This year the Gallery is featuring the amazing collections of Sir Osbert Sitwell – Champion for the Arts – many of the items unseen including works by Picasso, Rex Whistler, Wyndham Lewis and Cecil Beaton, Wilfred Owen to name but a few.
It was during a performance by Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe of Stravinsky’s ‘The Firebird” at Covent Garden in June 1912 that the 20 year old Osbert Sitwell decided on his life’s path. “Directly the overture began to be played I came to life …. Every gesture, every line, every tone meant something, a work of art that could not have existed before. Now I knew where I stood. I would be, for long as I lived on the side of the arts (they needed champions…).
From the end of the first world war in 1918, Diaghilev dined at Osbert’s house on armistice night, for nearly the next 45 years Osbert Sitwell quietly dominated the arts in all its forms. Now out of fashion as a writer, it is largely forgotten that he was perhaps one of the most influential patrons in the country. It was he and his brother Sacheverell who organised the first French Contemporary Arts Exhibition at Heals Mansard Gallery in August 1919 where Picasso, Matisse, Raoul Dufy, Vlaminck, Modigliani and Utrillo were exhibited for the first time in London. From then on Osbert was at the centre of the art world.
This exhibition tries to convey the eclectic mix of things that Osbert Sitwell surrounded himself with and collected. He was not only part of the international art and social scene, but also a member of the landed gentry, his duties of squire and landlord he took very seriously. He was greatly liked and loved here in Derbyshire by his tenants and employees. His knowledge of the area, its terrain and its people was encyclopaedic. He was also well respected locally because he worked, he wrote for a living.