About Nicholas Cochrane at Eye Feast: a small watercolour with a long lineage

Nicholas Cochrane at Eye Feast 2026: a small watercolour with a long lineage

Regent's Park Gallery  ·  1 June 2026

Most artists who bring a still life of sardines to a group show don't have the Old Masters department of Christie's in their CV. Nicholas Cochrane does. His Eye Feast piece is small — six inches square, a single watercolour — but the eye behind it has been trained for decades to see the way the great seventeenth-century painters saw.

About the artist

Nicholas Cochrane studied at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford, and worked in the Old Master department at Christie's Auction House — where serious looking at serious painting is the daily job. He is a winner of the Prince of Wales Award for Portrait Drawing, and he co-founded the Fine Arts College Hampstead, where he served as Principal. He continues to paint, teach, and bring an Old Master sensibility to contemporary subjects.

The work in the show

Sardines (watercolour) — £320

A modest 15 × 15 cm watercolour of two sardines, painted with the care of someone who has spent decades looking closely at how an artist makes a small thing feel weighty on a page. There is nothing flashy about the subject; the work is in the handling — the wet edge, the cool grey of the silvered skin, the space around the fish doing as much as the fish themselves.

It's the kind of small piece a collector lives with for years and continues to see new things in. A quiet, considered acquisition for a wall that already has plenty going on.

Where to see it

Sardines is in Eye Feast 2026 at Regent's Park Gallery, 17 Princess Road, London NW1 8JR, from 5 June to 27 June 2026. Watercolour on paper, 15.24 × 15.24 cm. £320.

Nicholas also has work in the gallery's ongoing Parkscapes collection — a long-running selection of paintings, drawings and original art prints of the parks and green spaces of north and west London.

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