Where Myth Gets Rewritten And Nothing Stays In Place

Hinton Magazine
5 hours ago
3 min read

At The Sherborne, history is not being preserved quietly. It is being interrupted, reworked, and in places, openly challenged. Of Myths and Murals does not treat the past as something fixed. Instead, it places it in direct conversation with artists who have no interest in leaving it untouched.

At the centre of that tension sits Sir James Thornhill, whose mural The Calydonian Boar Hunt has held its position inside the building for three centuries. It is everything you would expect from baroque painting. It is dramatic, controlled, full of movement that still feels contained within its own authority. The kind of work that defines a space rather than responding to it.

What changes here is not the mural itself, but what is placed alongside it.

Sir Quentin Blake steps into that same space with The Joy of the Frog, and the shift is immediate. Where Thornhill builds tension through myth and pursuit, Blake removes the weight entirely and replaces it with something far less predictable. His mural does not sit still. It moves, expands, and reshapes itself as you climb the staircase, pulling you into a sequence that feels closer to theatre than painting.

The frog appears first at ground level, almost quietly, surrounded by fragments that suggest something about to begin. As you move upwards, the structure breaks open. Musicians are lifted into the air, performers drift across the space, and scenes begin to overlap in a way that resists any single reading. By the time you reach the top, the narrative has stretched into something deliberately absurd, with the frog reappearing as if the entire ascent has been building towards a moment that refuses to take itself too seriously.

What makes it work is not the contrast alone. It is the way both murals commit fully to their own language. Thornhill leans into spectacle and control, while Blake allows for humour, instability, and a kind of looseness that never feels accidental. Together, they reshape the building into something less formal and far more alive.

That sense of instability continues beyond the staircase. Elsewhere in the building, The Baron Gilvan takes Ovid’s Metamorphoses and strips it of its classical distance. His exhibition does not present myth as something elevated or remote. It pulls it into something immediate, uncomfortable, and at times deliberately awkward.

The paintings are placed throughout the ground floor in spaces that feel slightly off balance. A vestibule, a library, areas that do not immediately announce themselves as exhibition rooms. The effect is intentional. You do not enter the work in a controlled way. You encounter it.

Within those paintings, transformation is not graceful. Figures shift, stretch, fracture. Faces emerge and disappear. Bodies refuse to hold their form. Metamorphoses becomes less about mythological storytelling and more about psychological states that feel recognisable now. Narcissus is no longer just a reflection story. It reads as fragmentation. Echo becomes a voice without origin. Icarus is ambition pushed to the point where collapse feels inevitable rather than tragic.

There is humour running through it, but it never softens the work. Instead, it sharpens it. Admirals appear as clowns. Authority feels unstable. Scenes drift between control and collapse without settling into either. Colour plays its part, pushing between something almost carnivalesque and something closer to decay. Bright tones sit against heavier ones, creating a tension that mirrors the figures themselves.

What holds the entire exhibition together is not style but intent. Every work here understands that storytelling has not disappeared. It has shifted. Myths still exist, but they now sit inside everyday behaviours, modern anxieties, and the way people construct and lose identity.

Of Myths and Murals does not try to resolve that tension. It allows it to sit in the space, moving between control and disruption, between heritage and something far less stable. The building becomes part of that process rather than a backdrop to it.

At The Sherborne, walls are not just holding history. They are being asked to carry something new alongside it, without deciding which one matters more.