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Mrs. Mabel Fripp at the opening
of her late husband's exhibition
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"MARRIAGE to a Fripp is like tying yourself to the tail of a comet for life" - so said Mabel Harvey's future mother-in-law back in 1918.
And the first of two attractive new exhibitions at
the Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum this week, devoted to the works of the energetic Paul Fripp, seems to justify his mother's warning. For he was a man passionate about creative work, believing it to be quite simply the key to life, and he was dedicated to the developing of talents in others.
Paul Fripp died in 1945, but not before he had spent half a century racing around Britain and the world in a frenzy of creation which included a decade as Director of Art at Cheltenham Ladies' College.
"Normally he exhausted a place after two or three years, but he loved living here because he could so easily go out to paint in the Cotswolds," says Mabel, now a spritely 94-year-old who came to the gallery for the exhibition's opening. She is delighted by the fine collection of her husband's works which have been gathered together following some inspired detective work by museum staff and readers of the Echo's "Hidden Treasures" column which prompted a search for information about Fripp.
Fripp remained unrecognised
Dying at the end of the war after two years of ill health, Fripp received little immediate attention, but he was too bound up in his work to advertise his skills effectively, the only instance of this being the day just before his illness when he knocked together a couple of wooden cases, filled them with paintings and photographs and went up to London "to see if he couldn't do anything with them," according to Mabel. The dealers were not interested and Fripp remained unrecognised except by a circle of admirers and friends who received each year his brilliant Christmas card caricatures.
Hopefully his exhibition will spark more memories of Fripp, just as the gallery did for Heywood Sumner earlier this year.
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