£815,035 secures Dartington’s Modern British collection for Devon museums

Twenty-two works from the Dartington Hall Collection have been secured for public ownership following an £815,035 grant from Art Fund. The acquisition, announced on 15 October, brings paintings, works on paper and ceramics into the collections of The Box in Plymouth and Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery.

The group includes works by Ben Nicholson, Winifred Nicholson, Christopher Wood, Bernard Leach and Lucie Rie. Phillips negotiated the private sale ahead of its London Modern & Contemporary Art auctions during Frieze Week. Art Fund covered the acquisition cost in full, supported by an urgent fundraising campaign involving individuals and trusts. (plymouth.gov.uk⁠)

Among the paintings is Ben Nicholson’s Cumbrian Cottages, c.1928. Phillips’s original presentation also highlighted Christopher Wood’s Fish in a Basket and Breton Fisherwoman, alongside Winifred Nicholson’s A Nursery Bunch and Flowers from Malmaison. Together, these works reflect the Elmhirsts’ interest in artists whose experiments with colour and composition retained an intimate connection with everyday subjects. (plymouth.gov.uk⁠, phillips.com⁠)

Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst bought Dartington in 1925, developing the estate through initiatives in education, agriculture and the arts. Their collecting formed part of that wider undertaking. Bernard Leach taught ceramics at Dartington, while Mark Tobey was artist in residence during the 1930s. Phillips’s presentation included Cecil Collins’s Dartington Landscape with the Artist of 1938 and John Piper’s Dartington Hall, works directly connected to the estate itself. (phillips.com⁠)

That history gives the acquisition a significance beyond the individual objects. A collection assembled through patronage and personal contact can reveal relationships that become harder to reconstruct once its contents are dispersed. Paintings and pots, considered together, record the breadth of the Elmhirsts’ interests and the place they gave art within their social ambitions.

The works will be shared between the two museums. Planned activity includes displays, research and a symposium on Modern British art and studio ceramics, with online access through RAMM’s Collections Explorer and Art UK. Proceeds from the sale will support the Dartington Hall Trust’s preservation of the estate. (plymouth.gov.uk⁠)

The arrangement preserves the group within public collections in Devon, while creating opportunities to study and exhibit it more widely. Its success will ultimately depend on how the museums make those connections visible: between the objects themselves, the artists who made them and the unusual community in which they were collected.