Peter Mitchell, a graduate of the Courtauld Institute, took over the business from his late father, John Mitchell, and is a leading authority on European flower and still life painting and the author of the standard work of reference European Flower Painters (1973). In 1993 he organized an unprecedented loan exhibition at his gallery of flower paintings from the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Peter Mitchell also contributed the entries on Rachel Ruysch, the eighteenth-century landscape painter Jean Pillement and the nineteenth-century artist Antoine Guillemet to the Macmillan Dictionary of Art. In 2004 he published a second monograph on the Belgian artist Alfred Stevens, whose paintings are a speciality of John Mitchell Fine Paintings.
His elder son James spent a year working for the Paris auctioneers Ader Picard Tajan in 1987 before going to read history at Oxford. After three years in the Old Master department at Christie's, James joined the family business in 1993. In 1999 he held a loan exhibition of the work of the English landscape painter Julius Caesar Ibbetson and published a new book about the artist. The gallery's British paintings are his particular fields of interest.
William Mitchell, James's younger brother, read languages at Durham University and then worked in the Paris art trade for five years dealing on his own account. William is also an authority on Swiss, French and German nineteenth and twentieth century paintings of the Alps. His main sphere of activity is the buying and researching of the firms Old Master paintings.
Throughout the year the firm holds selling and loan exhibitions at the gallery and has exhibited at TEFAF, Maastricht for over twenty years as well as fairs in Palm Beach and New York.
The Gallery Manager is David Gaskin, who comes to the firm after twenty-five years working with the world’s leading auction houses.
