STOUR MUSIC FESTIVAL

John Ward played an essential part in the first years of Stour Music Festival. One of the most important early music festivals, it was conceived and led by the renowned countertenor Alfred Deller, who lived three and a half miles away from Bilting. Ward had painted Deller backstage in Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer's Night Dream, and was one of the first collaborators of the Stour Music Festival. In its early years, the festival included an exhibition of paintings, and Ward illustrated the brochures, including the festival logo and advertising. The friendships around Stour Music lasted his whole life.

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"Stour Music is the most satisfying Art movement I ever had the good fortune to belong to. What impressed me was that you didn't have to be a musician or even musical, Alfred's vision held room for all. I was to organise an exhibition of painting, illustrate the programmes, do advertising drawings to help the funds and enlist friends whose talents would serve... Lovely, glorious days."

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William, Ward's eldest son, recalled that "the Stour Music exhibitions were the result of much good-natured begging and borrowing from John's friends and fellow Royal Academicians. With the help of two of his great friends, Gordon Davies and Gerald Norden, works were gathered from around the country and displayed on screens scrounged from somewhere or other. I only suppose that Gerald Norden's position as Principal of the Folkestone School of Art was entirely coincidental. The exhibitions were serious shows with works from established artists of the day, including Carel Weight, Gwynne-Jones and Peter Greenham. Mostly the pictures were representative, but abstracts did appear from time to time. Some years later when I had been called for picture-sitting duties, a very cross Academician came over and asked who had hung the show. I said that I had helped, to which he replied that had we mixed up the titles of his two pictures but we had also hung one of them upside."