Fry Art Gallery

The Fry Art Gallery building was designed to house the art collection of Francis Gibson, a local Quaker businessman who died in 1859. The collection was inherited by his daughter, Elizabeth, who had married the Bristol MP Lewis Fry. The gallery passed through the Fry family, who maintained a tradition of public access and who displayed a mixture of the family collection of historic masters and paintings by family members, including Roger Fry, until its closure in the early 1970s. The Fry Art Gallery Society was formed as a charity in 1985 and the gallery re-opened in its present form 1987. Prior to its closure it had been named the "Gibson Gallery". In 2015 the Society purchased the…

The Fry Art Gallery is home to the North West Essex Collection, a set of more than 3,000 works by diverse, nationally important artists who have lived or worked in the area. The collection includes paintings, prints, books, artists' scrapbooks, ceramics, wallpapers and decorative designs. There is an emphasis on artists who worked in and around Great Bardfield in the middle of the twentieth century, including Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious, Tirzah Garwood, John Aldridge, Sheila Robinson, Bernard Cheese, Chloe Cheese, Walter Hoyle, Michael Rothenstein, Kenneth Rowntree, George Chapman and Marianne Straub. Artists in the collection with a connection to the wider area include Michael Ayrton,…