Hardy exhibition features star artefacts from national collections

Prized Thomas Hardy artefacts from prestigious national collections are to go on display in our partner museums for the first time.

Hardy’s Wessex, which opens on 28 May, will be the largest collection of Hardy objects ever displayed at one time. Thanks to support from the Weston Loan Programme with Art Fund, each museum will have a ‘star’ object on loan from a national collection.

• Dorset Museum – Oil painting A Village Choir by Thomas Webster, on loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
• Poole Museum – Oil painting Weymouth Bay by John Constable, on loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
• The Salisbury Museum – Hardy’s Jude the Obscure manuscript, on loan from the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
• Wiltshire Museum – Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles manuscript, on loan from The British Library.

Created by the Garfield Weston Foundation and Art Fund, the Weston Loan Programme is the first ever UK-wide funding scheme to enable smaller and local authority museums to borrow works of art and artefacts from national collections.

Sophia Weston, Trustee of the Garfield Weston Foundation, said: “This exhibition on one of our most celebrated Victorian writers is a wonderful example of what the Weston Loan Programme sets out to do – we are so pleased to be able to support the display of such special objects in the places that inspired, and were reflected in, Hardy’s work.”

Harriet Still, exhibition curator, said:

“We are hugely grateful for this funding which is enabling us to display such significant objects. It’s a major coup for us to obtain the handwritten Tess and Jude manuscripts – the scribbles and amendments showing that even Hardy struggled to find the right words! The two oil paintings beautifully evoke life in Hardy’s times. A Village Choir is a snapshot of rural life, capturing the typical local ‘characters’ found in Hardy’s writing. The romantic and atmospheric Weymouth Beach could be a love scene from one of Hardy’s novels.

“Together with the extensive collections from our partner museums, all these objects will combine to make an immersive, thought-provoking and memorable Hardy experience.”

Hardy’s Wessex runs concurrently at the four museums from 28 May to 30 October 2022. You can find more information on our web pages.