Frances Spalding writes: ‘I very much enjoy doing exhibitions. This began early on. As a postgraduate, my suggestion to the Courtauld Gallery, that portraits by Roger Fry would make a good subject for an exhibition, was taken up. 33 oils and 3 drawings were shown in London and at the Mappin Art Gallery in Sheffield. More recently in June 2024, I very much enjoyed assisting the New Art Centre at Roche Court in Wiltshire with  a  Mary  Potter exhibition, and wrote the main catalogue essay. It  covered 30 years of her life, after her move to Aldeburgh and chimed with the Aldeburgh Festival’s 75^th Anniversary.

One of Roger Fry’s best portraits was of Edith Sitwell. There are in fact two of her by him but the best is in the Sheffield Museums collection.  She became the subject of my second exhibition. She sat for many artists and never fussed about the results, which were not always appealing. She would say: ‘If you are a greyhound, why try to look like Pekinese?’ I called this exhibition ‘Images of Edith: Portraits of Dame Edith Sitwell’, and it was held in the gallery of the Art School, then part of Sheffield City Polytechnic. Reresby and Penelope Sitwell came to the opening and on the spot invited a handful of us back to Renishaw for a cold supper. It was an evening I will never forget.  Towards its end, I asked Reresby if he would sign my copy of the catalogue. He readily agreed and I followed him into another room where, sitting at his desk, he announced that, having just come back from a visit to China, he could  also sign it in Chinese. This involved licking the end of a small wooden tool, then banging it down on an ink block before stamping the page with an imprint of a Chinese  character. Sadly, the catalogues of this and the  Roger Fry’s portraits exhibition are hard to find today.

In more recent times I worked with David Fraser Jenkins  on ‘John Piper in the 1930s: Abstraction on the Beach’ for Dulwich Picture Gallery. The argument behind the exhibition, tracing his move into abstraction and then out of it as war approached, very neatly filled the enfilade of four rooms allocated for exhibitions.  But best of all was the opportunity to guest curate for the National Portrait Gallery the exhibition ‘Virginia Woolf: Life, Art and Vision’, for which I also wrote the accompanying book of the same title. So much has been written on Virginia Woolf that at first it was difficult to know what to do. But the need for the exhibition’s story to have a strong visual attraction directed the narrative, and the attendance figures went beyond its target audience.

Three years later I co-curated with Simon Martin an exhibition at Pallant House, Chichester, timed to coincide with the centenary of John Minton’s birth.  Pallant House is another of my favourite galleries, and it was a pleasure to write a longish piece for the Pallant House Magazine (Autumn/Winter 2021/22) in celebration of this gallery’s fortieth anniversary.