The Williamson Art Gallery & Museum in Birkenhead is about to do something a local authority gallery does not often get to do. From Friday 14 August until Saturday 31 October, it hosts the largest exhibition of Leonard McComb's work ever assembled, with more than sixty pieces gathered from the artist's estate and from collections that do not usually lend to venues this size.
Leonard McComb RA (1930-2018) spent a long career moving between painting, watercolour, drawing and sculpture without ever settling permanently into one of them. Nature and Humanity takes that restlessness seriously and organises the show around what held it together, which was an ecological way of looking that runs through the portraits as much as the landscapes.
Entry is free for the whole run, which is worth saying plainly at the start, because a show of this weight would carry a ticket price almost anywhere else.
The single work most likely to stop you is "Rock and Sea Anglesey", on loan from Oriel Môn. At over ten metres long it is the largest drawing on paper held by any UK public collection, and it is not a piece that travels casually. Seeing it in Birkenhead rather than on Anglesey is the kind of thing that only happens when a smaller gallery works hard at it.
That is the practical story underneath this exhibition, and it is worth understanding if you have ever wondered how regional galleries end up with work from national collections. The loans here are supported by the Weston Loan Programme with Art Fund, set up by the Garfield Weston Foundation and Art Fund as the first UK-wide scheme designed specifically to let smaller and local authority museums borrow from national holdings. Alongside Oriel Môn there are loans from Manchester Art Gallery and the Royal Academy, and the show has been put together with Art Space Gallery, Michael Richardson Contemporary Art, and the Estate of Leonard McComb RA.
None of that is incidental detail. It is the reason a gallery in Oxton can put on a survey that would otherwise sit in London, and it is a reminder that the programme you see locally is shaped as much by funding structures as by curatorial taste.
Curator Josh Mackarell has framed the exhibition around McComb's environmental outlook, describing the work as relevant now not only for its beauty and technical brilliance but because its ecological view speaks to current debates.
That framing does real work here. It would be easy to present McComb as a technically superb figurative artist and leave it there. Reading the portraits, the still lifes and the landscapes as parts of one argument about the interconnectedness of living things gives the show a spine, and it makes the drawings of plants sit differently next to the drawings of people.
Whether you find that reading persuasive is another matter, and it is worth going in willing to test it rather than accept it. But it is a genuine curatorial position rather than a theme bolted on afterwards, and shows with an actual argument are more interesting to walk around than shows without one.
Merseyside artists can get into the habit of assuming the serious work happens in Liverpool city centre, and the Williamson quietly disproves that several times a year. This is one of those times.
There is also the timing to consider. Nature and Humanity opens while the Williamson Open 2026 is still hanging, and the gallery's Pre-Raphaelite show, Beyond the Brotherhood, runs until November. One visit gets you a major single-artist survey, a regional open, and a collection display in the same building, all free. That is a strong afternoon by any measure.
The gallery is also running a special Liverpool Life Drawing session on the opening evening of 14 August, built around the McComb exhibition, which is worth knowing about if you want to look and then immediately draw rather than just look.
Leonard McComb: Nature & Humanity runs at the Williamson Art Gallery & Museum, Slatey Road, Oxton, Birkenhead, from Friday 14 August to Saturday 31 October 2026. Entry is free throughout.
The gallery opens Monday to Thursday 10 AM to 5 PM, Friday 10 AM to 9 PM, and Saturday 10 AM to 5 PM, and is closed on Sundays. Last entry is thirty minutes before closing, and the late Friday opening is the easiest slot if you are working during the week.
Check the Williamson's own website before travelling, since event dates and any associated talks or drawing sessions can shift, and the accompanying programme is still being added to.