PJ Crook MBE, RWA, FRSA – Byron’s Bear and Menagerie

Private View Friday 4th October 5.30 – 8pm. Exhibition ends Saturday 2nd November

We are immensely proud to announce an exhibition with local heroine and painter of international repute, PJ Crook MBE, RWA, FRSA. The exhibition will comprise a collection of original paintings celebrating Lord Byron’s bear and menagerie. Lord Byron, a 19th Century romantic poet, was often described as flamboyant and notorious, mad and bad. He was famous not only for his poetry but also for hisextensive menagerie, including a bear that accompanied him to University in Cambridge.

He had an ever-growing menagerie, which Percy Shelley lists as comprising…“Ten horses, eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow, and a falcon; and all these, except the horses, walk about the house, which every now and then resoundswith their unarbitrated quarrels, as if they were the masters of it…P.S. I find that my enumeration of the animals in this Circean Palace was defective…I have just met on the grand staircase five peacocks, two guinea hens, and an Egyptian crane”. Added to which there were mentions by others of a crocodile, two geese he saved from the butcher’s block when living in Pisa, a goat with a broken leg, a tame wolf, a fox and a parrot.

For a time Byron actually lived in Cheltenham at Georgiana Cottage, where he had a liaison with an opera singer and met Joseph Grimaldi the witty actor and clown. Previously as a child he had visited the town with his mother who had taken him to visit a clairvoyant or fortune-teller; she predicted both the years of his fame and his early death. This year marks the bi-centenary of Byron’s passing.

For more information call 01242 233391  or email Eleanor@paragongallery.co.uk