Collected over ten years, this wonderfully individual group brings together works by David Nash RA, Stephen Chambers RA, Anne Rothenstein, Terry Frost, Chris Orr RA and the late Lindy Guinness, alongside artists whose work has played an important part in the gallery’s history.
Gathered by one collector over the course of a decade, these are works chosen not to follow a single theme, but because each one commanded attention and continued to reward looking. Together, they form a collection full of colour, narrative, curiosity and character.
A rare opportunity for these much-loved works to find new homes. Below is a snapshot of the career headlines for some of these artists.
Anne Rothenstein’s rise over the past few years has been remarkable. In 2025, Stephen Friedman Gallery’s solo presentation of her work at Frieze Masters sold out, with new paintings priced between £40,000 and £75,000. Her work has since appeared in exhibitions with Pace in Los Angeles and Waddington Custot in Paris and London, confirming her growing international recognition.
Painted in 2020, Waiting belongs to a particularly resonant moment in Rothenstein’s practice. Looking from her studio towards the neighbouring flats during lockdown, she became absorbed by the fleeting signs of lives taking place behind windows. The resulting painting captures the isolation, expectancy and quiet strangeness of that period.
A Royal Academician since 2005, Stephen Chambers is one of Britain’s most distinctive painters and printmakers. His work is held in collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, the V&A, the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Royal Academy, while major projects have been presented at the Royal Academy, the Pera Museum in Istanbul and during the 2017 Venice Biennale.
Three limited-edition works are included in A Collector’s Collection. Most significant is the monumental screenprint The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. Measuring more than a metre across and produced in an edition of only 30, it has the visual presence of a major painting.
David Nash is one of the most significant British sculptors of his generation. A Royal Academician and recipient of an OBE, his work is held in collections including Tate, the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the V&A, the Uffizi and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.
For more than five decades, Nash has explored the life and transformation of trees, working with wood through carving, cutting, seasoning and fire. His sculptures acknowledge nature as an active collaborator: wood splits, changes and continues to reveal the passage of time long after the artist’s initial intervention.
Fire Carved Holly was created for our exhibition Good Nature in 2017, to accompany Nash’s sculpture of the same name.
Lindy Guinness (1941–2020) was a painter of unusual independence and sensitivity. Formally trained at Byam Shaw and Chelsea, her artistic development was also profoundly influenced by the painter Duncan Grant, who became a lifelong friend and mentor.
Throughout her life, Guinness returned consistently to painting, experimenting with different approaches while developing a visual language of her own. In her late work, the historic rooms of Clandeboye became the setting for deeply personal meditations on light, memory and the passage of time.
Painted in 2020, the final year of the artist’s life, Incandescent Light and Could it be the moon? are exceptionally intimate works. Though small in scale, each carries a concentrated atmosphere: pools of illumination, half-seen furniture and shadowed interiors seem to hold the presence of those who have passed through the rooms before.
These paintings offer collectors an opportunity to acquire works from a poignant final series by an artist whose oeuvre is now finite.
Dame Laura Knight DBE RA (1877–1970) was one of the most accomplished and independent British artists of the twentieth century. Her long career took her from the fishing communities of Staithes and the landscapes of Cornwall to the backstage worlds of ballet and theatre, the circus ring, wartime factories and the Nuremberg Trials. In 1936, she became the first woman elected a full Royal Academician since the Academy’s two female founders, and in 1965 became the first woman to receive a major retrospective there.
The drawings presented here belong to two of Knight’s most sought-after subjects: ballet and circus life. Working backstage with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes during the early 1920s, and later travelling with the combined Bertram Mills and Great Carmo’s Circus in 1929 and 1930, Knight observed performers and animals at unusually close quarters. Her rapidly drawn lines capture the discipline, movement and fleeting drama of these worlds with remarkable economy.
Knight holds a particular significance for Candida Stevens Gallery. Her example inspired the gallery’s first London exhibition, which celebrated the relative freedom enjoyed by women artists today while acknowledging the determination of those who made that freedom possible. These intimate works on paper offer an accessible opportunity to acquire an original work by an artist whose importance within British art—and particularly within the history of women artists—continues to grow.
Stephen Farthing RA has achieved the kind of institutional career usually associated with a significantly higher market profile. A graduate of Saint Martin’s and the Royal College of Art, he represented Britain at the São Paulo Biennale and was elected a Royal Academician in 1998. His work is held in major public collections including the British Museum, Ashmolean Museum, National Portrait Gallery, V&A and Royal Academy of Arts.
Farthing is both a painter and an important thinker about art. His long career as an educator has included appointments at the Royal College of Art, Oxford’s Ruskin School, the New York Academy of Art and University of the Arts London. Throughout his work, he has explored how images acquire meaning and how museums, exhibitions and collections influence the way we see them.
Summer Show 1, 2017, is a hand-painted digital print that characteristically moves between reproduction and original intervention made for our exhibition of his work, Museums of the World.
Jane Harris (1956–2022) devoted more than thirty years to exploring the possibilities of a single form: the ellipse. Working within this self-imposed discipline, she created paintings and prints of remarkable variety, using subtle changes of colour, surface and light to make her elliptical forms appear to hover, recede, gleam or turn in space.
A graduate of the Slade and Goldsmiths, Harris was an Arts Foundation Painting Fellow, a prizewinner at the John Moores Painting Prize and Jerwood Drawing Open, and the recipient of the Sunny Dupree Family Award at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Her work is held in numerous public collections, including the Government Art Collection, Arts Council England, the Fitzwilliam Museum and Pallant House Gallery.
Since Harris’s death in 2022, her distinctive contribution to British abstraction has begun to receive renewed attention through museum and estate exhibitions in Britain and France.
Gleamers Silver, 2016, is a beautifully balanced woodcut diptych. Its paired forms seem simultaneously solid and weightless, while the restrained silver tonality captures Harris’s fascination with the movement of light across a surface. It offers an accessible opportunity to acquire a characteristic work by an artist whose focused, elegant practice is increasingly being reassessed.
London-based American artist Cecilia Charlton brings together the histories of abstract painting, mathematical pattern and hand embroidery. Working with techniques traditionally associated with domestic craft, she creates intricate, optically charged compositions that question the distinction between painting and textile.
Since graduating from the Royal College of Art, Charlton has received the Jerwood Art Fund Makers Open award and completed major public commissions. Her work is held in collections including the National Museum of Lithuania, London School of Economics, Bowdoin College and Barts Health NHS Trust. She is now undertaking an AHRC-funded doctorate at Glasgow School of Art in partnership with National Museums Scotland.
Michael Pollan says it’s OK . . ., part I, 2018, is especially significant within Charlton’s development. Inspired in part by Pollan’s writing on psychedelics and consciousness, its merging Bargello patterns create an experience of movement, expansion and altered perception.
Charlton has described these works as the foundation of the Bargello practice she has developed ever since. Rather than imposing a predetermined image, she allowed the historic patterns to act as collaborators, generating unexpected forms as they met, overlapped and changed direction.
Meticulously embroidered by hand in wool, this is not only an absorbing and accomplished textile work, but a pivotal early example of the visual language for which Charlton has subsequently become known.
