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 in

Ipswich Ipswich () is a port town and Borough status in the United Kingdom, borough in Suffolk, England. It is the county town, and largest in Suffolk, followed by Lowestoft and Bury St Edmunds, and the third-largest population centre in East Anglia, ...

Suffolk Suffolk ( ) is a ceremonial county in the East of England and East Anglia. It is bordered by Norfolk to the north, the North Sea to the east, Essex to the south, and Cambridgeshire to the west. Ipswich is the largest settlement and the county ...

, 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 Bury St Edmunds (), commonly referred to locally as ''Bury,'' is a cathedral as well as market town and civil parish in the West Suffolk District, West Suffolk district, in the county of Suffolk, England.OS Explorer map 211: Bury St. Edmunds an ...

.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. The panels contain a series of

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

s of the kind associated with emblem books—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 John Donne ( ; 1571 or 1572 – 31 March 1631) was an English poet, scholar, soldier and secretary born into a recusant family, who later became a clergy, cleric in the Church of England. Under Royal Patronage, he was made Dean of St Paul's, D ...

, who wrote his two ''

Anniversaries An anniversary is the date on which an event took place or an institution was founded. Most countries celebrate national anniversaries, typically called national days. These could be the List of national independence days, date of independen ...

'' 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 the university press of the University of Texas at Austin. Established in 1950, the Press publishes scholarly and trade books in several areas, including Latin American studies, Caribbean, Caribbea ...

(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