A Question of Guilt: A Crime Writer’s Collection

15th January 2018

Bournemouth’s Russell-Cotes invites visitors to reconstruct a crime through paintings

The new exhibition ‘A Question of Guilt: A Crime Writer’s Collection’ opens on Saturday 13 January 2018 in the  newly refurbished galleries of the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum. It features the private collection of crime writer Frances Fyfield, and asks the audience to look at each painting without prejudice, considering it through the eyes of a storyteller and imagine the character and motives of the person portrayed. The audience is invited to meet victims, charlatans, detectives, murderers, witnesses as well as mere onlookers.

Award-winning crime writer, Frances Fyfield, has written 24 novels featuring accidental murder, dental horrors, art theft, family feuds and other atrocities, leading to books of visual scenes which also emphasise the essential goodness of human nature. In the meantime, she has been an assiduous collector of oil paintings, portraits and drawings by British artists, from 1890 to 1950.  Based around her eclectic private collection of Bloomsbury/ British Modernist Art, including many anonymous painters, this exhibition is a show case for British twentieth century art, but it is also styled as a ‘Whodunnit’.  Each painting has its own potential story, while each character or scene may play a part in a wider story.  

Fyfield has written the captions for the exhibition, inviting the audience to become the detective too.

The backdrop of the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum is a perfect setting for an exhibition full of potential crime stories.  This splendid Victorian house, with stunning views over the golden sands of Bournemouth, is flamboyant and theatrical both inside and out, packed with paintings, sculptures, decorative arts and ethnography and arranged with individuality and eccentricity. Thus visitors are invited to come along, either to see fine British paintings from the Fyfield and Russell-Cotes Collection in their own right, or step back in time to an apparently gentler age of calling cards, cocktails, intrigue, fine hats and enmity. They can don their Sherlock Holmes style deer-stalkers and imagine themselves either Upstairs or Downstairs at a party that may go horribly wrong.

The exhibition offers a rare opportunity to see work by well-known artists including Walter Sickert, Frank Dobson, Duncan Grant, Evelyn Dunbar and Gwen John alongside less well-known and many unknown names. Frances Fyfield has also selected out some paintings from the Russell-Cotes collection and devised the commentary in her own inimitable style.

“A Question of Guilt “ has additional significance as it will be the first exhibition in the Russell-Cotes Galleries since the Edwardian stained-glass skylights were refurbished with a major grant from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport/Wolfson Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund and the South West Museum Development Programme.

Frances Fyfield says: ‘It is a joy and a delight to have fifty three of the paintings I own on display at the same time in the glorious setting of the Russell-Cotes.   They are taking a holiday from a Bloomsbury apartment and a seaside house in Deal, They love and deserve attention and will also enjoy the company of the Russell-Cotes paintings, too.  British 20th Century faces in the main, representing most decades, they’re a lifetime devotion of mine, and I hope the audience will want to take at least one of them home.’

Sarah Newman, Programmes Officer at the Russell-Cotes adds: ‘ We are honoured that Frances Fyfield has lent us her wonderful collection  and has allowed us to have such insight into a writer’s vision of her characters as well as encouraging us to  indulge our own imagination for intrigue and dastardly actions.  Uniquely at the Russell-Cotes, her collection will resonate with Merton and Annie’s passion for collecting and with collectors everywhere. ‘

The Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum’s new exhibition, A Question of Guilt: A crime writer’s collection opens on Saturday 13 January and runs until Sunday 15 April 2018.  Entrance to the Russell-Cotes includes the exhibition and costs £6, with Gift Aid. Concessions are available for groups of 10+ people – book in advance on 01202 451820.

There will be a programme of talks and workshops around crime writing, collecting and portraiture during the course of the exhibition.  

Frances Fyfield will talk about her collection on Friday 2 February and at a crime writers panel on Thursday 15 March 2018.

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 Image courtesy of Liss Llewellyn Fine Art