Private Collections

A Modernist Life : The Collection of Ursula & Gordon Bowyer

8 October 2025

Simon Hucker

We are especially honoured to present works from The Collection of Ursula & Gordon Bowyer, which will be offered as the opening session of our MODERN MADE auction at The Mall Galleries in London on 30 October.

Architects Gordon and Ursula Bowyer were a remarkable couple who were deeply involved with the foundation of modernism in post-war Britain. Formed over six decades, their collection reflects both an unerring eye for innovation and a circle of friendships with many of the up-and-coming artists and designers of their day, who went on to become major figures in their fields. They collected not as investors, but as participants in a milieu who believed passionately in shaping the modern world. Their collection stands today as a testament to that shared spirit of optimism and experimentation and its ethos is something that we very much try to emulate in the curation of MODERN MADE.

MODERN MADE ft. The Collection Ursula & Gordon Bowyer

Browse the catalogue for next auction, taking place on 30 & 31 October in London

The story of the collection starts with a bicycle: Gordon had been given 21 guineas by his parents for his 21st birthday, with express instructions to buy one, but instead he bought a painting – by Ben Nicholson. And Modern British Art is at the core of the collection – with works by Paul Nash, C.R.W. Nevison, Eric Ravilious, Ben Nicholson, Keith Vaughan, Victor Pasmore, Robert Adams, Reg Butler, the ‘Two Roberts’ Colquhoun and MacBryde, amongst others. The two paintings by Colquhoun were amongst some of Gordon’s earliest purchases and things have come full circle, as ‘The Roberts’ are the subject of a major retrospective at Charleston this autumn – as well as a newly released novel by Damian Barr.

ROBERT COLQUHOUN (BRITISH 1914-1962)

HEBRIDEAN WOMAN, 1944

signed and dated (upper right), oil on canvas

£40,000-60,000 + fees

Yet Gordon and Ursula would have known these ‘classic’ Modern British artists not as modern masters but as young contemporaries and a few of them – Pasmore and Adams for instance – were friends. In many cases, the Bowyers had to wait until the 80s and 90s to be able to afford to acquire them, but they never forgot that time when not only they themselves came into their own professionally, but when British art was certainly at its most creative and ground-breaking.

The 1950s was the decade when a new generation of British sculptors, including Adams, Butler and Paolozzi, took the art biennials of Venice and Sao Paulo by storm; when Henry Moore was populating the modernist plazas of America; and when Nicholson, along with Hepworth, Lanyon, Heron et. al made the small Cornish fishing village of St Ives one of the key sites of European abstraction

KEITH VAUGHAN (BRITISH 1912-1977)

THREE RED BATHERS, 1944

crayon, ink and gouache on paper, 11.5cm x 16cm (4 ½in x 6 ¼in)

£4,000-6,000 + fees

Yet whilst the 1950s were a golden age of British artistic creativity – in fine art, design, industrial design and architecture – actually making a living from it was hard. This was in part due to the financial austerity of the post-war period, but equally due to the long tradition of British cultural philistinism and our native preference for the traditional in art, where artists such as Sickert or Ben Nicholson’s father, Sir William were about as modern as one got without scaring the horses. For Gordon & Ursula, on the other hand, these artists were about as traditional as they got, the start-point of a modernity that fired their imagination and they felt it was vital to support those artists trying to shape something new. If it wasn’t for people like them – a small band of architects, designers, engineers, as well as the odd moneyed dilettante of impeccable taste, such as Peter Watson or Cyril Connolly – there simply wouldn’t have been the conditions for contemporary art to exist.

Festival of Britain, 1951

A New Age of British Modernity

Ursula, in particular, fits the profile of this vitally important new wave of collector, as almost all that was good about the avant-garde scene in Britain in the 1950s ran through the network of artists, collectors, gallerists and who had arrived in Britain to escape persecution by the Nazis in the previous decades. Europe’s loss was very much our cultural gain. Ursula’s story is, in fact, heartbreakingly typical of the period. She was born in Berlin into a Jewish family with no conception of being anything other than German. However, her family were slowly isolated and disenfranchised by the succession of race laws passed by the Nazis in the mid-1930s.(When asked about her earliest memories of architecture, she recalled living in a flat near to the Berlin Olympic stadium and being aware of the powerful, brooding presence of the structure – but equally recalling that the position of the flat also made it harder for the SA to smash their windows). Ursula’s parents were lucky enough to have the opportunity to leave and so they did, sending her over to England on a ferry in 1938 and yet, like so many families who did manage to get out, they still lost large parts of their extended family to the Holocaust.

Gordon and Ursula met during the War, when they we both students at the Regent Street Polytechnic, then one of the more advanced art and design schools in the country. Their tutor was Peter Moro – another European émigré and one of many bringing Bauhaus principles of art and life to a willing British student body. They married in 1950, during a brief pause in the work on what was to be their breakthrough project: the Sports Pavilion for the Festival of Britain, held the following year. Looking back, the Festival of Britain could be seen as the British government – bankrupt from the War – desperately papering over the cracks, trying to preserve its pre-War hegemony in a rapidly de-colonialising world. And the architectural jamboree built on the south bank of the Thames was (literally) flimsy and jerry-built. But the Festival was also brilliant and innovative and, importantly, beloved by the public, who took it for what it was intended to be: a celebration of hopeful new beginnings, the very opposite of the existential cry that some of the Bowyer’s favourite sculptors were to present to a stunned audience at the Venice Biennale in 1952.

The Festival itself had a strong look – bright colours, lightweight, playful, with plenty of angled go-ahead lettering (at which Ursula was a dab hand) and public murals in a user-friendly Cubist idiom (at which Gordon was adept). And Gordon and Ursula’s ‘Sports Pavilion’ was the Festival personified – bolted together from scaffolding poles and canvas awnings, hovering elegantly above the muddy Thames, it was the epitome of bright and breezy, at once both nostalgic and futuristic.

EMILY YOUNG (BRITISH 1951-)

ANGEL HEAD, c.2004-08

Purbeck Blue marble , mounted on the original studio designed stone and corten steel base 23cm x 31cm x 34cm (9in x 12 ¼in x 13 ½in) (excluding bases)

£8,000-12,000 + fees

Based on the success of the Pavilion and the small pieces of work they were managing to win (and Ursula’s wages from working for the influential Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew), the Bowyers bought a house - on Maze Hill in Greenwich, where they were to stay for the rest of their lives – and established their own architectural practice, with their first office in Blandford Street, in Marylebone. Despite the success of the Festival of Britain in giving the nation a taste for modernism (a taste we embraced perhaps more than we let on, judging by the popularity of Midwinter tea sets and G-plan sideboards in the ensuing decade), work for architects in the manner of Le Corbusier was stretched rather thin and so the Bowyer’s practice morphed into more of a loose collective of architects – many of them friends from their Regent Street Poly days – working on projects independently and collaboratively, sharing skills and opportunities equally. Colleagues included Trevor Dannatt (whose brother George was a painter whom the Bowyers collected), Walter Grieves, Richard & Margaret Finch and George Subioto, whilst Peter Moro was installed as eminence grise. After several years, the Blandford Street architects went their separate ways, although they continued to collaborate on projects for decades to come. Ursula, having taken some time away to focus on raising a family, re-joined Gordon as a partner as they developed a small but exquisite line in private houses, most notably the mirrored terrace at 17 and 17a Montpellier Row in Blackheath, that they built in 1958 for their friend, the Labour politician Jim Callaghan. Gordon & Ursula were meant to move into 17a but found the prospect of leaving Maze Hill too much of a wrench. The Callaghans, on the other hand, found it equally hard to leave no.17 for the cold comforts of 11 Downing Street, when Jim was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1964: as Audrey Callaghan noted in an article in House and Garden in 1965: “the rare kind of house that exactly suits one’s way of life is like a second skin”.

In 1961, the Bowyers had presented perhaps their most experimental work, what the architectural historian Neil Bingham describes as ‘one of Britain’s most original and sophisticated investigations into the possibilities of change and flexibility within domestic living’: their presentation of ‘the growing home’ at the Earl’s Court Furniture Show. Under the auspices of the Design Research Unit, which had been the driving force behind the Festival of Britain, Gordon and Ursula created four full house interiors – 18 distinct rooms in total – to chart the life of a family of four, from childbirth (nursery), to growing up (separate rooms), to the children leaving home (bedrooms converted to guest rooms), with two of these interiors showing the same space but as night and day, to add drama to an already elegiac study of the passing of time.

A typical Gordon and Ursula Bowyer house, as Neil Bingham has observed is ‘modest and discreet, yet distinctive’ – with a fantastically chic and logical kitchen, that was something of an Ursula speciality. Their private work tended to range between bespoke Corbusian boxes – the Curtis House in Peterborough or the Shearer House in Newport Pagnall, which suffered the misfortune of having the M1 placed a few hundred feet away from it the following year – or modern conversions and accents added to old buildings –such as 2 Langton Way for the architect Graham Lane. And the lessons they took from their private builds they applied to social housing. Both Gordon and Ursula believed that everybody deserved a well-made, well-designed house and they became actively involved in the national debate on the post-War housing shortage, joining the critic Ian Nairn in railing against ‘Subtopia’, the shoddy and soulless new housing that was being forced upon a desperate nation.

By the time Gordon retired in 1993, the Bowyer’s practice had completed 550 projects of incredible and infinite variety, from minor interventions to major schemes, from social housing projects to a string of stylish boutiques for the hair stylist Vidal Sassoon across Europe and America. And as avid collectors of art and design, it was inevitable that they would also design for museum and galleries, including the Japanese Gallery, Oriental Antiquities Gallery and the Prints and Drawings Gallery at the British Museum.

Interior of Maze Hill, c.1950s

Their own early 18th Century house at Maze Hill – where the writer and abolitionist Olaudah Equiano had spent time whilst he was in London – was itself not immune to the understated and sensitive touches that made a bespoke Bowyer home so appealing. There is the large picture window on the first floor sitting room, giving a wonderful view of the garden (with its two Emily Young sculptures): Gordon would often chuckle to himself when taking in the scene, full in the knowledge that such things wouldn’t have got planning permission much after 1960. And, of course, there is a bespoke kitchen by Ursula complete with a breakfast table by Gordon. Then there is the furniture, by their friends Robin Day and Finn Juhl, and low hanging light fittings by Alvar Aalto, bringing a Scandinavian touch to south London long, long before such things were fashionable. Juhl was a particularly close friend, who would design and make little objects as presents for the Bowyer children.

The art collection fits within the interior seamlessly. The main sitting room, especially, feels very reminiscent of Kettle’s Yard, with its restraint and artful combinations, whereas the rest of the house is something more of wunderkammer with pictures occupying every available surface, including a pine panelled central stair in the middle of which sits a painting by Gordon himself, from very early on in his career – the same one that features in the back of a wonderful photograph held in the RIBA archives of Gordon and Ursula together, two young architects drawing up the plans for modernity in Britain. The all-over effect of art hanging everywhere is enhanced by the hundreds of books that surround them – on art and architecture in the main, but with plenty of fiction, history and biography too. It’s a house designed for conversation, for thinking – with the kitchen, sitting room, dining room and design studio all interlinked on the same floor, high up to take advantage of the light and air and a cool and very modern breeze that blows through everything.

About the Author

Specialist

Simon Hucker

Associate Director, Senior Fine Art Specialist | London

simon.hucker@lyonandturnbull.com

0207 930 9115