Bardfield Murals

With over 90 illustrations, many previously unpublished, showing highly worked studies for murals and new and archive images of works in situ, Bardfield Murals adds a fascinating and delightful dimension to the story of North West Essex artists.

The artists of Great Bardfield are well known today, especially Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious, whose careers took off when they completed their murals on themes of Shakespeare and contemporary playwrights at Morley College in South London in 1930.

Less well known is what happened afterwards. Ravilious painted three other sets of murals, Bawden painted over 20 more sets up to the end of his life, many far more experimental in subject matter and technique than his watercolours or illustrations would suggest.

There was widespread patronage before, during and after the Second World War for such work; in libraries, schools, wartime British Restaurants, the Festival of Britain, P&O ocean liners and more. Other Bardfield resident artists painted murals – Kenneth Rowntree, Michael Rothenstein, Bernard Cheese, Sheila Robinson and Olga Lehmann.

Alan Powers has written widely on visual arts of the mid twentieth century, covering art, architecture and design. With two monographs on Eric Ravilious and others on Edward Ardizzone and Enid Marx, he has explored a generation of interconnected artists and illustrators, as well as writing widely on murals, a subject on which he has an abiding interest, having painted several of them himself.