The Fry Art Gallery is an

art gallery An art gallery is a room or a building in which visual art is displayed. In Western cultures from the mid-15th century, a gallery was any long, narrow covered passage along a wall, first used in the sense of a place for art in the 1590s. The lon ...

Saffron Walden Saffron Walden is a market town in the Uttlesford district of Essex, England, north of Bishop's Stortford, south of Cambridge and north of London. It retains a rural appearance and some buildings of the medieval period. The population was 15, ...

, Essex. Recognised as an Accredited Museum by Arts Council England, it displays work by artists of national significance who lived or worked in North West Essex during the twentieth century and after. The gallery is known for its comprehensive collection of work by the

Great Bardfield Artists {{Use British English, date=July 2015 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. The principal artists who lived t ...

, including

Edward Bawden Edward Bawden, (10 March 1903 – 21 November 1989) 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 be ...

and

Eric Ravilious Eric William Ravilious (22 July 1903 – 2 September 1942) 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 and other English landsca ...

The collection and exhibitions

The Fry Art Gallery is home to the North West Essex Collection, a set of more than 3,000 works 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 Great Bardfield is a large village in the Braintree district of Essex, England. It is located approximately northwest of the town of Braintree, and approximately southeast of Saffron Walden. The village came to national attention during the ...

in the middle of the twentieth century, including

Tirzah Garwood Eileen Lucy "Tirzah" Garwood (11 April 1908 – 27 March 1951) 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. Early life Garwood was bo ...

John Aldridge John William Aldridge (born 18 September 1958) is a former football player and manager. He was a prolific, record-breaking striker best known for his time with English club Liverpool Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough in M ...

Sheila Robinson Sheila Robinson may refer to: * Sheila Radley, a pseudonym of Sheila Robinson, British mystery novelist * Sheila Robinson (artist), a British artist * Sheila Robinson (publisher), a businesswoman and magazine founder {{Disambiguation} ...

, Bernard Cheese, Chloe Cheese,

Walter Hoyle 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, Londo ...

Michael Rothenstein William Michael Rothenstein (19 March 1908 – 6 July 1993) was a British printmaker, painter and art teacher. Early life Born in Hampstead, London, on 19 March 1908, he was the youngest of four children born to the celebrated artist, Sir W ...

Kenneth Rowntree Kenneth Rowntree (14 March 1915 – 21 February 1997) was a British artist. Career and life Kenneth Rowntree was born in Scarborough, the son of Howard Doncaster Rowntree (1879-1974). He was educated at Bootham School, York. He studied at th ...

, George Chapman and

Marianne Straub Marianne Straub OBE (23 September 1909 – 8 November 1994) 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. .. ...

. Artists in the collection with a connection to the wider area include

Michael Ayrton Michael Ayrton (20 February 1921 – 16 November 1975)T. G. Rosenthal, "Ayrton , Michael (1921–1975)", ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'', Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2008accessed 24 Jan 2015/ref> was a British arti ...

John Bellany John Bellany (18 June 1942 – 28 August 2013) was a Scottish people, Scottish painter. Early life Bellany was born in Port Seton. His father and grandfather were fishermen in Port Seton and Eyemouth near Edinburgh. During the early 1960 ...

Robert Colquhoun Robert Colquhoun (20 December 1914 – 20 September 1962) was a Scotland, Scottish Painting, painter, printmaker and theatre Scenic design, set designer. Colquhoun was born in Kilmarnock and was educated at Kilmarnock Academy. He won a s ...

Robert MacBryde Robert MacBryde (5 December 1913 – 6 May 1966) was a Scotland, Scottish still-life and figure painter and a theatre Scenic design, set designer. Early life and career MacBryde was born in Maybole, Ayrshire, to John MacBryde, a cement laboure ...

Grayson Perry Grayson Perry (born 1960) is an English contemporary artist, writer and broadcaster. He is known for his ceramic vases, tapestries, and cross-dressing, as well as his observations of the contemporary arts scene, and for dissecting British "pre ...

and

Keith Vaughan John Keith Vaughan (23 August 1912 – 4 November 1977), was a British painter. Biography Born at Selsey in West Sussex, Vaughan attended Christ's Hospital school. He worked in an advertising agency until the World War II, when as an intending ...

. 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''. 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 and the V&A Purchase Fund.

Work of the Great Bardfield Artists

Bawden, who with his friend Ravilious discovered

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.

History and operation

The Fry Art Gallery building was designed to house the art collection of Francis Gibson, a local

Quaker Quakers are people who belong to a historically Protestant Christian set of Christian denomination, denominations known formally as the Religious Society of Friends. Members of these movements ("theFriends") are generally united by a belie ...

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 Roger Eliot Fry (14 December 1866 – 9 September 1934) was an English painter and critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Establishing his reputation as a scholar of the Old Masters, he became an advocate of more recent developme ...

, until its closure in the early 1970s.Cook, O. (2012). The Fry Art Gallery. In ''Artists at the Fry: Art and design in the North West Essex Collection'' (pp. 7-14). Saffron Walden, Essex: The Fry Art Gallery. 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". In 2002 the North West Essex Collection Trust, a separate charity, was formed, to be responsible for the safekeeping of the collection. In 2015 the Society purchased the freehold for the gallery building.The Fry Art Gallery Society Newsletter, March 2017 Total visitor numbers for 2016 were approximately 11,000.

References

Sources

* ''Artists at the Fry'' (Saffron Walden, Essex: The Fry Art Gallery, 2012) *''Ravilious at the Fry (Saffron Walden, Essex: The Fry Art Gallery, 2012)'' *''Rothenstein at the Fry'' (Saffron Walden, Essex: The Fry Art Gallery, 2017) *Gill Saunders and Malcolm Yorke (Eds), ''Bawden, Ravilious and the Artists of Great Bardfield'' (London: V&A Publishing, 2015) *Andy Friend, ''Ravilious and Co (London: Thames and Hudson, 2017)'' *Garwood, Tirzah, ''Long Live Great Bardfield'' (London: Persephone, 2016)

External links

Fry Art Gallery website

Fry Art Gallery Blog

Art UK, Your Paintings
{{Coord, 52.0251, 0.2378, type:landmark_region:GB-ESS, display=title Art museums and galleries in Essex Art galleries established in 1985 1985 establishments in England