The Abbey, Little Coggeshall
1940
watercolor
From the collection of Victoria and Albert Museum
1940
watercolor
From the collection of Victoria and Albert Museum
The Abbey, Little Coggeshall is a 1940 watercolor by Walter Bayes, held at Victoria and Albert Museum.
This watercolour shows a quiet scene from Little Coggeshall. Walter Bayes painted St. Nicholas’s Chapel around 1940, long after the abbey fell apart and the chapel got turned into a stable and pigsty. The building’s past is full of turns—Henry VIII knocked most of the abbey down, then it got fixed up again in 1860. Funny enough, the chapel stayed safe even when bombs fell nearby in 1940. Check out the Victoria and Albert Museum to see more.
Walter Bayes’s 1940 watercolour depicts the surviving medieval chapel of Little Coggeshall Abbey, showing its side elevation with a simple lawn and flower garden in the foreground where a dog rests in sunlight; the building had earlier served as a stable and pigsty before being restored as a church in 1860. Executed for the Recording Britain project during the Second World War, the work records a site that had been bombed nearby but remained undamaged. The scheme, funded by the Pilgrim Trust and administered by the Committee for the Employment of Artists in Wartime, aimed to capture places of…
Read the full account in the museum source.
Walter John Bayes was an English painter and illustrator who was a founder member of both the Camden Town Group and the London Group and also a renowned art teacher and critic.
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