12 September 2026 to 17 January 2027
A bowl of fruit, a window, a chair pulled out from a table. For a long time these were the paintings people walked past on the way to battles and saints.
The Quiet Table brings forty of them together across three rooms. Some come from our own store, where they have waited years for a wall; others are on loan for the season. None of them shows an event. Each shows a room in the minutes before or after something happened: the breakfast plates not yet cleared, the letter read twice by the window, apples tipped out on the grass.
The rooms are hung at table height and lit from one side, the way most of these pictures were painted. Benches face the largest works. Take your time with them; they were made by people who did.
Exhibition notes by the curatorial team. Sample text.
Follow the rooms in order and the light moves from early to late, from the market ledge to the open garden door.
No. 101
Fruit on a marble ledge
The first room is all surfaces: marble ledges, cloths and baskets, fruit heaped higher than any table could hold. Look for the cut melon and the single fly that painters liked to hide in plain sight.
No. 112
Woman reading by a window
Light arrives from the left in almost every picture here. The people in these rooms read, sew and wait, and the window does most of the talking.
No. 093
Breakfast in a garden room
The last room sits at the table itself: newspapers, cups and chairs pushed back. It ends with a sunlit garden room and a door left open to the morning.
Twelve short stops, about forty minutes in all, read by the people who hung the rooms. Free on your own phone, or borrow a handset at the desk.
Doors open at ten. Thursdays stay open until nine, with the lights a little lower and the rooms a little quieter.
Under 18s and members walk in free
