Chisholm Gallery

Chisholm Gallery History

Jeanne Chisholm founded the Chisholm Gallery with her husband, the late Hugh Jeremy Chisholm, a well-known and eccentric businessman and polo player, in 1978. The gallery first opened in the grandstand of the Palm Beach Polo & Country Club. It was an immediate success and quickly acquired the largest collection of polo art for sale in the world.

Since its inception, the gallery has had a considerable impact in the world of sporting art. Indeed, the world’s top design houses have turned to Jeanne Chisholm to answer their sporting art needs. These have included Cartier, which asked her to curate their celebrated exhibit POLO USA: A Retrospective History of Polo in America, which showed first in Palm Beach and later traveled to New York, and Polo Ralph Lauren, who approached Jeanne for artifacts and paintings to decorate their flagship store, the historic Rhinelander Mansion on New York’s Madison Avenue.

Jeanne’s work with museums has included the Aiken Thoroughbred Racing Museum and Hall of Fame, in Aiken, South Carolina, which enlisted Jeanne to curate an exhibit commemorating 100 years of polo history, the National Museum of Dance and Hall of Fame in Saratoga Springs, New York, and most significantly the National Polo Museum and Hall of Fame. Jeanne served as Coordinating Director for the latter, an idea fostered by Jeremy Chisholm in the 1970s. The Chisholm Gallery, further, was invited to participate in the first-ever sporting art exhibit at the prestigious London Colnaghi Gallery.

Much of the Chisholm Gallery’s success derives from the strong vision instilled in it from the outset, an understanding that the pieces it seeks are art first, and that quality is of the utmost concern.

As Jeremy Chisholm said in a 1980 article on the gallery: The gallery is the result of an ongoing search for unusual sporting art. The notion that sporting pictures transform a house into a men’s club or worse is only true if they lack quality and/or originality. The same hackneyed old fox hunting prints bore everyone. What we attempt to show are works which are rare by virtue of their quality and originality and will hang comfortably anywhere.

The same is true of the works housed by the gallery today. Jeanne has traveled the globe, seeking out truly unique works of only the highest quality. The gallery offers items for a variety of tastes, from originals by well-known and highly desirable artists, to pristine collectibles, decorative pieces and even the works of promising up and coming artists on the verge of breaking into the art world’s major arenas.