Piano Nobile

In 2018, Charleston Farmhouse purchased from Piano Nobile the Famous Women Dinner Service by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant.

[7] The service was commissioned by Kenneth Clark, late director of the National Gallery and presenter of the 1969 television series Civilisation.

[8] In May 2018, the gallery's director Dr Robert Travers spoke about the plates on BBC Radio 4's programme Front Row with novelist Ali Smith and Charleston curator Darren Clarke.

[15] In 2018, a BP Spotlight display at Tate Britain about Mark Gertler included The Pond, Garsington (1916), the loan of which was facilitated by Piano Nobile.

[17] In 2019, the National Gallery of Modern Art’s exhibition Cut and Paste included Duncan Grant’s Still Life with Fruit and Coffee-pot (1916) and Vanessa Bell’s collage portrait of Molly MacCarthy (1914), both of which were loaned through Piano Nobile.

Examples include exhibitions of work by Mark Gertler (2012), Paul Nash (2014), John Armstrong (2015), William Coldstream and Euan Uglow (2016), Peter Coker (2017), David Bomberg and Leslie Marr (2017), Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant (2018), Leon Kossoff (2019), Craigie Aitchison (2019), and Ben Nicholson (2020).

[20] Piano Nobile's exhibitions have been reviewed by art critics including Martin Gayford,[21] Jackie Wullschlager,[22] and Jonathan Jones.

[25] The private view of Leon Kossoff: A London Life was attended by the artist himself, as well as his peers the painters Frank Auerbach and Joe Tilson.

"It was a moving opening for me, because if you’d have gone to St Martin’s School of Art in 1948-1949, you would have seen Leon Kossoff, Joe Tilson and myself working in a room.

The Nobile Index Series, published in association with the University of Bristol, presented original research about recent sale prices at auction for work by Walter Sickert, David Bomberg, L.S.

[30] It is still owned by Ruth Borchard’s descendants, while Piano Nobile is responsible for storing, promoting, exhibiting and loaning out the collection on the family’s behalf.

[32][33] This biennial exhibition alternates with the Ruth Borchard Self-Portrait Prize, which encourages contemporary artists to practice self-portraiture.