I was really excited to find this one at the Madison Bouckville show--pretty much never do I find such an evocatively aged oil painting as this, oil on wood, of just my scale and dated on the back with subject identified to boot: Archbishop Grindall's School, St. Bees, Cumberland, 1845. If there were ever an architectural subject to loom large in the psyche, I'd say a castle-like British grammar school might be it, such that the losses to the surface of the painting feel exactly right--moody, aura-full, all about history and memory and mystery too..feels a bit ominous!
St. Bees was founded by Edmund Grindal, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1583 as a free grammar school for boys. It remained small, fewer than 40 pupils until expansions in the Victorian era, around when this was painted--I believe this painting probably marked the completion of construction on the school's open quadrangle, which included the original schoolhouse, in the early 1840s. (In 1978 the school became co-education, then finally closed in 2015.)
11 3/8 x 8 1/2. Oil on wood panel. Paint loss as evident, all the good in my opinion, and all the better in hand, with a sort of inner glow to it. Sound and stable now, no flaking, etc. A couple of small holes to the wood along top edge for old hanging hooks.
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