© The Estate of John Blake
8th May – 30th October 2022
Opening times: Tuesdays to Fridays, Sundays and bank holidays 2 – 5, Saturdays 11 – 5
supported by the Weston Loan Programme with Art Fund and sponsored by Shirley Parish in memory of Dorothy Staples.
Thirteen striking costume designs for the 1953 Royal Opera House production of Strauss’s opera Elektra will be among the highlights of a new exhibition at the Fry Art Gallery, Saffron Walden, dedicated to the remarkable and diverse talents of the artist Isabel Rawsthorne. The Sainsbury Centre are lending two further works and also a bust of Isabel by Alberto Giacometti.
The loans are supported by the Weston Loan Programme with Art Fund. Created by the Garfield Weston Foundation and Art Fund, the Weston Loan Programme is the first ever UK-wide funding scheme to enable smaller and local authority museums to borrow works of art and artefacts from national collections.
The Many Sides of Isabel Rawsthorne will showcase the often-revolutionary work of an artist who ‘disappeared from the history of art’. Rawsthorne (1912-1992) changed her surname with each of her three marriages (Delmer, Lambert, Rawsthorne) and became known as the muse of twentieth-century giants such as Jacob Epstein, Pablo Picasso, André Derain, Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon rather than as a multi-faceted artist in her own right.
The exhibition will also feature a selection of Rawsthorne’s portraits and still-lifes given to the Fry Art Gallery by the artist’s family, many of them specially restored thanks to a grant from the Association of Independent Museums and the Pilgrim Trust. Among the portraits are Rawsthorne’s paintings of her third husband Alan Rawsthorne, together with his sister Barbara. Isabel lived in Little Sampford for over thirty years, until her death in 1992.
We recommend booking a free timed-entry ticket for admission to the Gallery. You can book HERE
