Arthur Tooth & Sons
Directors of Arthur Tooth & Sons: (John) Peter Warren Cochrane (1913-2004); David Gibbs; Dudley William Tooth (1896-1972)
by Ida Kar vintage bromide print, 1959
Arthur Tooth & Sons was a prominent art gallery located at 5-6 Haymarket, City Of Westminster, Greater London Authority, SW1 in London, near the establishment of another picture dealer, McLean. The firm was founded in 1842 by Charles Tooth (1788–1868), a carver and framer, to set up his son, Arthur, in business. Until the 1880s, the gallery dealt in the occasional 18th-century, but mainly 19th-century British and some Continental paintings, thereafter expanding into old master paintings. Arthur Tooth also had a New York location from around 1900 until 1924 as well as a branch in Paris. The London branch remained in business until the 1970s.
The gallery remained in the Tooth family until its closure in the 1970s after the death of Dudley Tooth (Charles' great-grandson). Arthur Tooth & Sons, while a relatively small business, established a major presence in the commercial art market from the 1870s onwards. The Tooth gallery supplied industrial magnate Henry Clay Frick with works by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Jean-François Raffaëlli, J. M. W. Turner, Frits Thaulow, Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret, and Rembrandt.
Arthur Tooth & Sons - "Recent paintings", 1953. Dimitrie Berea together with David Gibbs
In the mid 1920s, Dudley Tooth (1896–1972) took up leadership of Arthur Tooth & Sons and rebranded the gallery, expanding within the pool of contemporary artists and further promoting artists by regularly hosting a solo show of each artist’s work every two and a half years.
Dimitrie Berea also enjoyed the organization of an individual exhibition, entitled "Recent Paintings", in 1953 (June - July), at the London Gallery, located on 31 Bruton Street. On this occasion, Berea appears photographed in the exhibition with one of the gallery's directors at that time, David Gibbs. Berea seems to have developed a long-term professional relationship with Gibbs, the appreciation of the Romanian artist's work materializing also through Gibbs' acquisition of paintings for his personal collection or to be later sold to his personal clientele. Also, in the catalogs of his subsequent exhibitions in the United States, Berea lists among his collectors of paintings, both the Athur Tooth Gallery and, distinctly, the David Gibbs collection. In the late 1960s Gibbs moved to the USA to pursue his artistic career there, working from a studio in Manhattan and being a director of the Pace Gallery. He held solo exhibitions of his interlocking abstract compositions in New York in the 1970s & 1980s.
The paintings presented to the London public consisted of landscapes painted in Paris, London landscapes recently made for this exhibition in 1953, but also landscapes from Italy.