Old Master Drawings

Day & Faber, London

By Sotheby's

D ay & Faber are fine art dealers specialising in European drawings from the last five hundred years.

The gallery was founded in 1970 when Richard Day, expert in Italian and Dutch drawings and former head of Sotheby’s Old Master Drawings Department, set up as a dealer in Bond Street, London. In partnership with John Baskett, who was Paul Mellon’s art advisor, Richard built up a number of important private collections as well as working with, and selling to, museums in Europe and America. From the early 1980’s he was one of the first UK dealers to hold an annual exhibition of Master Drawings in New York.

After working at Sotheby’s and the Wildenstein Gallery in London, James Faber joined in 1994. Richard retired in 2012 and James and Sophia Kisielewska now run the gallery, which in 2015 moved round the corner to Maddox Street, located in the heart of the London art world.

Our aim is to find drawings of exceptional quality, beauty and interest. We offer works across a wide price range and seek out the quirky and unusual. Drawings of the French Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Century are a great interest. Over the last couple of decades we have also developed a specialism in early nineteenth century plein-air oil-sketches, in particular the works of the Norwegian Romantics Joseph-Christian Dahl and Thomas Fearnley. During this time we have sold over thirty works by Fearnley, including to the National Museum in Stockholm, and a masterpiece by Dahl to the Barber Institute in Birmingham. In 2019 we were entrusted with the sale of oil-sketches by Fearnley from the estate of the celebrated collector Asbjorn Lunde, all of which were acquired by private collectors and museums.

Day & Faber are members of the Society of London Art Dealers. We exhibit at the Art Fairs TEFAF in Maastricht and Masterpiece in London.

Day & Faber, London

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