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Aitchison belonged to the Beaux Arts generation, a tight-knit milieu of figurative artists that emerged after the Second World War. Along with Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff and Euan Uglow, he held his first solo exhibition at Helen Lessore’s Beaux Arts Gallery on Bruton Street – a flight-footed enterprise bringing together artists of prodigious talent from London’s leading art schools.

The early careers of these five artists were launched under Lessore’s discerning gaze and close friendships were formed, even as a wild divergence of artistic styles took place. By the time of its closure in 1965, the Beaux Arts Gallery had laid foundations for the next five decades of British art.

The exhibition will show Aitchison’s work up to the mid-1990s, including a rare early butterfly painting, still lifes from the 1960s and early 1970s, and portraits and crucifixions. In a parallel space, a significant group of paintings and watercolours by Andrews will hang alongside nudes and still lifes by Uglow, and substantial early works by Auerbach and Kossoff.

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