Inquisitive Eyes: Slade Painters in Edwardian Wessex, 1900-1914

Featuring artists including Augustus John, William Orpen, Philip Wilson Steer and Vanessa Bell, Inquisitive Eyes reveals for the first time the importance of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex landscape at a pivotal moment in British art.

Roaming the rolling hills and dramatic ancient coastline of Wessex – described by Augustus John as ‘lovely beyond words’ – a group of early twentieth-century artists associated with the Slade School of Art and New English Art Club explored and expanded the boundaries of art.

The work they produced offers a riveting new insight into a period in which Purbeck played host to an informal artists’ ‘colony’, evidently as significant as St. Ives or Newlyn, but hitherto unrecognised. Roger Fry and Vanessa Bell’s depictions of the area’s coastline also afford an intriguing comparison with the ‘modern’ work of the Slade painters, suggesting that the modernist battle was waged upon the beaches of Dorset.