Lady Drury's Closet (also known as the Hawstead Panels) is a series of painted wooden panels of early 17th-century date, currently installed in the room over the porch of

Christchurch Mansion Christchurch Mansion is a substantial Tudor brick mansion house built in Ipswich, Suffolk by Edmund Withypoll (also written "Withipoll") around 1548–50. The Grade I listed building is located within Christchurch Park and sits by the southe ...

Ipswich Ipswich () is a port town and borough in Suffolk, England, of which it is the county town. The town is located in East Anglia about away from the mouth of the River Orwell and the North Sea. Ipswich is both on the Great Eastern Main Line ...

, Suffolk, England.Christchurch Mansion (Colchester & Ipswich Museums), Museum Booklet. They originally decorated a painted closet, about square, adjacent to a bedroom in Hawstead Place, near Bury St Edmunds.Partner, Jane, "Vision, appearance and skin colour in the painted emblems from Hawstead Hall," Word & image, 25/2 (2009): 178-191. It is believed they were made for Anne Drury, Lady Drury, wife of Sir Robert Drury of

Hawstead Hawstead is a small village and civil parish in the West Suffolk district of Suffolk in eastern England. It is located south of Bury St. Edmunds between the B1066 and A134 roads, in a fork formed by the River Lark and a small tributary. The ...

and Hardwick, who died in 1624. They were removed to Hardwick House, probably by Sir Robert, before 1615; and when the Hardwick House contents were sold in 1924, they were purchased for and installed in Christchurch Mansion when it had already become the home of the Fine and Decorative Arts collections of the

Ipswich Museum Ipswich Museum is a registered museum of culture, history and natural heritage located on High Street in Ipswich, the county town of Suffolk. It was historically the leading regional museum in Suffolk, housing collections drawn from both the fo ...

. The panels contain a series of

emblem An emblem is an abstract or representational pictorial image that represents a concept, like a moral truth, or an allegory, or a person, like a king or saint. Emblems vs. symbols Although the words ''emblem'' and '' symbol'' are often us ...

s of the kind associated with

emblem books An emblem book is a book collecting emblems (allegorical illustrations) with accompanying explanatory text, typically morals or poems. This category of books was popular in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. Emblem books are collection ...

—images fashionable throughout Europe for private religious meditation in that age. The original sequence of the emblems is unclear, although the panels as arranged under their Latin "headings" are as originally devised. In addition to their importance for the study of emblems in general, they are significant because the Drurys were patrons of the poet and divine John Donne, who wrote his two ''Anniversaries'' following the death in 1610 of their daughter Elizabeth Drury—namely, '' An Anatomy of the World'' and ''The Second Anniversarie or the Progresse of the Soule''. The epigrammatic and verbally or visually paradoxical themes of the paintings are, however, linked more directly to the themes and techniques of meditation developed in the writings and sermons of the preacher Joseph Hall, who was chaplain and spiritual advisor to Lady Drury at Hawstead.

References

Sources

* Farmer, N.K., ''Poets and the Visual Arts in Renaissance England'',

University of Texas Press The University of Texas Press (or UT Press) is a university press that is part of the University of Texas at Austin. Established in 1950, the Press publishes scholarly books and journals in several areas, including Latin American studies, Texan ...

(1984). * Mantz, D.C., S.E. Gardner and E.M. Ramsden, "'The Benefit of an Image, Without the Offence': Anglo-Dutch Emblematics and Hall's Liberation of the Lyric Soul" in {{DEFAULTSORT:Lady Drury's Closet English paintings 17th-century paintings History of Suffolk St Margaret's Ward, Ipswich Paintings in the East of England

See also

References

Sources