Batsford Gallery is delighted to announce Phyllis Bray: Myth & Nature, the UK’s first comprehensive retrospective exhibition of Phyllis Bray (1911–1991), a significant figure in modern British art. The exhibition runs from 2 to 14 June 2026, with an opening reception on Thursday 4 June.
A painter, illustrator and muralist, Bray sustained a distinguished career spanning more than four decades. In 1928, at the age of 17, she was one of the youngest students ever to be accepted to the Slade School of Art, at a time when the field was overwhelmingly male dominated, and where she trained under Henry Tonks. A key member of the East London Group, she is best known for her evocative landscapes, murals and book illustrations, which combine the vitality of interwar British art with a distinctive personal vision. Throughout her career, Bray repeatedly returned to the natural world and to mythic and literary subjects, using landscape as both physical setting and symbolic space. She was also a formidable collector of antique jewellery.
The exhibition brings together works from Bray’s early years with the East London Group—where she worked alongside her first husband, John Cooper—through to her later book illustrations, public art, and, above all, watercolours and oil paintings of landscape. Hills, rivers and forests are rendered with sensitivity and immediacy, while her illustrated scenes draw on mythology, folklore and legend. The exhibition also highlights her close artistic relationship with the German Jewish painter and sculptor Hans Feibusch, whose interest in mythological subject matter informed Bray’s work, and whose influence can be seen in her paintings, and vice versa.
Despite major mural commissions and representation in national collections, Bray has not received recognition commensurate with her contribution to British art. This exhibition offers a rare opportunity to reassess the breadth of her practice and her lasting impact on twentieth-century British painting.
The exhibition coincides with the publication of a new edition of Artists of the East London Group: From Bow to Biennale, published by Batsford Books, in which Bray figures prominently.
