The Lost Houses at Cliffe Castle

The Lost Houses exhibition is going up one last time before all the paintings are collected by their new owners. It will be on display At Cliffe Castle in Keighley from February 11th until April 23rd 2017.

I’m going to be in the museum all day on February 11th and April 1st to chat (in the hope that nice folks come and tell me stories as they did when the exhibition was at Bankfield).

Cliffe Castle seems a very apt venue, as it’s almost a Lost House itself.  Here it is in its glory days. Half of what you see here, including the beautiful glass houses, have now gone.

The owner, Industrialist Henry Isaac Butterfield was a great friend of Sir Isaac Holden who built Oakworth House, a just a few miles away. Butterfield’s glass houses are thought to have inspired sir Isaac to build his winter gardens:

It was photographs from the Cliffe Castle archive that inspired this painting of Oakworth House:

The paintings (14 paintings of 10 grand houses) will be on display in the upstairs gallery. The full collection can also be seen here on my website:

(This is the exhibition at Bankfield Museum in Halifax, in January of 2016)

The paintings will be displayed alongside research information and photographs.

Please come along and see it while it’s there! My kids love Cliffe Castle. It used to have stunning glass houses but it now it has a pretty good park. There’s also a wonderful natural history collection (stuffed animals!) and rocks and minerals. I enjoy the horror of random taxidermy case with inexplicable objects (really, I can’t explain. You’ll understand if you visit) and the Hen Pecked Club’s peace box!

My Lost Houses Book will be for sale in the museum shop, along with cards and prints of the paintings.

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