The Fry Art Gallery’s retrospective of work by Walter Hoyle, Walter Hoyle: a versatile artist has been extended into the autumn of 2020 [the exhibition closed in November 2020 due to national COVID-19 restrictions]. The show is a rare chance to appreciate the full achievement of an artist who was central to the Great Bardfield scene during its 1950s heyday, became an influential teacher in Cambridge and, as a committed Francophile, spent an increasing amount of time in Dieppe.
Walter Hoyle, Cemetery at Enna, Sicily, 1951, watercolour
Many themes ran throughout Hoyle’s career, including a love of watercolour and of linocut, but the exhibition falls naturally into a chronological sequence. After examples of his early works, created at the time when Hoyle’s studies at the RCA were interrupted by National Service, come a set of watercolours from a painting trip to Sicily that he made with Edward Bawden, formerly one of his RCA tutors, in 1951.
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