Edward Harley: The Great Collector

A new Harley Gallery exhibition opening 25 May 2013

From opulence and obsession to debt and despair, new exhibition Edward Harley: The Great Collector follows the fortunes of the 2nd Earl of Oxford. Showing at The Harley Gallery from May 2013, this exhibition explores Edward Harley’s background, family and marriage through his spectacular collections of art, decorative crafts and fine books.

The son of one of the most powerful politicians in the country, Edward Harley married Henrietta Cavendish-Holles - the wealthiest heiress in Britain.  Harley filled his family’s home with a hubbub of activity – writers, poets, artists, bibliophiles would be regular visitors. He was a dedicated collector; his collections were extensive and extravagant as he passionately sourced the rarest and most beautiful things. Harley was surrounded by the finest thinkers and the finest things.

His wealth gradually dwindled, yet Harley continued to add to his collections, often driving up the price of objects in his lust for ownership. In this obsessive collecting, Harley bankrupted himself and spent much of his wife’s fortune, eventually selling his family home and his collections to pay his debts.

At his death in 1741, Edward Harley’s library contained 50,000 printed books, 7,639 manuscripts, 14,236 rolls and legal documents, 350,000 pamphlets and 41,000 prints. Harley’s manuscript collection was sold to the nation after his death to pay his remaining debts, at a price far less than he had paid. These manuscripts formed the basis for the British Library, still known as the Harleian Collection.

Visit the Harley Gallery to see a selection of objects from Edward Harley’s phenomenal collections, treasured by his widow and daughter. Glimpse the obsessive and opulent world of the 2nd Earl of Oxford in Edward Harley: The Great Collector, showing from May 2013.    

The Bodging Project

Gareth Neal working in Clissett Wood

27 March – 2 June 2013

The Bodging Project’s creative adventures and woodworking experiments will be showing at The Harley Gallery, Welbeck from 27 March to 2 June. Visit to explore the relationship between traditional craft skills and contemporary design.

The exhibition will tell the tale of 10 furniture designers and what happened when they went to the woods.

In a series of workshops, The Bodging Project took top furniture designers to work in the woods and to go back-to-basics with traditional ‘bodging’ techniques - which use green, unseasoned wood and low tech tools.

The 10 designers will each show 3 pieces of their work:

‘Before the bodge’ – a manufactured piece of furniture

‘At the bodge’ a piece made by hand in the woods, using green wood techniques

‘After the bodge’, made when the designers returned to their normal practice. As Chris Eckersley explained; ‘although we’d moved out of the woods and into the factory, we’d somehow retained the ‘bodge’ way of thinking’.

Work made by The Bodging Project’s Lloyd Loom Elves will also be on show. Creeping into the Lloyd Loom factory in Spalding, Lincolnshire one weekend, a group of designers were able to play with Lloyd Loom’s iconic twisted paper materials, creating new exciting designs and trying different, unusual techniques. 

Visit The Bodging Project from 27 March – 2 June to discover these designers’ adventures from factories, to the forest, and back again.