John Chubb

1746 - 1818

Mayor 1788

Blake Museum has reached its appeal target of £123,000 to save over 300 unique historic original watercolour paintings and documents with an important link to Bridgwater’s history, known as the Chubb Collection.

It is thanks to local support and help from a number of national grant-giving bodies that the Museum has reached its goal. The collection was mostly made between 1761 and around 1800 by John Chubb, a former Mayor of Bridgwater and local merchant, although there are also some letters written by his Somerset ancestors going as far back as the 1650s.

There are portraits of Bridgwater people and landscape paintings of the area. For the past 25 years, sixty of the pictures have been on loan from John Chubb’s descendants to the Blake Museum in Bridgwater. At the end of 2002, the family decided to sell the entire collection and offered it in the first instance to Blake Museum.

Heritage Lottery Fund contributed £88,000 in the light of local contributions from Sedgemoor District Council, the Friends of Blake Museum and other local organisations and individuals, which amounted to about £9,700. Other national organisations that contributed were the MLA/V&A Purchase Grant Fund (£15,000), and the National Art Collections Fund (£10,000).Councillor Miss Ann Bown, Chairman of Sedgemoor District Council, said “Sedgemoor District Council is delighted to have purchased the Chubb Collection for Blake Museum, as it includes so many unique portraits of people who made local history and paintings showing how the River Parrett looked 200 years ago.”Jessica Vale, Museums Officer for Sedgemoor, added “The paintings by John Chubb which we display at Blake Museum are crucial to visitors’ understanding of Bridgwater in the late 18th century. We have documents and tombstones that give us names of Bridgwater people, but only Chubb’s portraits tell us what they actually looked like. The way in which John Chubb portrayed the people around him really brings the town to life. He painted for his own enjoyment, not for commercial gain, so he depicted whatever subjects he wanted to. Also he painted local characters who would not have been able to afford an artist to paint their portrait. The pictures have many uses in Blake Museum, and their acquisition is a big gain in telling our visitors about the history of Bridgwater.”

Tom Mayberry, Head of Heritage Service for Somerset County Council, says “The documents in the Chubb collection are no less remarkable than the wonderful paintings. There are account and memorandum books, showing the Chubb family’s activities in a busy merchant town. There are also personal letters written by the Chubbs shedding light on their lives in the 18th and 19th centuries. But most significant of all are the 22 letters John Chubb received from his friends Charles James Fox and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Fox, a brilliant orator, was a leader of the Whig parliamentary group and spoke out for social reform. He knew Bridgwater well. The one letter from Coleridge was written at Nether Stowey in 1797 – at the time when Coleridge was writing one of his most famous poems “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”.

Thirty of John Chubb’s paintings are on display to the public at the Blake Museum, Bridgwater, which is open Tuesday to Saturday, 1000 hrs until 1600 hrs. Admission is free.

For further information please contact; Jessica Vale, Museums Officer tel. 01278 456127 or 01278 435399

Background information about the Chubb Collection

John Chubb was born in 1746, the son of Jonathan Chubb, a Bridgwater timber and wine merchant, whose Day Book is among the collection purchased. As a teenager, John visited relations in London and more than 50 letters between him and his family at this time are in the collection. John wanted to become a professional artist, but his father did not approve of the idea, and eventually he carried on the family business. John took an active part in town politics, and was Mayor of Bridgwater in 1788. The collection includes correspondence from a leading politician of the time, Charles James Fox, and a letter from the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as well as Chubb’s own comments on local politicians in verse.While his father ran the family business, John Chubb had plenty of spare time to spend on drawing and writing poetry, not to earn a living but for his own amusement. He painted not only local scenery, which makes an important record of what Bridgwater and its surrounds looked like in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, but also lots of portraits of his family, local businessmen, doctors, clergy, local Members of Parliament and suchlike. Some of his writings contain witty pen portraits of local figures – and as he was not being paid for the work he did not have to flatter them! Three hundred and sixty sketches and finished drawings were kept together by his daughter after his death in 1818, and, most unusually, have been kept together by the Chubb family ever since.