From Stanley Spencer to Van Dyck and Brueghel: Frieze Masters 2026 Opens in London

Frieze Masters opens in London tomorrow, 14 October, for its fourteenth edition, bringing together 142 galleries from 33 countries for five days of Old Masters, modern British painting, sculpture, antiquities and twentieth-century art.

While the fair's extraordinary chronological range remains its defining attraction, the quality of several individual paintings announced for this year's edition suggests that visitors will have much more to look forward to than the usual parade of familiar names.

From a wonderfully intimate Stanley Spencer kitchen scene to a seventeenth-century Flemish still life once owned by the Rothschild family, this year's fair promises some genuinely exceptional works. Frieze

Stanley Spencer's remarkable domestic masterpiece

One of the undoubted highlights will be Stanley Spencer's Washing Up (1935), presented by London dealer Offer Waterman.

Formerly in the collection of Sir Kenneth Clark, the painting belongs to one of the most fascinating periods of Spencer's career, when the ordinary activities of domestic life assumed an almost religious significance in his imagination.

The setting is the kitchen at Chapel View, the cottage in Burghclere where Spencer and his first wife, Hilda Carline, lived while he undertook his celebrated cycle of paintings for the nearby Sandham Memorial Chapel.

The composition is a glorious confusion of activity. Hilda reaches upwards to put away a saucepan, Spencer himself, seen from behind in a green checked jacket, attends to his paintbrushes, while the family's maid, Elsie Munday, stands holding a towel. Below them, the couple's daughter Shirin is almost overwhelmed by an extraordinary tower of crockery.

Every surface seems occupied, every object carefully observed. Yet for all its apparently chaotic arrangement, the composition has an extraordinary formal discipline. The overlapping figures, precariously balanced plates and sweeping movement of the towel create a remarkable sense of rhythm.

Spencer himself considered the painting particularly important, describing it as the only work directly inspired by his family's everyday life at Chapel View. It captures something central to his artistic philosophy: that the commonplace could possess all the emotional and spiritual significance traditionally reserved for religious subjects.

There is something especially compelling about the painting's combination of affectionate observation and extraordinary pictorial invention. It is an excellent reminder that Spencer, at his finest, was not simply an eccentric visionary but also a remarkable painter of the human figure.

For collectors of modern British art, Washing Up is likely to be one of the fair's most memorable works.

A monumental Van Dyck at Colnaghi

Old Master specialists Colnaghi will present a particularly distinguished selection, headed by an imposing Anthony van Dyck, Portrait of a Nobleman, traditionally identified as Paolo Giordano Orsini, Duke of Bracciano.

Dating from approximately 1627-32 and measuring 188.5 × 135 cm, the portrait belongs to Van Dyck's second Antwerp period, following his transformative years in Italy.It is a work of considerable presence, demonstrating the artist's ability to invest the conventions of aristocratic portraiture with effortless authority. The richness of the costume, the elegant handling of the sitter's features and the sophisticated arrangement of the composition reveal an artist who had thoroughly absorbed the lessons of Titian and the great Genoese portrait tradition.

Colnaghi's presentation also includes an intriguing Jusepe de Ribera, 'An Elderly Woman with a Tambourine (The Sense of Hearing)', dating from around 1637. The picture's documented provenance extends back to the collection of Carlo Gottardo, Count of Firmian, where it was recorded in 1782.

A magnificent Brueghel with an extraordinary provenance

One of the most beautiful paintings at the fair should be Jan Brueghel the Elder's Still Life of Flowers in a Stoneware Vase, painted around 1607-08, which will be shown by Hauser & Wirth.

The painting is an exquisite example of Brueghel's pioneering approach to flower painting, bringing together irises, tulips, roses, fritillaries and other flowers with extraordinary botanical precision and painterly delicacy.

Its provenance is equally compelling.

The work formerly belonged to Baron Alphonse von Rothschild and was appropriated during the Nazi period in 1939. It subsequently entered the National Gallery in Prague, where it remained for more than seven decades before being restituted to the Rothschild heirs in 2016.

Later that year, it was sold at Sotheby's London for £3.8 million.

Hauser & Wirth has devised an interesting (yet increasingly predictable) presentation, displaying the Brueghel alongside a newly commissioned painting by contemporary British artist Flora Yukhnovich, created in direct response to the seventeenth-century masterpiece.

It promises to be one of the fair's more successful encounters between historical and contemporary painting, offering an opportunity to appreciate Brueghel's extraordinary achievement while considering his continuing influence.

Glyn Philpot, Lotte Laserstein and the reassessment of modern portraiture

British figurative painting is also particularly well represented. At Agnews, visitors will encounter two important pictures by artists whose reputations have undergone considerable reassessment in recent years. Glyn Philpot's King Balthazar (1929) depicts Henry Thomas, the Jamaican-born model who became one of the artist's most important and frequently portrayed sitters. Alongside it, Agnews will show Lotte Laserstein's Portrait of Louis Hahne (1938), painted after the artist had escaped Nazi Germany for Sweden. The work belongs to a poignant period in Laserstein's life, when exile interrupted what had been a flourishing career in Berlin. Both works form part of the fair's new Queering Modernism programme, which seeks to reconsider the contributions of artists whose experiences and identities have often been marginalised in traditional accounts of twentieth-century art.

Meanwhile, Daniel Katz Gallery will present another compelling Philpot portrait, depicting Julian Zaire, a performer in the Parisian cabaret scene of the 1930s who appeared under the name Tom Whiskey. Katz will also show a particularly expressive David Bomberg painting of St Ives from 1947, alongside a characteristically unusual landscape by Algernon Newton from the same year.

The pairing should provide an interesting contrast between two distinctly individual approaches to British landscape painting.

Auerbach, Kossoff and Hockney at Annely Juda

Annely Juda Fine Art has assembled a substantial display examining the human figure in twentieth-century art. Among the highlights is Frank Auerbach's J.Y.M. Seated in the Studio III (1988), a powerful example of the artist's intensely personal approach to portraiture. The gallery will also present work by Leon Kossoff, whose paintings and drawings continue to attract increasing attention from collectors and institutions.

Particularly appealing will be three drawings by David Hockney, including portraits of his father and the dealer David Juda, both dating from 1972, and a later portrait of Annely Juda from 1999.

These intimate drawings remind us of Hockney's remarkable gifts as an observer of character, qualities sometimes overshadowed by the scale and colour of his later paintings.

Rediscoveries and new perspectives

Beyond these established names, several presentations promise discoveries.

Benappi Fine Art, exhibiting alongside Kunsthandel S. Mehringer, will offer a recently rediscovered St Michael the Archangel by the fifteenth-century painter Antoine de Lonhy, dating from approximately 1462-65.

The painting should be of particular interest to scholars and collectors of early Renaissance art.

Elsewhere, Alison Jacques will devote its presentation to the Filipino-American artist Pacita Abad, including the first public showing of her monumental Angkor Wat (1998), ahead of a major retrospective at Madrid's Reina Sofía in 2027.

The presentation forms part of Spotlight, the fair's section dedicated to historically significant artists whose work deserves wider recognition. Frieze

And for those whose interests extend beyond painting, antiquities specialist Rupert Wace will exhibit a remarkable Egyptian bronze figure of the god Ptah from the 26th Dynasty. The sculpture was formerly owned by the American newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst and displayed at his celebrated San Simeon estate in California.

A fair that continues to justify its reputation

Since its establishment in 2012, Frieze Masters has developed into one of the international art market's most important occasions for historical art. Its particular strength lies in bringing together works that would otherwise be encountered in entirely separate environments: an Egyptian bronze, an early Renaissance devotional painting, a great Flemish portrait and a modern British masterpiece.

The best stands offer more than an assortment of valuable objects. They provide an opportunity to encounter exceptional works supported by scholarship, provenance and the specialist knowledge of the dealers presenting them.

On the evidence of this year's advance announcements, the 2026 edition looks especially promising.

Frieze Masters takes place in Regent's Park, London, from 14 to 18 October 2026. The invitation-only preview is on Wednesday 14 October, with public admission beginning on Thursday 15 October.