The Fry Art Gallery is an art gallery in Saffron Walden, Essex. Recognised as an Accredited Museum by Arts Council England, [1] it displays work by artists of national significance who lived or worked in North West Essex during the twentieth century and after. [2] The gallery is known for its comprehensive collection of work by the Great Bardfield Artists, including Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious.
The Fry Art Gallery is home to the North West Essex Collection, a set of more than 3,000 works [3] by diverse, nationally important artists who have lived or worked in the area. The collection includes paintings, prints, books, artists' scrapbooks, ceramics, wallpapers and decorative designs. There is an emphasis on artists who worked in and around Great Bardfield in the middle of the twentieth century, [4] including Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious, Tirzah Garwood, John Aldridge, Sheila Robinson, Bernard Cheese, Chloe Cheese, Walter Hoyle, Michael Rothenstein, Kenneth Rowntree, George Chapman and Marianne Straub. [5] Artists in the collection with a connection to the wider area include Michael Ayrton, John Bellany, Robert Colquhoun, Robert MacBryde, Grayson Perry and Keith Vaughan. [5]
The gallery displays a revolving selection of works from the collection in themed exhibitions. In 2016/17 the exhibitions held were: Exploring – Inspirational Places for North West Essex Artists, and three sequential temporary exhibitions: George Chapman – From Bardfield to the Rhondda; Michael Rothenstein – Sustained Invention; and Connections. [6]
Items from the collection have been lent to exhibitions elsewhere, including Eric Ravilious at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 2015 and Ravilious and Co at the Towner Gallery in 2017. New acquisitions to the collection have been supported by the Art Fund [7] and the V&A Purchase Fund. [8]
Edward Bawden, who with his friend Eric Ravilious discovered Great Bardfield and became a key figure in the local artists' scene, is well represented in the Fry Art Gallery collection through linocuts, watercolours, posters, ceramics, books, scrapbooks and other printed material. The gallery holds watercolours by Ravilious, plus lithographs, books, fabric, ceramics and a collection of woodblocks, as well as two of his scrapbooks.
In 2015 V&A Publishing, in association with the Fry Art Gallery, published Bawden, Ravilious and the Artists of Great Bardfield, illustrating a number of the pieces by Bawden, Ravilious, Rothenstein and other Bardfield artists in the collection. [4]
The Fry Art Gallery building was designed to house the art collection of Francis Gibson, a local Quaker businessman who died in 1859 and was inherited by his daughter, Elizabeth, who had married the Bristol MP Lewis Fry. The gallery passed through the Fry family, who maintained a tradition of public access and who displayed a mixture of the family collection of historic masters and paintings by family members, including Roger Fry, until its closure in the early 1970s. [9]
The Fry Art Gallery Society was formed as a charity in 1985 and the gallery re-opened in its present form 1987. Prior to its closure it had been named the "Gibson Gallery". [9] In 2002 the North West Essex Collection Trust, a separate charity, was formed, to be responsible for the safekeeping of the collection. [10] In 2015 the Society purchased the freehold for the gallery building. [11]
Total visitor numbers for 2016 were approximately 11,000. [11]
James Ravilious, was a British photographer, who specialised in recording the rural life of north Devon.
Eric William Ravilious was a British painter, designer, book illustrator and wood-engraver. He grew up in Sussex, and is particularly known for his watercolours of the South Downs, Castle Hedingham and other English landscapes, which examine English landscape and vernacular art with an off-kilter, modernist sensibility and clarity. He served as a war artist, and was the first British war artist to die on active service in World War II when the aircraft he was in was lost off Iceland.
Great Bardfield is a large village in the Braintree district of Essex, England. It is located approximately 9 mi (14 km) northwest of the town of Braintree, and approximately 12 mi (19 km) southeast of Saffron Walden.
Edward Bawden, was an English painter, illustrator and graphic artist, known for his prints, book covers, posters, and garden metalwork furniture. Bawden taught at the Royal College of Art, where he had been a student, worked as a commercial artist and served as a war artist in World War II. He was a fine watercolour painter but worked in many different media. He illustrated several books and painted murals in both the 1930s and 1960s. He was admired by Edward Gorey, David Gentleman and other graphic artists, and his work and career is often associated with that of his contemporary Eric Ravilious.
John Arthur Malcolm Aldridge was a British oil painter, draftsman, wallpaper designer, and art teacher in the United Kingdom. He was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy (ARA) in 1954 and a Royal Academician (RA) in 1963.
Stanley Clifford-Smith (1906–1968) was an English Expressionist painter and textile designer who was active as an artist in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.
Audrey Cruddas (1912–1979) was an English costume and scene designer, painter and potter.
Betty Mona Desmond Ayers, known as Duffy Ayers, was an English portrait painter. She was known for most of her life by the nickname "Duffy".
The Great Bardfield Artists were a community of artists who lived in Great Bardfield, a village in north west Essex, England, during the middle years of the 20th century.
William Michael Rothenstein was a British printmaker, painter and art teacher.
Elizabeth Joan Glass (1915–2000), was an English textile designer and painter.
Marianne Straub OBE was one of the leading commercial designers of textiles in Britain in the period from the 1940s to 1960s. She said her overriding aim was: "to design things which people could afford. ... To remain a handweaver did not seem satisfactory in this age of mass-production".
Kenneth Rowntree was a British artist.
Brian Webb is a graphic designer and director of Webb & Webb Design Limited.
Bernard Cheese was an English painter and printmaker, a fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers. His works are found in internationally important collections in the UK and US.
The Hundred Parishes is an area of the East of England with no formal recognition or status, albeit that the concept has the blessing of county and district authorities. It encompasses around 450 square miles of northwest Essex, northeast Hertfordshire and southern Cambridgeshire. The area comprises just over 100 administrative parishes, hence its name. It contains over 6,000 listed buildings and many conservation areas, village greens, ancient hedgerows, protected features and a historical pattern of small rural settlements in close proximity to one another.
Eileen Lucy "Tirzah" Garwood was a British artist and engraver, a member of the Great Bardfield Artists. The artist Eric Ravilious was her husband from 1930 until his death in 1942.
Sheila Robinson (1925–1988) was a noted artist and illustrator, one of the Great Bardfield Artists and member of staff at the Royal College of Art. After her death, the RCA created the Sheila Robinson Drawing Prize in her honour.
Chloë Cheese is an English illustrator, painter and print-maker.
Walter Hoyle (1922–2000) was an English artist, known for his prints, watercolours and illustration. He was a central figure in the Great Bardfield group of artists and a close associate of Edward Bawden. He taught at the Central School, London, and, for twenty years, at the Cambridge School of Art.
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