal Cheshire Regiment in the Italian campaign. It was then that he first developed an interest in art, with, as he put it, “the ‘stuff’ all around”. On a visit to the Vatican he had an impromptu encounter with Pope Pius XII, whom he always reckoned the most impressive person he had ever met.
After demob Pilkington joined the family business but his new interest in art led him to switch to the West End fine art dealers, Frost & Reed, in 1947. Again there was a family connection: his maternal grandfather, Walter Frost, had started the company and his aunt had inherited control of it.
His future wife, Eve Vincent, joined him at Frost & Reed from the Foreign Office, and after they married they opened their own gallery in Piccadilly Arcade in 1953. Despite bomb damage lowering the rent, the gallery made a loss in its first year, but it was never out of profit after a move to larger, although still modest, premises in Cork Street in 1954. In 1956 Christabel Briggs joined them, and for the next half a century the business was run as a triarchate, with Godfrey Pilkington the dominant force.
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At first the Piccadilly concentrated on modern British and a handful of younger British artists. Its Cork Street launch featured the then overlooked Scottish colourists, and Jack Simcock, the Yorkshire landscape painter, was given one of the first solo shows. An early collector was Betty Boothroyd, later, the first woman Speaker.
Throughout the 1950s Pilkington edited and wrote much of the magazine Pictures & Prints, published by the Fine Art Trade Guild. He was also the author of an anonymous booklet which the guild published, 50 Facts on Art, which sold half a million copies. Despite the growing fashion for Abstract art, Pilkington’s taste was resolutely figurative. He thought Abstract art had thrown “the baby out with the bath water”, as he put it.
The choice for collectors in these postwar years was confined to British and French art. Most successful artists were sustained, or at least helped, by private incomes, and what Pilkington called “the old club-like atmosphere with its amateurish charm” still prevailed. This changed rapidly with the ease of air and motor transport in the 1960s. New York succeeded Paris as the artistic mecca with dynamic consequences. As Pilkington noted: “Art was becoming big business and, what is more, it was becoming publicity business.”
The 1960s and 1970s were nonetheless the gallery’s golden age, when it established an international reputation by going against the American grain and instigating a revival of Art Nouveau, 19th-century Symbolist art and its 20th-century followers. Among landmark shows were Art Nouveau (1964), and Les Salons de la Rose + Croix (1968), the first of their commercial kind.
“This early revolt in the name of Idealism against the ‘commonplace’ realism of the Impressionists had a quality of perversity which pleased us,” Pilkington recalled. For a short time the Piccadilly was the leading Symbolist gallery in the world – an interest stimulated by its participation in international art fairs, the first at Basle in 1968. In the 1970s the gallery’s reputation for bringing attention to unfairly neglected artists led to equally ground-breaking revivals of the Viennese Secession and the German (Neue Sachlichkeit) Realists. Max Beerbohm, Eric Gill, Gwen John and Stanley Spencer were some of the English artists whose reputations the gallery helped to salvage. The still-life painter David Tindle, a future academician, was a stalwart among a small contemporary stable, which later included the landscape painter Adrian Berg, RA. The gallery gave the short-lived Brotherhood of Ruralists a first London show.
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Pilkington was especially pleased to help to instigate and support an annual open art competition in St Helens to foster and encourage local talent, an event which survives him.
The disappearance of the Saturday-morning window shoppers – they preferred to invest in weekend rural retreats – was a blow to the gallery, which always prided itself on maintaining a friendly attitude. It was embodied by the affable Pilkington, a man devoid of vanity, who bicycled to work with a knapsack on his back and wearing a flappy old mackintosh held together by string. Cycling almost cost him his life in his seventies, when he was knocked off his bike and badly injured in the Hyde Park underpass. The expiry of the Cork Street lease and a move to basement premises in Dover Street in 1999 signalled the last chapter in the gallery’s history.
The Piccadilly retained its gentle charm to the end, despite having to operate in a more cutthroat business world. As Pilkington wrote: “I believe art is for pleasure. Hedonism may be too frivolous a creed for this tortured generation. Happy are they for whom it is sufficient.”
The Piccadilly closed on June 1, 2007. A few weeks earler, the principal art gallery in St Helens had been renamed the Godfrey Pilkington Art Gallery in his honour.
Pilkington is survived by his wife and two sons and two daughters.
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Godfrey Pilkington, picture dealer, was born on November 8, 1918. He died on July 8, 2007, aged 88