Portrait of a working artist

Edward Bawden
Bedford Gallery, Castle Lane, Bedford, until 31 January 2010

In these days when museums seem to think it acceptable to sell off the charitable gifts of past ages to feed contemporary vanities, I wonder who will be tempted to donate works of art without binding them securely in protective red tape? In the last eight years before his death, the artist and illustrator Edward Bawden (1903–89) gave a vast archive of his work to the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery in Bedford.