The young gallerist Maximillian William brings a long-overdue moment to London this season with Measure of My Song, the first European exhibition dedicated to Bob Thompson since his death in 1966. Though he spent several formative years abroad, Thompson’s blazing, genre-defying paintings have remained far better known in the United States than on this side of the Atlantic. It was Sir Frank Bowling OBE who once wrote that Thompson’s canvases seemed to “generate their own personal heat” and this show makes it a reality.

Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Thompson plunged into the creative intensity of downtown New York in the late 1950s, absorbing Happenings, Beat poetry, free jazz and the sense that abstraction had hit a wall. While many artists were still pushing non-representation, Thompson pivoted boldly toward figuration. What emerged, lush pastoral scenes charged with slabs of colour.

His first trip to Europe in 1961 began in London, where the museums reportedly moved him to tears. Measure of My Song brings him back to the city that once stirred him so profoundly, tracing how his expatriate years sharpened his hand and expanded his vision.

The exhibition gathers a tightly focused group of paintings, many unseen publicly for more than twenty years. Its title comes from a 1959 translation of a line in the final stanza of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a fitting source, given Thompson’s long fascination with Ovid’s tales of transformation. A triptych in the show nods to devotional painting, yet fills its panels with tangled silhouettes set in a rhapsodic landscape, an electrifying blend of the sacred and the profane. Another standout revisits Titian’s Perseus and Andromeda, loaned from the New Jersey State Museum, threading Thompson’s language of colour and compression through one of the Wallace Collection’s most storied works.

The exhibition is curated by Diana Tuite, who organised the acclaimed retrospective Bob Thompson: This House Is Mine (2021–22), and is accompanied by a new publication. It remains on view until 13th December.