Gerrish Fine Art

Gerrish Fine Art Gerrish Fine Art is a family-run business specialising in original works of art from the 18th century to the present day

What if mankind became the fossil?In 1830, Henry De la Beche produced one of the most extraordinary images from the begi...
15/09/2026

What if mankind became the fossil?

In 1830, Henry De la Beche produced one of the most extraordinary images from the beginnings of palaeoart: Awful Changes. Man found only in a fossil state — Reappearance of Ichthyosauri.

The lithograph was a wonderfully ingenious satire on ideas being developed by De la Beche’s friend and fellow geologist Charles Lyell in his Principles of Geology.

Lyell argued for an immensely ancient Earth shaped by natural processes operating over vast periods of time. He even speculated that, were the conditions of the ancient world to return, its characteristic creatures might return with them — the ichthyosaur to the sea, the iguanodon to the woods and the pterodactyl to forests of tree ferns.

De la Beche took the idea to its absurd conclusion.

In Awful Changes, the ichthyosaurs have indeed returned — but mankind is extinct.

At the centre, Professor Ichthyosaurus lectures to his reptilian audience on a recently discovered fossil human skull. Examining our unimpressive teeth and feeble jaws, he concludes that mankind must have belonged to “some of the lower order of animals.”

It is a remarkably modern joke: humanity reduced to an archaeological curiosity and confidently misinterpreted by the dominant species of the future.

De la Beche was simultaneously helping to invent the visual language through which the prehistoric world could be imagined. His celebrated Duria Antiquior, produced at almost exactly the same moment, is among the earliest attempts to reconstruct prehistoric life.

An exceptionally rare original impression of Awful Changes, dated 1830, recently acquired by Gerrish Fine Art.

Henry Thomas De la Beche (1796–1855)
Awful Changes. Man found only in a fossil state — Reappearance of Ichthyosauri, 1830
Lithograph

HistoryOfScience Lithography WorksOnPaper Printmaking GerrishFineArt

Not quite art imitating life , but pretty close.
19/06/2026

Not quite art imitating life , but pretty close.

All ready for tomorrow’s private view of our new exhibition: ‘Seascape : Gustave Le Gray and Hiroshi Sugimoto’.
16/06/2026

All ready for tomorrow’s private view of our new exhibition: ‘Seascape : Gustave Le Gray and Hiroshi Sugimoto’.

David Hockney - 9th of July 1937 - 11th of June 2026Today we celebrate the extraordinary life and legacy of David Hockne...
12/06/2026

David Hockney - 9th of July 1937 - 11th of June 2026

Today we celebrate the extraordinary life and legacy of David Hockney — not only one of the great painters of our time, but one of the most inventive and influential printmakers in modern art.

Throughout his career, Hockney transformed printmaking into a space of endless possibility. From his masterful etchings and lithographs to his groundbreaking experiments with photocopiers, fax machines, and digital technologies, he continually expanded what a print could be. His prints combined technical brilliance with wit, colour, intimacy, and a profound joy in looking at the world.

Series such as A Rake’s Progress, the Illustrations for the Brothers Grimm, The Blue Guitar, and of course his later iPad series of Yorkshire, Yosemite and Normandy reveal an artist who never stopped questioning, exploring, and reinventing. He understood that printmaking was not simply a means of reproduction, but a medium for innovation and imagination in its own right.

Hockney taught us to look more carefully, to find wonder in everyday moments, and to embrace new ways of seeing. His influence on generations of artists and printmakers is immeasurable.

Thank you, David, for the colour, curiosity, and vision you brought to the world.
ContemporaryArt Etching Lithography ArtistLegacy Hockney

We hope you can join us on Wednesday the 17th for the opening of our new exhibition ‘Seascape: Gustave Le Gray & Hiroshi...
09/06/2026

We hope you can join us on Wednesday the 17th for the opening of our new exhibition ‘Seascape: Gustave Le Gray & Hiroshi Sugimoto’ a dialogue between two of photography’s greatest practitioners, Gustave Le Gray and Hiroshi Sugimoto. Gustave Le Gray was the most famous early photographer to elevate the medium of photography to that of painting, through his use of double negatives to achieve drama simultaneously in both sea and sky. While Sugimoto’s contemplative seascapes, produced over a century later, represent a deep meditation on the passage of time and our place within civilisation. While Le Gray’s photos evoke the Romantic ‘sublime’, often using boats as a metaphor for human vulnerability against the vast uncontrollable forces of the ocean, Sugimoto’s conceptually rigorous and elegantly formal seascapes draw us back to a time before humans existed, “To me, the sea is amniotic fluid. It was in the sea that life first came into being three billion years ago.” Both artists, in their own way, transcend photography’s reputation as a medium of descriptive truth, manipulating the camera to make higher poetic and metaphysical statements.

Visit the exhibition page on our website for all available works.

Shown here are two proof impressions of Palmer’s most celebrated small plates: ‘Christmas’ and ‘The Skylark’. ‘Christmas...
13/05/2026

Shown here are two proof impressions of Palmer’s most celebrated small plates: ‘Christmas’ and ‘The Skylark’.

‘Christmas’ was inspired by lines from a sonnet by John Codrington Bampfylde (1754-1796):

Old Christmas comes, to close the wanéd year,

And aye the shepherd’s heart to make right glad;

Who, when his teeming flocks are homeward had,

To blazing hearth repairs, and nut-brown beer;

‘The Skylark’ represents Palmer’s first true visonary venture in the etching, and he chose for it a motif he had explored previously in other forms. The subject first appeared in a sepia drawing from the 1830s (Lister 140) and again in an oil painting of around 1843 (Lister 375; now in the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff). A preparatory study for the etching survives in the Cleveland Museum of Art, in the Mr and Mrs Lewis B. Williams Collection (Lister 497). The inspiration for the composition came from lines 41–44 of Milton’s L’Allegro:

To hear the Lark begin his flight,

And singing startle the dull night,

From his watch-towre in the skies,

Till the dappled dawn doth rise …

Considered Palmer’s two great masterpieces, ‘The Lonely Tower’ and ‘The Bellman’ were both inspired by by lines from Joh...
13/05/2026

Considered Palmer’s two great masterpieces, ‘The Lonely Tower’ and ‘The Bellman’ were both inspired by by lines from John Milton’s ‘Il Penseroso’:

Or the Belman’s drousie charm,
To bless the dores from nightly harm:
Or let my Lamp at midnight hour,
Be seen in some high lonely Towr
Where I may o& out-watch the Bear,
With thrice great Hermes.

Palmer was profoundly influenced by Milton and was known to carry a pocket sized copy of his poetical works with him at all times.

Two more rare etchings from our current Samuel Palmer exhibition. Both are impressions of ‘The Early Ploughman. The firs...
13/05/2026

Two more rare etchings from our current Samuel Palmer exhibition. Both are impressions of ‘The Early Ploughman.

The first is a very rare proof between states 1 and 2, which is in all likelihood unique. Impressions that show a plate in such an early stage of development have always been highly prized.

The second work is a touched proof in the 5th state, with the title written in pencil by the artist. It was formerly in the collection of fellow ‘Ancient’ George Richmond.

Two touched impressions of ‘The Weary Ploughman’ in our current exhibition: Samuel Palmer and his followers: A Poetic Vi...
13/05/2026

Two touched impressions of ‘The Weary Ploughman’ in our current exhibition: Samuel Palmer and his followers: A Poetic Vision.

Together with ‘The Early Ploughman’, this work forms one of those deliberate pairings in which the artist contrives a poetic symmetry: evening answering morning, return set against departure. In the former, the labourer, his task concluded, makes his homeward progress beneath the guidance of a full moon, whose pale authority determines the course of his journey. Passing a great chestnut, he follows his oxen as they descend towards a village half-concealed within its valley hollow, where the ascending threads of chimney smoke intimate rest and habitation. An impression was shown at the Royal Academy in 1865 (No. 876), accompanied by ‘The Rising Moon’ (No. 872), then bearing the title Evening Pastures. At that time, The Weary Ploughman carried a caption drawn from Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard—“The ploughman homeward plods his weary way”—a borrowing at once apt and indicative of the artist’s literary affinities.

The title by which the plate is now known was later suggested by F. L. Griggs, and it has the merit of preserving the Gray association while also clarifying the relationship with its companion. In The Early Ploughman, the same figure, now seen at the outset of his day, enters from the opposing side of the design. There, in the cool lucidity of dawn, he cuts the first furrow as the sun’s initial rays begin to animate the landscape. A dense screen of cypress trees occupies the right, imparting a note more Mediterranean than English, while a woman bearing water crosses the field. Indeed, the entire conception suggests an origin less in the English countryside than in an imagined, Italianate pastoral—filtered, as so often, through the artist’s poetic sensibility rather than direct observation.

Now on view at Gerrish Fine Art: Samuel Palmer and His Circle: A Poetic Vision.Alongside a complete collection of Samuel...
13/05/2026

Now on view at Gerrish Fine Art: Samuel Palmer and His Circle: A Poetic Vision.

Alongside a complete collection of Samuel Palmer’s etchings, including no less than three touched proofs and two rare proofs, we are also exhibiting works by his influential predecessors, William Blake and John Linnell. The exhibition is further enriched by works from his contemporary, Edward Calvert, and later followers, including F. L. Griggs, Paul Drury, and Graham Sutherland.

We are open without appointment all of today, closing at 5 pm. The perfect warm up for the London Original Print Fair .

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By Appointment Jermyn Street
London
SW1Y

Opening Hours

Monday 9am - 5:30pm
Tuesday 9am - 5:30pm
Wednesday 9am - 5:30pm
Thursday 9am - 5:30pm
Friday 9am - 5:30pm

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+442078713089

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