The Alpine Club, the world’s first mountaineering club, was founded in 1857.  For over 150 years, members have been at the leading edge of worldwide mountaineering development and exploration. 

With membership, experienced and aspiring alpinists benefit from a varied meets programme, regional lectures with notable guest speakers, reduced rates at many alpine huts, opportunity to apply for grants to support expeditions, significant discounts at many UK retailers, extensive networking contacts, access to the AC Library and maps - and more! 

Becoming a Member
 

Exhibitions

The Club is pleased to be able to use its premises and resources, along with its renowned archive of mountaineering reports, books, art and artefacts to host and curate exhibitions that celebrate mountain history and culture. As well as spotlighting the work of contemporary artists and academics, the Club has also worked to mark key mountaineering anniversaries; bringing together records of the past to keep our history alive and engaging for climbers and the wider community alike.

Individual exhibitions may vary, but most take place at our Charlotte Road Club House.

A full list of past and upcoming exhibitions is shown below.

Glaciers Exhibition Opens at the Alpine Club

With increasing attention being given to the issue of climate change and the effect it is having on mountain environments, glaciers have been pushed into the fore of public consciousness. In our new exhibition, 'Glaciers', curated by Janet Johnson, we use the Alpine Club's extensive collection of mountain art work to explore the ways that glaciers were depicted prior to the advent of photography.

Today, glaciers are revered for their sublime beauty and hold a melancholy quality, serving as significant testimony to the impact of climate change. But in previous centuries, glaciers themselves, rather than their retreat, were something to be feared; moving their way through alpine valleys and sometimes crushing entire villages in their wake. They were powerful, elemental forces of nature. The watercolour and oil paintings in The Alpine Club Collection are a valuable historical record of the world's glaciers and humanity's relationship to them.

This new exhibition will showcase some of the finest works in our collection, including a number of rarely-exhibited hidden gems that have not been shown for a long time due to a need for special safe lighting or because they are in a delicate condition and require some repair.

 
Thanks to our digital partners, these works will also be available to view online. Ninety-four oil and watercolour paintings can be found on the Art UK website while The Watercolour World showcases a further 617 watercolours, including rarely if ever seen paintings from alpine artists’ travel sketchbooks as well as mounted watercolours stored in archival boxes. We are hoping to further increase the number of entries on both sites over time. For this exhibition, we have curated a special collection of featured works on the ArtUK website.

If you would like to view these remarkable pieces in person, the exhibition will run from 11 January - 27 April 2022 and is open every Tuesday and Wednesday from 12PM to 5PM

We ask that you please book in advance by calling 0207 613 0755 or by emailing This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

 

Our Digital Partners

To help bring our extensive art collection to a wider audience, The Alpine Club is working with two innovative partners, Art UK and The Watercolour World. Together, these two online portals provide an opportunity to place more of our paintings on constant digital display, allowing audiences to view, curate and purchase prints of their favourite pieces. 

Art UK

Art UK is an online art database that shows over 200,000 artworks from 3,000 venues across the UK.

Art UK was originally conceived as a database of oil paintings belonging to public collections. However, it now also shows a growing number of private collections (for example, the Oxford and Cambridge colleges). In addition to oil paintings, collections can upload images of watercolours and drawings. The site is free to access and non-profit making.

The Alpine Club is able to sell prints through the Art UK shop and license images for use in publications and for items such as wall calendars. All the images available on this website are out of copyright, (seventy years after the artist’s death).

www.artuk.org

 

The Watercolour World

The Watercolour World is also an online portal that showcases purely documentary watercolour painting through the ages.

‘Before the invention of the camera, people used watercolours to document the world. Over the centuries, painters – both professional and amateur – created hundreds of thousands of images recording life as they witnessed it. Every one of these paintings has a story to tell, but many are hidden away in archives, albums and store rooms, too fragile to display. The Watercolour World exists to bring them back into view. We are creating a free online database of documentary watercolours painted before 1900.’

At present it is not possible to buy prints from the website.

www.watercolourworld.org