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. Since entering the family business he has organised several successful exhibitions on artists, who specialized in Alpine scenery. William's main sphere of activity is the buying and researching of the firms Old Master paintings.
In 2004 John Mitchell Fine Paintings took a new lease on an important five-storey building in London's Old Bond Street. At the time when many art dealers are choosing to withdraw from the public gaze and work privately, the Mitchell family have re-affirmed their commitment to old-fashioned art dealing by opening a gallery in the traditional centre of the art world. This may be seen as offering an alternative to the current predominance of the art fairs.
The Gallery Manager is David Gaskin, who comes to the firm after twenty-five years working with the world’s leading auction houses.
