Painting donated to CCHS

St James's Church and churchyard by Richard Parker Crook
St James's Church and churchyard by Richard Parker Crook

An atmospheric painting of St. James Church and churchyard is now hanging on the wall of the CCHS Archive Room.

The painting was a gift from Tim Jones and his wife Jean, both former CADHAS members, who moved from Campden some years ago. Tim was CADHAS programme secretary and he researched and wrote our book on Wentworth Huyshe, following his hard work in cataloguing the family papers for the Guild of Handicraft.

The oil painting is by Richard Parker Crook.  A review in The Times, 5 March 2000, says

This artist is undoubtedly a realist painter, but beyond that he is difficult to pigeonhole. Crook is not, for example, a photorealist, making his paintings look like photographs, there’s a sense of strangeness in his compositions. We are familiar with most of the scenes he paints, whether he’s depicting London, Paris or the Cotswolds, but seen through Crook’s eyes, they take on a mysterious quality. Many of them are captured apparently at night, or illuminated from within, and are surrounded with a formal black border. There is something disturbing in Crook’s obsessive preoccupation with detail, so that the result is faintly hallucinatory. This is where realism moves into super-realism and then surrealism.

Comments about this page

  • What a lovely donation – thank you Tim and Jean – a nice memory of your time in Campden.

    By Carol Jackson (03/11/2020)

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