This furniture was required to be as fashionable and useful as the top work made exclusively for the aristocracy and landowners, but the constraints of its social situation are subtly reflected in construction, style and decoration.
Textile specialists The Samarkand Galleries in Brewery Yard, Sheep Street, explore symbolism in nomadic tribal weaving with The Lost Language while pictures are the realm of The Titian Gallery, Sheep Street, which looks at the work of late Victorian painter and illustrator Paul Vincent Woodroffe through The Enchantment of Nursery Rhymes.
Woodroffe illustrated the music for his brother-in-law Joseph Moorat, a composer and researcher of nursery rhymes, and the original work is offered here.
Wold-wide web of intriguing exhibitions
THREE other Stow-on-the-Wold members are also holding selling exhibitions from October 11 to 25 and a contrasting trio they are. Baggott Church Street hosts A Sense of Proportion which displays some specially chosen pieces of period furniture commissioned by the middle classes to furnish their townhouses and country manors.
