LONDON.- The Trustees of Ben Uri Gallery and Museum recently unveiled, for the first time in over 50 years, this important historical portrait of Arthur James Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour. Attributed to the distinguished Royal Academician Reginald Eves and painted c.1908-1910, the portrait reprises the pose of the famous portrait of Lord Balfour from 1908 by John Singer Sargent which hangs in London's National Portrait Gallery. The painting is being displayed alongside Ben Uri’s exhibition, A Farewell to Art: Chagall, Shakespeare and Prospero, the first UK showing of Chagall’s rare suite of 50 illustrations for The Tempest, created in 1975. Both will be on show until 11 February 2018 at Ben Uri, 108a Boundary Road, off Abbey Road, St John’s Wood, NW8 0RH. The gallery is open every day of the week and is free entry for all.

The artist, Reginald Eves, was born in London in 1878 and trained at University College School, London, winning the Trevelyan Goodall scholarship in art, and then at the Slade School of Fine Art under Alphonse Legros, Frederick Brown, and Henry Tonks, where he was awarded a Slade studentship. After five years in Yorkshire, he returned to London in 1901, taking a studio in Fitzroy Street and exhibiting for the first time at the Royal Academy. He married the artist Bertha Sybil in 1903. Eves became a successful and fashionable portrait painter, particularly after exhibiting a much-praised portrait of Sir Herbert Cozens-Hardy (1912) at the Royal Academy, where he became a regular exhibitor until his death in 1941. He also exhibited at the Royal Institute of Oil Painters and the Paris Salon (winning a gold medal in 1926). He specialised in male sitters, painting many of the most prominent figures of his day including George VI (1924), Sir Ernest Shackleton (1921), Thomas Hardy (1923 and 1924), Stanley Baldwin (1933), Lord Jellicoe (1935); and Max Beerbohm (1936). He became an Associate of the Royal Academy and in 1939 a Royal Academician. In 1940 he was appointed an official war artist, and in 1941, at the time of his death in Durham, eight portraits by him of war leaders were on exhibition at the National Gallery.