The walk down to the Fry Art Gallery from Saffron Walden church is a pleasure at any season. In spring, flowering branches spill over garden walls into back lanes; in autumn, the town is flush with yellow roses and ripe apples. Such everyday English places were important to the group of artists – Tirzah Garwood, Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden, Kenneth Rowntree and others – who gravitated to the Essex village of Great Bardfield in the mid-20th century. This group, together with others who moved to the village later – Olga Lehmann and Michael Rothenstein – is the subject of ‘Bardfield Murals’, an excellent exhibition that takes up one of the Fry Art Gallery’s two lofty rooms. At its heart are the coloured sketches and designs for murals produced by these artists. Since each sketch is distinctive in tonality and pattern, the exhibition enables the viewer to survey in microcosm much of what comprises 20th-century British mural art.

The revival of the mural in England can be said to have begun in the 1920s, when Lord Duveen made two modest subventions for public schemes. One paid for Rex Whistler’s (lately controversial) Refreshment Room murals at Tate Britain; these launched Whistler on his career as a melancholy supplier of amusing, Baroque-style artworks to the beau monde. The other brought the young Bawden and Ravilious together to paint murals for one of the rooms at the adult education institution Morley College, where several spaces were decorated with merry and delightful murals by various artists. 

Thereafter, the pair received mural commissions from contemporary architects, public institutions and international exhibitions. Their Bardfield neighbour Kenneth Rowntree also produced murals for public institutions, most notably the government-sponsored British Restaurants, which were such a feature of the wartime years. The English mural continued to develop during the 1950s,