The Radev Collection

[1][2] It is named after the Bulgarian émigré Mattei Radev, a picture framer and art collector, who moved in the social circles of the Bloomsbury group.

[5] Radev ran a picture framing business in London and was a lover of the writer E.M. Forster, with whom he began an affair in 1960.

[3] He arrived in Britain in 1950 after escaping communist Bulgaria by swimming across a river to Turkey, and then hiding in the lifeboat of a cargo ship travelling from Istanbul to Glasgow, where he was able to claim asylum.

His distinguished customers included Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Graham Sutherland, John Banting and Princess Michael of Kent, who at that time was working as an interior designer.

He kept ownership of his original framing workshop building, which he used as his private home and where he displayed his art collection, which was not open to the public.

In 1945, Knollys, Sackville-West and the music critic Desmond Shawe-Taylor together bought a Georgian rectory at Long Crichel, Dorset, where they held weekend salons, attended by some of the most notable cultural figures of the period, including Benjamin Britten, Nancy Mitford, Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham.

[5] It includes works by over 65 artists, such as Vanessa Bell, Georges Braque, Eugène Boudin, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Maurice Denis, Duncan Grant, Frances Hodgkins, Amedeo Modigliani, Ben Nicholson, Pablo Picasso, Lucien Pissarro, Matthew Smith, Graham Sutherland, and Alfred Wallis, many of whom were known personally by the three men who put the collection together.