Celebrate the Into Abstraction: Modern British Art and the Landscape closing weekend with a guided tour led by our resident expert! Isobel will also be providing insider information through her close family links to the Great Bardfield Artist movement.

Isobel “Bel” Dethrow is a watercolour and acrylic portrait artist originally from the St. Louis area of the United States. Her maternal family hails from Great Bardfield, Essex.

Through her family, Isobel has close connections to the Great Bardfield Artists movement during the 1940s/50s.

Her great-grandfather, William Slow, apprenticed under Edward Bawden as a painter, producing his own distinguished works. Her grandmother, Kathleen Slow, was John Aldridge’s housekeeper for several years.

Isobel’s uncles tended to both Bawden and Aldridge’s home gardens, and have memories of Grayson Perry as the Bardfield paperboy.

About your Tour Guide:

For Isobel, art is nature and nurture. With an instilled passion for family history, Isobel’s expertise lies in the Great Bardfield Artists movement.

While focusing on works by Bawden, Aldridge, Eric Ravilious, and Tirzah Garwood among others, Isobel seeks to have her great-grandfather’s own works academically recognized and researched.

Painting skills were inherited for Isobel on both sides of her family, as a portrait artist in her own right, with a niche for musician portraiture. Isobel specializes in painting concert scenes, while also creating landscapes and standard portraits on a commission basis.