Ballroom at the Shire Hall, Chelmsford
1940
watercolor
From the collection of Victoria and Albert Museum
1940
watercolor
From the collection of Victoria and Albert Museum
This watercolour shows a fancy ballroom in Chelmsford’s Shire Hall around 1940. Walter Bayes paints the elegant neoclassical County Room during a ball, a space used for dances in the first half of the twentieth century. A strange thing happened here two years before this painting. A woman’s crinoline caught fire on the steps in 1938, but tests couldn’t prove how it started. Look up the Victoria and Albert Museum.
![Society Ball [verso]](https://pub-3a17a9933ad74fb28aa30fa758592f23.r2.dev/artworks/9ac6089fba024416/thumb.webp)
