AN EXHIBITION of works by the Camden Town Group is to open at the Museum of Somerset.

A Fragile Beauty: Art on the Blackdown Hills 1901 to 1925 comes to the museum in Taunton on Saturday, March 25.

It captures the beauty of this Somerset and Devon borderland in a period when the First World War was changing English society forever.

The Camden Town Group, led by Walter Sickert, was named after the London district where many of the artists lived and worked.

Initially they painted contemporary urban life, but later they were drawn to the countryside, especially the Blackdown Hills.

Inspired by the example of the impressionists and post-impressionists, artists such as Spencer Gore, Charles Ginner and Robert Bevan created Somerset and Devon landscape paintings of great freshness and immediacy.

“They came to Applehayes, Clayhidon, as the guests of Harold Harrison, an estate owner and amateur artist,” Tom Mayberry, chief executive of the South West Heritage Trust, explained.

“The Blackdown Hills were remote and artistically unexplored when they arrived there and their paintings are a wonderful celebration of landscape. Though the world they knew was so different from ours, many of the landscapes and buildings they painted have hardly changed.”

‘A Fragile Beauty’ is the first major exhibition at the Museum of Somerset to rely entirely on loans from other museums and from private collectors.

Loans include Spencer Gore’s ‘Applehayes’ from the Ulster Museum, and Charles Ginner’s ‘Landscape with Farmhouse’ from Manchester Art Gallery. The exhibition also includes works from private collections that have rarely been seen in public.

The museum has worked with the fine art auctioneers, Lawrences of Crewkerne, who, together with private donors, and the Blackdown Hills Area of Outstanding Beauty (AONB) have sponsored and supported the exhibition.

A varied public programme of associated events is also being delivered.

‘A Fragile Beauty’ has been created in partnership with the Somerset-based curators and art historians Denys Wilcox and Richard Emeny.

The exhibition runs from March 25 to July 8 and is free of charge.