Falmouth Art Gallery’s latest exhibition has brought one of the finest private art collections of the 20th century to Cornwall.

A Framer’s Collection features “remarkable” works by major British and international artists, including Georges Braque, Maurice Denis, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Ivon Hitchens, Amedeo Modigliani, Ben Nicholson, Winifred Nicholson, Pablo Picasso, Graham Sutherland and Alfred Wallis.

The collection is named after Mattei Radev, who was one of the leading London picture framers, mixing with artists, dealers and art critics. In 1991 he was left a significant art collection by his friend, the artist-dealer, Eardley Knollys, who had in turn inherited a large part of it from the music critic, Eddy Sackville West some years earlier.

Guest of honour at the private view of the exhibition was Norman Coates, a representative of the Radev Collection who had been a close friend of Mattei Radev. He told of how Radev had fled Bulgaria and Communism in the 1950s and arrived in London homeless and penniless.

A Framer’s Collection can be seen until April 20 and admission is free. Falmouth Art Gallery is open 10am until 5pm, Monday to Saturday.