Budleigh Past and Present

To Exeter, where I spent an enjoyable time at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, just wandering around really. Then I found myself in the exhibition 'Quay Views: Exeter Canal and the Exe', where I spotted three watercolours by the Exeter-born artist John Abbott White.    Abbott White, who also practised as a surgeon, painted and sketched various local scenes including the above pen and wash drawing of the old granary at the bottom of Granary Lane in Budleigh Salterton. During his visit to the town he also made a drawing of fishermen and their boats on the beach. Both pictures were bought by the Museum in 1992, thanks to an anonymous donation and a special one-off grant from the then East Devon Council.   “Pictorial representations of Budleigh Salterton in the past are very rare, so every opportunity to obtain works of art has to be taken,” said Museum spokesman Geoffrey Swinyard at the time. “These will enhance the Museum’s collection of local historical ...

The Boyhood of Raleigh is one of the Pre-Raphaelite artist Sir John Millais’ most celebrated works,   painted during his stay in Budleigh Salterton in 1870    With the quatercentenary of Sir Walter Raleigh’s death only four years away you could guess that at least one Fairlynch volunteer might be recalling the famous years of 2000 and even 1969. Those two high points in the Museum’s history were reached when Sir John Millais’ celebrated depiction of East Budleigh’s best known personality went on show. To greet the arrival of ‘The Boyhood of Raleigh’ at Fairlynch in July 1969 three members of the US Marine Detachment from its 6th Fleet HQ in London’s Grosvenor Square joined forces with three Royal Marines from Lympstone to stand guard over the painting, a military band played and Tudormania broke out. Visitor numbers at the Museum shot up. For the management of such a small institution as Fairlynch it was an amazing achievement.   ...

  I enjoyed visiting the current exhibition at Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum a few days ago. It’s called ‘West Country to World’s End - The South West in the Tudor Age’ and I’ll write more about it in due course. A well produced book of the same title accompanies the exhibition, which I enjoyed so much that I bought a copy. Budleigh people will admire the impressively life-size portrait by an unknown artist of the area’s great Elizabethan hero Sir Walter Raleigh and his eight-year-old son Walter. On loan from the National Portrait Gallery the work was painted in 1602 when he was enjoying Queen Elizabeth’s favour, and shows in great detail, as the printed commentary explains, the expensive clothes worn by father and son: Sir Walter is wearing a jacket embroidered with seed pearls while the boy’s blue suit is silver-braided.   This link on the excellent and useful Wikipedia will take you to see it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WalterRaleighandson...