The Burton Art Gallery and Museum  

Few townships lay claim to a richer vein of historical interest than Bideford in Devon, Kingsley's 'little white town' nestling above the northern reach of the river Torridge at the entrance to the bay that takes its name. The Atlantic water that today carries ships peacefully along the north coast of Devon into the Bristol Channel and thence over the bar into Bideford Bay, once played host to the warships of Napoleon's fleet. During the twenty or so years of Anglo-French conflict at the end of the 18th century and beginning of the 19th, many a matelot ended up in Dartmoor prison, an establishment built for the very purpose of housing prisoners of war, while others were incarcerated in Bideford town itself. Three centuries earlier, captive ships and men of the Spanish Armada came the same way. Raleigh, Drake, Grenville and a host of less distinguished sea dogs brought a fame and repute to this part of the South West that is recorded in a legion of street and place names. Clippers brought the spices, tea and tobacco that made the fortunes of local merchants and provided the wherewithal of fine houses and gracious living. And there is the famous long bridge, now overshadowed by a massive modern span to the north, eccentric, apparently indestructible, described by Kingsley as 'the very soul' of the town, built of timber around the year 1280 with a chapel at either end, restored by order of the Pope in 1459 and later reconstructed of stone. There are people alive today who remember the last years of the grand regime when summer's evenings were enlivened by Palm Court orchestras, when baritone voices floated on the river and into the bay with invocations to Maude and Sylvia, and small ensembles entertained house guests to the strains of Palestrina and Mozart. Others recall more down to earth evidence of a defining regional attitude. There was the titled widow, for example, who sold off part of her estate to a developer of 'quality' homes. When the builder had consumed the allotted land the developer asked is she would sell a further stretch. 'No', she said, 'stop where you are. That's quite close enough for the working classes'.

Art and crafts, like a sense of degree, are inseparable from Bideford's and North Devon's past and present. Literary heritage of course rests heavily on the indigenous genius of Kingsley and the boyhood of Kipling, whose school, the old Imperial Services establishment, looked out from the cliff tops of Westward Ho! to the Bristol Channel and the Atlantic Ocean beyond. The steep, gorse-crowned cliffs now called the Kipling Tors and administered by the National Trust were once the playground of Stalkey & Co, where imaginary conflicts of empire were rehearsed and the incursion of the White Russian armies into Lenin's Bolshevik domain found its eminence gris in the commander of Dunsterforce, Major-General Dunsterville, so disappointingly unlike the boyhood hero who anticipated him and assured his immortality.

Visual art is altogether more commonplace. North Devon's 'country' pottery goes back to medieval origins, to the slipwares formed from local clays, reddish earthenware in the main, fired at relatively low biscuit temperatures, then dipped in a coloured slip that is dried and sgraffito or scratch decorated through the glaze before a final firing in the glost oven. The effect, as with the Greek wares of the first millennium BC, is one of a rich leathery surface with incised patterns that reveal the underlying reddish brown texture of the body clay. Such pots were made on a commercial scale in the 18th century and achieved wide popularity. John Watkins, early historian of Bideford, provides a temporary account:

'The potteries here, for making coarse brown earthenware are pretty considerable, and the demand for the articles of their manufacture in various part of the Kingdom, is constantly great... The earthenware made here is generally supposed to be superior to any other of the kind, and this is accounted for,. From the peculiar excellence of the gravel which the river affords in binding clay. That this is the true reason, seems clear from the fact that though the potteries at Barnstaple make use of the same sort of clay, yet their earthenware is not held in such esteem at Bristol as that of Bideford...'.

The harvest jug was a popular manifestation of this branch of the potters' art. Pottery at its basic, utilitarian level is like language; its universality always defeats the objectives of those who claim special merit, or special significance, for the version made or spoken in their neck of the woods, their region or country. Slipware and incised ornament are the devices of peasant potters, vehicles of folk art that is as honest as the day is long, conveying simply in words and decoration the essence of what needs to be said. As Bevis Hillier, social historian of the arts and crafts, put it, 'as ruthlessly decorative as it is ruthlessly functional'. The Fishley family in the village of Fremington, on the road between Bideford and Barnstaple, has been making such wares since the early 18th century and they are still prominently at it. Undoubtedly the craft was by then at least two centuries old in the British Isles. Some believe that immigrant potters started it all in Elizabethan times. No one doubts that the true folk tradition that it incorporates is best preserved in North Devon and especially along the banks of the river Torridge. And as good a representation as any is to be found in Bideford's splendid museum, the Burton, until recently a rather poor orphan of an establishment that tried hard to do justice to its surroundings and content in the face of barely concealed official apathy. It is now a sophisticated Mecca of local art and culture that attracts the workers of the arts and crafts community and, inevitably, is the daily assembly point of the local cognoscenti. A cafeteria that dispenses very good home baked produce may have as much as the artefacts to do with its social appeal.

The museum is, of course, the home of much more than pottery. As its name suggests, pictures and sculpture form a large part of its magnetism, not least its annual display of local work that portrays the energy, and something of the innate conservatism, of the contemporary scene. The original Gallery, opened in 1951, was conceived by a wealthy businessman, Thomas Burton, and Hubert Coop, a well-known water colour painter, in order to commemorate the former's daughter Mary, herself an artist, who had suffered an untimely death. Coop set out the aim:

'... a peaceful haven where one may take a quiet look at beautiful things; a gallery for the enjoyment, education and good of all, old and young...'.

The present-day content of galleries and museum makes a happy marriage of local history and art universality. If the mutton bone sail ships fashioned with devotion and meticulous detail by French prisoners of the Napoleonic wars are a tribute to man's creativity in adversity, so the Arthur McTaggart-Short collection of visiting card cases, one of the finest to be found, acknowledges that upper and middle class conventions are not necessarily without a useful spin-off. The odd Staffordshire figure and Ch'ing pot demonstrate, a relief wax of Good Sir Toby, and William Owen portraiture live easily in the company of local seascapes, bridge views and rural scenery, much of it gathered under the umbrella of the Ackland and Edwards collection.

The realisation of the founders' ambition has been largely the work of John Butler its curator from the outset. He is the hands on museum man, a sculptor in wood who prefers to be called a wood carver, locally schooled, though educated further afield in the higher mysteries of art and design, glad of the odd moment of quiet that allows him to add a touch or two to the latest of his acerbic 3-D commentaries on life and art. For a long time there was hardly room to move, nowhere to place the latest exhibit. Now, following the rebuilding and refurbishment of 1994, there is room not merely to breathe but to choose between one space and another in housing pictures and artefacts. The result is a splendidly accessible display of the best of local art, silverware, ceramics, fabric design, printing and manufacture; all, at their best, very good indeed.