Lyrical and dreamlike: A World of Private Mystery – British Neo-Romantics, at the Fry Art Gallery, reviewed

‘My daughter’s moving to Saffron Walden, away from all this,’ said the railway man at Stratford station, gesturing at the tower blocks overlooking the platform. ‘It’s like going back to the 1970s and ’80s.’

Further back, in the case of Saffron Walden’s Fry Art Gallery. Purpose-built by a Victorian banker to house his collection, this gem of a gallery has since been devoted to collecting and showing artists who have lived and worked in north-west Essex, beginning with the group that congregated around Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious in Great Bardfield from the 1930s. Half the gallery’s miniature enfilade is currently hung with their work, while the other half has been given over to a display of British neo-romantics including loans from the Ingram Collection.

The Englishness of Bawden, Ravilious and co. is too obvious to require elaboration, but it’s harder to get a handle on the neo-romantic movement that sprang up on this island in the shadow of the second world war. For the purposes of this show it’s described as British to accommodate ‘The Two Roberts’, Colquhoun and MacBryde, who left their native Scotland in 1941 to join the two Johns, Minton and Craxton, Keith Vaughan and Michael Ayrton on the London art scene that revolved around the watering holes of Soho and Fitzrovia.

Glasgow-trained and working class, the Two Roberts owe their presence in the Fry’s collection to their notoriously rackety three-year stay in the early 1950s in a borrowed cottage near Great Dunmow, most of whose contents they allegedly smashed or sold.