We love art as a family – paintings, sketches, sculpture, architecture, literature and all the mediums in between! So we jumped at the chance to see some free art this week.
We usually keep our eyes peeled for any kind of free art to enjoy and learn about. We’ll look for graffiti style street art if we’re in cities, sculptures in towns, architecture wherever we go and free art museums and galleries at every location. We will of course pay to see art too! But why miss all the other good free stuff too?
I signed up to the Ashridge House newsletter ages ago, as they do some lovely Christmas events and the setting is absolutely stunning. You can see why here! https://www.ashridgehouse.org.uk
And we go the cafe and woods here quite a lot to meet family and friends (parking is free and the cafe is brilliant, but very busy as the morning progresses!) and we’ve toured the gardens before (you have to pay, but it’s pretty stunning). There is a lot of history to the house (building started on the current house as it stands in 1806) but it was King Henry VIII’s hunting ‘lodge’ after he “acquired” it during the reformation of the churches in the 1500’s. I can see why he wanted it – the park and woodland is lovely around here. And his daughter, a young Princess Elizabeth, lived in the previous building here as a child (and as the amazing guide Nigel told us, she was arrested from here when her sister Mary became Queen, aka Bloody Mary). Shout out to Nigel as he knows so much and was so fascinating to learn from!
Ashridge offered a limited number of slots this week to visit the house and view their art collection for FREE! Which is amazing, as we would have paid to access it. There are two collections here – a family one, and an acquired collection with a very different style. The house itself is a piece of art too.
The kids took their small sketchbooks and made little sketches of the stained glass windows and pieces of art they liked the most. They made some notes about the painters, when and how pieces were created and who the subjects were. We learned about which family members were Lord Chancellors, who went into politics, how the current house came to exist (built by a gentleman who inherited millions!), who went into the Navy and how some of the young men related to the family died in battle in the First World War. Perhaps our most interesting fact was about a Rear Admiral who helped to guard an exiled Emperor Napoleon on the Island of Elba!
It made the children curious, and they wrote many notes, ready to follow up and do some extra research on later today. That’s what I love about art collections… there are always stories, love interests, wars, feuds, dangers and secrets behind each item, and you can quickly find yourself falling down into the rabbit hole of each one!
It’s worth keeping an eye on the Ashridge House website for other similar events if you live nearby and want to see their art collection or gardens. And now our daughter has decided that she wants to get married here in the future… so we best start saving!
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