About
History of the Trust
The Willoughby Memorial Trust was founded in 1965 by the late Lord Ancaster in memory of his son, Timothy, Lord Willoughby de Eresby, who died in 1963. Established as a charitable trust, its purpose is to support and promote arts, learning, and community life in Corby Glen and the surrounding area.
The Trust is housed in the historic Read’s Grammar School, a distinguished late 17th-century building founded in 1673 and now a Grade I listed structure. Carefully adapted for contemporary use, the building provides a unique setting where historic character and cultural activity meet.
The Gallery
The Willoughby Memorial Trust Gallery presents a programme of rotating exhibitions from March to November each year. The programme includes solo and group exhibitions, themed shows, and the annual Open Art and Poetry Competition, encouraging participation from both emerging and established artists and writers.
As a registered charity, the Trust plays an active role in the cultural life of the area, offering free access to exhibitions and supporting creative engagement across the community.
Artworks in the Library
The late Lord Willoughby de Eresby was a great collector of art and one of the first shows in the Willoughby Memorial Gallery was an exhibition of his art collection.
Four of the works from this collection are on display in the Library.
Henri Le Sidaner (1862 - 1939)
Study for ‘Le Rue Royale’
Le Sidaner was a French ‘intimist’ painter (Intimism was a variety of late 19th and early 20th century painting that made the intense exploration of the domestic interior its subject matter, as practiced principally by Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard). Le Sidaner is mentioned in Marcel Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’. He also created a garden at Gerberoy that he used, like Monet, as a subject for his paintings.
This intimate pencil drawing was obviously used as a study for a larger work.
Harold Stevenson (born 1929)
Portrait of Timothy Willoughby (1961)
Stevenson is an American painter, who moved to Paris in 1952, exhibiting in European galleries during the 1950s and 1960s. A friend, mentor and associate of Any Warhol, he is known for his paintings of male nudes. His large work, The New Adam 1963, (acquired by the Gugenheim Museum in New York in 2005), on 8 canvases, measures 8 feet x 39 feet and was dedicated to Lord Timothy Willoughby.
This lively ink drawing is one of several that Stevenson made of his friend Lord Willoughby.
Henry Lamb (1883 -1960)
Heads of Breton Peasant Women
A drawing in red chalk. Lamb was an Australian born, English painter, follower of Augustus John and founder member on the Camden Town Group. He has works in the Imperial War Museum and his best known painting, Portrait of Lytton Strachey (core member of the Bloomsbury Group and author of ‘Eminent Victorians’) is in the Tate.
Henry Lamb worked in Brittany in 1908, 1910 and 1911 where, presumably, this drawing was made.
John Haytor (1800 - 1895)
Rotten Row: Lady and her Escort (1840)
John Haytor was an English portrait painter who painted, the Duke of Wellington and whose many portrait drawings were often issued as engravings.
This lively drawing captures the movement of the riders as they exercise in Rotten Row in Hyde Park.
