About
For roughly thirty years either side of 1900, the Hertfordshire village of Bushey was one of the most important places to learn to paint in England. The reason was Hubert von Herkomer, a Bavarian-born artist who rose to become a Royal Academician, a fashionable portraitist and a genuine celebrity, and who in 1883 opened an art school at Bushey that within a few years was drawing hundreds of students from across Britain, Europe, America and Australia.
Herkomer taught without fees for tuition, insisted on drawing from life, and built around himself an extraordinary establishment including a Bavarian-Gothic mansion called Lululaund and a purpose-built theatre in which he staged pioneering experiments in lighting and pictorial stage effect.
Students settled in the village, built studios, married one another and stayed, so that long after the school closed in 1904 Bushey remained a working artists' colony of a kind more usually associated with Cornwall or Suffolk. Bushey Museum and Art Gallery exists to hold that legacy together with the ordinary history of the parish, and it does both unusually well for a museum of its size.
Two permanent galleries are devoted to Herkomer and to Lucy Kemp-Welch, the painter of horses who studied at the school, later ran her own art school in the village and produced some of the most widely reproduced equestrian images of her generation.
Around them sits a collection of works by dozens of other Bushey artists, together with studio material, letters, photographs and archives that make the museum a genuine research centre for the colony. The local history displays cover the parish from prehistory and the Roman road through the medieval village, the coming of the railway, the growth of Bushey and Oxhey as commuter suburbs, and twentieth-century life including the film studios that operated nearby.
Admission is free and the museum opens four days a week.
It is a rewarding stop for anyone interested in late Victorian and Edwardian British art outside the metropolitan mainstream, and a reminder that significant artistic movements did not only happen in famous places. The point is reinforced by the streets outside, where dozens of purpose-built studios put up between the 1880s and the 1920s still stand, mostly converted to houses but recognisable by their tall north-facing windows once you know to look for them.
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Plan Your Visit
⏱️ Recommended Visit Duration
💡 Visitor Tips
- The museum opens Thursday to Sunday only. It is an easy trip from north-west London but not one to make on a Monday or Tuesday.
- Walk up to the High Street afterwards to see the surviving porch of Lululaund. It is all that remains of Herkomer's mansion and looks startlingly out of place among the shopfronts.
- Ask at the desk about the artists' studios in the surrounding streets. Many survive as houses and are identifiable by their large north-facing windows once you know what to look for.
- Check what temporary exhibition is running. The museum changes its shows several times a year alongside the permanent Herkomer and Kemp-Welch galleries.
- Contact the museum in advance if you want archive access. The research collections on the art colony are extensive and are not on open display.
- Allow at least an hour and a quarter. Visitors expecting a small local museum are regularly caught out by how much art there is.
- There is no café, but Bushey High Street a few minutes away has plenty of places to eat.
- Bushey railway station is about twenty minutes' walk and is not step-free; the 142 and other bus routes stop much closer to the museum.
Highlights
The Herkomer Gallery
A permanent gallery devoted to Hubert von Herkomer, the Bavarian-born painter who settled in Bushey in the 1870s, became a Royal Academician and one of the most celebrated portraitists of his day, and made the village an international centre of art teaching. The displays cover his social-realist paintings, his portraits, his printmaking and his restless experiments in theatre design, film and enamelling.
The collection here is nationally significant and is the principal public resource on an artist who was enormously famous in his lifetime and is now unfairly overlooked, which makes the gallery both an introduction and something of an argument for reassessment.
The Lucy Kemp-Welch Gallery
Lucy Kemp-Welch came to Bushey as a student in 1891, stayed for the rest of her working life and became the outstanding British painter of horses of her generation, at a period when the horse was still central to farming, transport and war. Her enormous canvases of working teams, cavalry and forest ponies were widely exhibited and reproduced, and she took over the running of an art school in the village herself.
The gallery holds paintings, drawings, studies and personal material, and it also documents her role as a rare example of a woman running a professional art school in Edwardian England.
The Bushey art colony
Between the 1880s and the 1930s several hundred artists lived and worked in Bushey, drawn first by Herkomer's school and then by the studios, cheap accommodation and professional company that accumulated around it. The museum holds works by a large number of them and interprets the colony as a social phenomenon as well as an artistic one: how students found lodgings, who married whom, which studios survive in the streets outside, and why the community persisted long after the school itself closed in 1904.
Few provincial museums can document an artistic community of this size and duration so completely.
Lululaund and the lost mansion
Herkomer built himself a house at Bushey unlike anything else in England: Lululaund, a fortress-like Bavarian-Gothic mansion in red sandstone designed with the American architect H. H. Richardson, filled with carved woodwork and metalwork much of it made by Herkomer himself.
It was demolished in 1939 and only the entrance porch survives, standing incongruously on the High Street. The museum holds photographs, fragments, fittings and drawings, and the story of the house — its extravagance, its brief life and its loss — is one of the most memorable things in the collection.
Collections
The collection has two strands. The art holdings comprise paintings, drawings, prints, sketchbooks and studio material by Hubert von Herkomer, Lucy Kemp-Welch and several hundred other artists associated with the Bushey colony between the 1880s and the mid-twentieth century, together with fittings, photographs and architectural fragments from Herkomer's demolished mansion Lululaund and material relating to his theatre and film work.
Supporting this is an extensive documentary archive of letters, student records, press cuttings and biographical files that makes the museum the principal research resource on the colony.
The local history collections cover the parish of Bushey from prehistoric and Roman evidence through the medieval village to nineteenth-century railway suburbanisation and twentieth-century social change, with objects, photographs, maps and oral history recordings.
Herkomer and the Bushey Art Colony
Permanent galleries devoted to Hubert von Herkomer, his art school, Lululaund and his theatre and film experiments, together with works by the artists who settled in the village.
The Story of Bushey
Local history displays covering the parish from prehistory and the Roman road through the medieval village to railway suburbanisation and twentieth-century life.
Themes
Time Periods
Current Exhibitions
No current exhibitions. Please check the museum website for updates.