Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu
This year marks the centenary of airships being built for the Admiralty in far-fromthe-sea Bedfordshire. The Short Brothers, Eustace, Oswald and Horace, had begun building balloons in 1897, before turning to aircraft, so they had the relevant experience for dirigible airships. They started building the first, the R 31, at the Cardington sheds in 1917, and they also built a village for their workers, which lives on today as Shortstown. This branch of the Shorts’ business was nationalised in 1919. The exhibition also tells us of the Zeppelin airship raids during the First World War and the impact of early airships on Bedfordshire and the wide world.
The second summer exhibition drawn from the Higgins Art Gallery’s own Collection is a romp through Victorian art. Cecil Higgins was a philanthropic local brewer who left his collections of ceramics, glass and works of art to the town. His successors added impressive things in other areas, notably English watercolours, aesthetic furniture and 20th-century prints, and in 2005 the Higgins merged with Bedford Museum.
This show demonstrates the variety and stylistic extremes of the Victorians from the older traditional artists to the Aesthetes, the Pre-raphaelites to the Decadents, and the Social Satirists to the Exquisites. The exhibition charts the period chronologically, showing how these styles grew and flourished alongside one another and features JM W Turner, Frederic, Lord Leighton, Edward Burne-jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, James Mcneill Whistler, Richard Dadd and Aubrey Beardsley.