Great Bardfield Artists

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The north west Essex village of Great Bardfield, was an important English centre for the visual arts during the middle decades of the 20th century.

The principal artists who lived in the village between 1930 and 1970 include John Aldridge (Royal Academician), Edward Bawden, George Chapman, Stanley Clifford-Smith, Audrey Cruddas, Walter Hoyle, Eric Ravilious, Sheila Robinson, Michael Rothenstein, Kenneth Rowntree and Marianne Straub. Other artists associated with the group include Duffy Ayers, Bernard Cheese, Joan Glass, David Low and Laurence Scarfe. The Great Bardfield Artists were diverse in style, but shared a love for figurative art, making the group distinct from the better-known St Ives art community in Cornwall, who after the war were chiefly dominated by abstractionists.

During the 1950s the Great Bardfield Artists organised a series of large ‘open house’ exhibitions which attracted national press attention. Positive reviews and the novelty of viewing art works in the artists own homes led to thousands visiting the remote village during the summer exhibitions of 1954, 1955 and 1958. As well as these shows the Great Bardfield Artists held several touring exhibitions of their work in 1957, 1958 and 1959.

From the early 1960s the majority of the artists at Bardfield moved away from the village for pastures new. In 1985 the Fry Art Gallery [1] at Saffron Walden, Essex was established with the expressed aim of highlighting the paintings, prints, wallpapers, books, fabrics and ceramics made by the Great Bardfield art community between 1930 and 1970.

References:

Colin MacInnes, ‘Introduction’, Great Bardfield Artists, W. S. Cowell, Ipswich, c.1957

Martin Salisbury, Artists at the Fry: Art and Design in the North West Essex Collection, Ruskin Press, Cambridge, 2003

W. J. Strachan, ‘The Artists of Great Bardfield’, Studio, March 1958