Charlecote Park and Fry Art Gallery

 

This week I've visited Charlecote Park in Warwickshire and the Fry Art Gallery at Saffron Walden.

Charlecote Park, a family home for more than 900 years, was transformed in the 1800s into one of the finest examples of Elizabethan Revival style by its owners Mary Elizabeth and George Hammond Lucy.

Overlooking the river Avon on the edge of Shakespeare’s Stratford, it is a place of surprising treasures, which reflect the tastes and memories of the Lucy family.

The exceptionally well preserved working spaces, the laundry, brewhouse and kitchen, give a taste of past activity, while the stables still hold the family carriage collection.

In the parkland, Jacob sheep and fallow deer roam across the landscape designed by 'Capability' Brown, while the formal parterre and shady woodland garden that Mary Elizabeth loved so dearly are a haven for pollinators.

'The Library of Memories' is a brand-new display situated in the upstairs room of the House and open to the public from March 2025. It showcases the writing of Mary Elizabeth Lucy, who lived at Charlecote Park in the Victorian era, and draws on themes of making and sharing memories. We seek to inspire visitors to share their memories with us, and with each other, and find new ways to relate to Charlecote’s past residents. The display focuses on a book from the library written by Mary Elizabeth Lucy, Grandmamma's Chapter of Accidents, that has not previously been displayed.

The Fry Public Art Gallery was opened in 1987 and houses an impressive number of paintings, prints, illustrations, wallpapers and decorative designs by artists of the 20th century and the present day who have local connections and have made a significant contribution to their field. There is an emphasis on those who for a variety of reasons settled in Great Bardfield between the early thirties of the last century and the death in 1983 of John Aldridge RA who had lived in the village for fifty years.

The Great Bardfield artists were a community of artists who lived and worked in and around the village of Great Bardfield in Essex from the 1930s to the 1970s. The community included artists like Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious, Charlotte Bawden, and Tirzah Garwood, among others. Their work often depicted the local countryside and village life, and the Fry Art Gallery was established to showcase their artistic contributions. 

The Gallery is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year and is delighted to have as guest curator of the exhibition in the main gallery Ella Ravilious, with a celebration of art and design depicting or made for the domestic space ‘Finding a Home at the Fry’. In the Gibson Room they are presenting an opportunity to view and buy a selection of works by Richard Bawden from the later period of his life in Hadleigh, Suffolk. ‘Richard Bawden: the Hadleigh Years’: runs from Saturday 26th July to Sunday 26th October 2025.

A statue of the Great Bardfield artists by Ian Wolter has recently been placed outside the Fry Art Gallery in Saffron Walden, Essex. The statue serves as a welcoming feature for visitors to the gallery, which houses a collection of art by these artists.

 

Other sculptures to be found nearby include:

• The 'Children of Calais' by Ian Wolter, which is a life-sized sculpture of six children in poses echoing 'The Burghers of Calais' by Auguste Rodin but dressed in contemporary clothing. One of the figures holds a life jacket in place of the city key held in Rodin’s original. The piece is designed to provoke debate about the inhumanity of our response to the children caught up in the current refugee crisis.
• 'Mary' by Tessa Hawkes. This sculpture at St Mary's Saffron Walden portrays Mary as a young and vulnerable woman, receiving the news from the angel Gabriel that she is to be the mother of Jesus, God's Son. The artist originally intended to portray Mary at a very early stage in the annunciation of a young girl completely bewildered but the eventual sculpture is of a later stage in the annunciation, one of acceptance whilst still a little bewildered.

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The Fire Theft - Heaven.

Charles Mahoney: The Pleasures of Life

Developed in partnership with Liss Llewellyn, Charles Mahoney: The Pleasures of Life at the Fry Gallery is the most significant show dedicated to the artist since a touring exhibition at the Fine Art Society in 1999, also organised by Liss Llewellyn.

Interest in Mahoney's work has since enjoyed a steady rise, together with that of Royal College contemporaries such as Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden, and he was one of the most prodigiously skilled artists of his generation. This was a view shared by the former Director of the Tate Gallery, John Rothenstein, who called Mahoney ‘an artist of very exceptional gifts’, and ‘a distinguished successor to the finest of the Pre-Raphaelites’.This exhibition brings together works from throughout Mahoney’s career, and demonstrates the full range of his artistic vision. It includes preparatory studies for all of Mahoney’s major mural cycles, as well as superlative views of Oak Cottage and the gardens he so lovingly cultivated there that provided the inspiration for his keen, minutely observed botanical works. The majority of the pictures have been gathered from the artist’s studio, and never previously exhibited before.

Mahoney was a frequent visitor to Great Bardfield, helping Bawden to decorate Brick House, and sharing his love of gardens with Bawden and with John Aldridge. He shared his own earthly paradise, Oak Cottage at Wrotham in Kent, with his wife Dorothy (Bishop) from the end of WWII until his death in 1968. Like many of the Bardfield artists, he had a love of the domestic and the overlooked scene.

Bawden, Mahoney and Ravilious won the commission to paint the murals at Morley College in Southwark between 1928 and 1930. Mahoney’s contribution was the central panel in the hall depicting seven large figures and titled ‘The Pleasures of Life’. Unfortunately these murals were destroyed during World War II. The work led to further murals: at Brockley School, Kent, with Evelyn Dunbar; and at Campion Hall Lady Chapel, Oxford. His oil paintings are frequently of a religious nature.

The wall paintings for the Lady Chapel at Campion Hall are unique and exquisitely executed depicting the life of Our Blessed Lady, with Mahoney’s great love of colour and horticulture on full display.

When Martin D’Arcy, as the recently appointed Master of Campion Hall, was planning the new building of the Hall in Brewer Street, he naturally wished to make something special of its Lady Chapel. He was enabled financially to do this through the benevolence of his close friend, Evelyn Waugh, who had recently completed writing his life of Edmund Campion and who now agreed to donate the royalties from the sales of the book to finance the painting of a set of Lady Chapel murals.

D’Arcy first invited the celebrated artist Stanley Spencer to consider taking on the Lady Chapel project, but Spencer proved himself eccentric and unpredictable. D'Arcy’s friend, Sir John Rothenstein, Director of the Tate Gallery, recommended a promising young teacher at the Royal College of Art, Charles Mahoney, who already had several murals to his credit. Mahoney enthusiastically accepted the commission, and his working relationship with Campion Hall would continue for ten years, resulting in a set of richly coloured and detailed murals portraying the life of Our Blessed Lady which constitutes one of the most splendid and engaging treasures in Campion Hall.

Not a Catholic, Mahoney was thoroughly instructed in the details of Our Lady’s life and traditional Marian devotion, and the Lady Chapel narrates the events and providential role of Mary’s life in three major panels along with the two altar and sacristy walls, and all in the setting of a richly flowered vaulted ceiling. The artist achieves both contemporary relevance and artistic immediacy by dressing participants in everyday clothing and including portraits of some members of the Campion Hall community.

The dominating panel shows Mary crowned as Queen of Mercy surrounded by a garland of flowers and angels and spreading her protective cloak over four kneeling child-sized suppliants: a workman, a student, a uniformed soldier (it was wartime) and a clergyman, his friend the Jesuit Father Vincent Turner. The other two panels continue the theme of the year’s seasons by portraying, first, a winter night Nativity scene, with mundane shepherds replacing an earlier setting with kings; and then a summer-reflecting canopied Coronation of Our Lady by her risen Son when she was assumed into heaven by the accompanying angels.

The wall of the chapel which contains a doorway into the sacristy presented the artist with a challenge. Lutyens had designed the large elaborate door to fit in with his systematic use of wood throughout the Hall. Mahoney incorporated the doorway into his work by placing at the top the scene of the Holy Family’s Flight into Egypt, with two panels on either side of the door portraying several other Marian events: the traditionally wondrous birth of Mary to elderly parents; her Visitation to her pregnant cousin, Elizabeth; her betrothal to Joseph, preferred to the other apocryphal suitors; and the unfinished Dormition, or ‘falling asleep’, of Mary, the term traditionally applied to the completing of her earthly life.

The Chapel’s wall which includes the windows above the altar was chosen by Mahoney to display the Annunciation by the angel Gabriel to the young Jewish girl dressed in red, while below (incomplete) two other angels are playing xylophones; and spread across the top are illustrations of Old Testament prophetic titles which are applied to Mary in the traditional Litany of Loreto.

Finally, the ceiling of the chapel draws on Mahoney’s floral expertise to display a delightful luxuriant garden, which may portray a new Eden as the life setting for the new sinless Eve, and may also, with its surrounding wall, recall her being the ‘enclosed garden’ (hortus conclusus) beloved of God in Song 4:12, all surmounted by a radiant blue sky stretching across the ceiling’s vault.

As it happened, the sensitive Mahoney’s work was left unfinished, for several possible reasons: the artist did not feel his efforts were sufficiently admired by D’Arcy after the latter ceased to be Master; or Waugh’s donated royalties grew less over the years and were proving insufficient for what was becoming a lengthy project; or the physical demands of the work were affecting Mahoney’s declining health. The consequence was that the small Dormition panel to the right of the Sacristy door (including Fathers D’Arcy, Martindale, Corbishley, the architect Lutyens and the Hall’s carpenter), and the two other panels placed immediately on either side of the altar, remained incomplete in their grey undercoating. Interestingly, this unplanned feature has produced a simple graceful effect, particularly in Mary’s deathbed, and it also serves in its unfinished condition to highlight the interplay of strong colours which pervades the work as a whole, while also evidencing the otherwise concealed patterning of fabrics and garments which underlies Mahoney’s entire work.

Not completed, and therefore never officially unveiled nor publicly launched, Mahoney’s insufficiently known Lady Chapel murals in Campion Hall are nonetheless capable of making a deep impression on their viewers. They elicit admiration for the peaceful prayerful space which they create, while also being valued as a visible illustration of St Ignatius Loyola’s practice of biblical imaginative meditation.

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Francis Poulenc - Stabat Mater.

Fry Art Gallery and Gibberd Gardens

On the way to Saffron Walden and the Fry Art Gallery, I called in to Thaxted Parish Church to see their painting by Stanley Clifford-Smith, the most mystical of the Great Bardfield artists.

Clifford-Smith was an active member of the Great Bardfield Artists community during the mid to late 1950s and became the Honorary Secretary of the group. Clifford-Smith and the other Bardfield artists exhibited in the large 'open house' shows in the rural village in 1954, 1955 and 1958 as well as several one-off exhibitions and touring shows in the late 1950s. These exhibitions attracted thousands of visitors and made the art community famous thanks to press, radio and TV coverage.

Clifford-Smith's work in the 1950s was diverse and included Irish and Italian landscapes, images of ships, as well as hypnotic 'mother and child' portraits. He received many positive press reviews for his work while at Great Bardfield. In 1958 he moved to the Old Bakehouse in Great Bardfield with his family., and during the late 1950s he began to teach art in Cambridge. In the early 1960s the Great Bardfield art community fragmented and Clifford-Smith and his family (which now included four sons) moved to Little Baddow Hall near Chelmsford. During his time at Little Baddow he painted mainly thickly textured monochrome moon portraits, works inspired by the 1960s interest in space.

Following his death, several exhibitions were organised; a retrospective at the Minories, Colchester (1969), Little Baddow Hall Arts Centre (1979) and at the Fry Art Gallery, Saffron Walden (1998). His work is included in several collections including the University of Cambridge, Benjamin Britten Foundation, Aldeburgh, Suffolk; the Beecroft Art Gallery, Southend, Essex; and Thaxted Church, Essex.

The Fry Public Art Gallery was opened in 1987 and houses an impressive number of paintings, prints, illustrations, wallpapers and decorative designs by artists of the 20th century and the present day who have local connections and have made a significant contribution to their field. There is an emphasis on those who for a variety of reasons settled in Great Bardfield between the early thirties of the last century and the death in 1983 of John Aldridge RA who had lived in the village for fifty years.

Apart from the Great Bardfield Artists, after the end of World War II, north west Essex became the home for a later group of younger, more radical artists, embracing neo-romantic ideals. These were Michael Ayrton, Robert Colquhoun, Robert MacBryde, and Keith Vaughan. The Fry Art Gallery has good holdings of these artists and are delighted that the Ingram Collection has lent further works by Ayrton and Vaughan as well as Graham Sutherland, John Craxton and John Minton for the exhibition 'A World of Private Mystery: British Neo-Romantics'.

An additional exhibition 'Art and Design' draws from the Gallery's Permanent Collection works which emphasise the contribution which the artists made to British design.

At St Mary's Saffron Walden is a sculpture of 'Mary' by Tessa Hawkes. The sculpture portrays her as a young and vulnerable woman, receiving the news from the angel Gabriel that she is to be the mother of Jesus, God's Son. Outside in Dorset House Garden is ‘The Children of Calais’ by Ian Wolter. The sculpture portrays six British children as refugees caught in the present migration crisis. Their poses echo Auguste Rodin’s famous 'The Burghers of Calais', completed in 1895. 'The Children of Calais' was unveiled on 8th June 2018 by Lord Alf Dubs.

I then went to the Gibberd Garden in Harlow to see more sculptures. The Gibberd Garden is an inspirational and fascinating Grade II listed garden. Created between 1957 and 1984 by Sir Frederick Gibberd, Master Planner of Harlow New Town and leading post-war architect, it is acknowledged to be one of the most important 20th century gardens in the country. The garden occupies 9 acres of a 14 acre site on the side of a small valley, sloping down to the Pincey Brook. It is full of sculptures and what Sir Frederick called ‘decorative objects’, including ceramic pots and items of architectural salvage. It has lawns, pools, streams and glades, a dramatic mature lime avenue, a brookside walk, a wild garden, an arboretum and a moated castle with a drawbridge. In making his garden Sir Frederick fulfilled his ambition to create a work of art. It is loved and admired by garden designers, professional gardeners and the many visitors who are captivated by its unique atmosphere.

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Robert Randolph and the Family Band - Baptise Me.