Bawden, Ravilious and the Artists of Great Bardfield

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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] Modern British Painting and Prints" (PDF). Scottish-gallery.co.uk. Archived from the original (PDF) on 23 February 2014 . Retrieved 8 February 2014. Lewis, Simon. "Edward Bawden's map of Scarborough". All Things Considered . Retrieved 9 February 2014. Great Bardfield is a large village in the Braintree district of Essex, England. It is located approximately 9mi (14km) northwest of the town of Braintree, and approximately 12mi (19km) southeast of Saffron Walden. Nowadays Great Bardfield is a thriving and popular village surrounded by glorious countryside much loved by walkers. It won the Calor Best Village in Essex award in 2009 and was a runner up in the national Village of the Year competition. The village boasts two pubs, a butcher, an electrical shop, the Co-op stores, two gift shops, a hairdresser, an estate agent and a primary school, not counting a huge variety of clubs and societies which offer something for everyone. The village recreation area is the home turf of the Mud Dogs football club, and funding is being sought for a purpose-built sports pavilion. The popular Blue Egg café and farm shop on the edge of the village provides Post Office facilities. Nearby in the Bardfield Centre, the beautifully restored late 13th century High Barn is a renowned recording studio and live music venue, where X Factor winner, Matt Cardle, regularly performed.

Garwood was educated at West Hill School in Eastbourne from 1920 to 1924, and then at Eastbourne School of Art from 1925, under Reeves Fawkes, Oliver Senior and, as a wood engraver, Eric Ravilious. [3] She moved to Kensington in 1928. [2] She later studied at the Central School of Art. [3] Martin Salisbury, Artists at the Fry: Art and Design in the North West Essex Collection, Ruskin Press, Cambridge, 2003Their sharp-lined rolling landscapes and buildings, and their mildly caricatured paintings of human beings (notably Ravilious’s portrait of Bawden at work) have become emblematic of the years before the Second World War. They have that in common with Brian Cook, whose magical drawings of English landscapes and buildings adorned the covers of the topographical books published by his uncle, Harry Batsford, from 1932. This was a golden age of graphic art – and its heart was in Bardfield.

The artists never constituted a ‘school’ or movement, and they had diverse styles and interests. However, they have inevitably become known as the ‘Bardfield Artists’. Many of them were skilled printmakers, producing both limited edition art prints and inexpensive lithographs for wider circulation, often pioneering new methods. Most of them needed to earn their living, and as well as teaching they undertook a wide range of commercial work. DMU Special Collections, D/009, https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/7c3ec076-3b27-38c2-975b-976aa3fad234 Upon leaving school in 1919, he attended Cambridge School of Art full-time from 1919 to 1921. There he became interested in calligraphy and in the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Richard Doyle, William Morris and other Victorians. [2] This was followed in 1922 by a scholarship to the Royal College of Art School of Design in London, where he took a diploma in illustration until 1925. Here he met his fellow student and future collaborator Eric Ravilious; the pair were described by their teacher Paul Nash as "an extraordinary outbreak of talent".The gallery was built in 1856 as a private gallery to house the collection of a local Quaker businessman, but was taken over by The Fry Art Gallery Society in 1987 to tell the story of the Great Bardfield artists who lived in and around the village of Great Bardfield and Saffron Walden during the 20th century and into the 21st. Its re-creation in 1987 ensured that links with living artists from the group were forged while they still could be; this was vital to the way the gallery evolved and is something that would be impossible today. What makes this museum unique?

His work can be seen in many major collections and is shown regularly at the Fry Art Gallery, Saffron Walden and at the Higgins. [19] [20] [21] His notable surviving public works include a tile depicting a foot ferry on the River Lea, commissioned by London Underground and located on the Victoria line platform at Tottenham Hale tube station. Bawden also produced the cameo-like silhouette of Queen Victoria located at Victoria tube station. [22] An early map, produced in 1931 for Scarborough's Pavilion Hotel and presented to Scarborough Library when the hotel was sold, was recently restored and rehung in the library. [23] [24] Bawden's legacy 'the place to see' his work". BBC News. 16 February 2020 . Retrieved 16 February 2020.

a b c d e f Cook, Olive. "Matrix: Tirzah Garwood". Photography at Weeping Ash . Retrieved 8 September 2014. Bawden grew up near Bardfield and so was effectively returning home when he went there in 1930. Ravilious and Garwood followed a couple of years later, lodging with the Bawdens before finding a house in nearby Castle Hedingham. To the uninitiated, the figurative styles of Bawden and Ravilious are so similar that it is hard to tell their early works apart; and indeed the 1933 portrait of the two artists deliberating by a Bardfield fireplace, by their friend Michael Rothenstein (who also moved into the village), suggests they looked and dressed alike, too. Powers, A; Green, O (2006). Away we Go! Advertising London's Transport, Eric Ravilious & Edward Bawden. Norwich: Mainstone Press.

The History of England " Architecture + Painting " THE GREAT BARDFIELD EXHIBITION". England-history.org . Retrieved 8 February 2014. This week, we spoke to the exhibition curator, Wolfson Senior Member, Peter Donovan, about the show, the artists, and the joys of exhibiting at Wolfson. Who are the Bardfield artists and why spotlight them now?After making a series of studies of the Marsh Arabs in southern Iraq, Bawden was recalled to London. He departed Cairo aboard the SS Stratheden but transferred to the RMS Laconia in Durban on 27 August 1942. After the Laconia was torpedoed and sunk, on 12 September 1942, he spent five days in an open lifeboat before being rescued by a French ship, the Gloire. [8] He was held prisoner in a Vichy internment camp in Casablanca for two months before the camp was liberated by American troops. [9] From Casablanca he sailed to Norfolk, Virginia. [8] When he eventually returned to Britain, Bawden did portrait work at the Military Hospital in Colchester and in Scotland, with Polish forces training there. He returned to Iraq in September 1943, as a Ministry of Information artist to work in Baghdad and Kurdistan, before he joined the Middle East Anti-Locust Unit on its trek to Jeddah. From Jeddah, he returned to the Marsh Arabs in southern Iraq, before entering Iran to portray supply shipments to the Soviet Union.