5-559: Great Bardfield is a large village in the Braintree district of Essex , England. It is approximately 9 mi (14 km) northwest of the town of Braintree , and approximately 12 mi (19 km) southeast of Saffron Walden . The village came to national attention during the 1950s as home to the Great Bardfield Artists . Henry VIII is said to have given Bardfield to Anne of Cleves as part of his divorce settlement and
10-445: A house. Great Bardfield played an important role in the history of the oxlip ( Primula elatior ) which, in the UK, is a rare plant only found where Suffolk , Essex and Cambridgeshire meet. Originally it was thought that oxlips were cowslip-primrose hybrids but in 1842 Henry Doubleday and Charles Darwin conducted tests on plants collected from Great Bardfield and concluded that this
15-586: A number of buildings in the village are associated with Anne of Cleves, including the Grade II-listed Great Lodge and its associated Grade I-listed barn, now named after her. The 1,000-acre (4.0 km) grounds include a Grade I-listed barn and a vineyard. Great Bardfield is home to the Bardfield Cage, a 19th-century village lock-up, and the Gibraltar Mill , a windmill which has been converted to
20-414: The 1940s and 1950s were: John Aldridge , Edward Bawden , George Chapman, Stanley Clifford-Smith , Audrey Cruddas , Walter Hoyle , Michael Rothenstein , Eric Ravilious (who lodged with Bawden at Brick House ), Sheila Robinson and Marianne Straub . Other artists linked to the art community include Joan Glass , Duffy Ayers , Laurence Scarfe and the political cartoonist David Low . Each year there
25-505: Was not so. For a while the plant was known as the Bardfield Oxlip. The common cowslip-primrose hybrid is known as the false oxlip ( Primula × polyantha ). Bardfield was the home of many important twentieth-century English artists who hosted a series of important 'open house' exhibitions in the village during the 1950s. These exhibitions garnered national press attention and attracted thousands of visitors. The Great Bardfield Artists of
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