Painting of the Day: Ballroom at the Shire Hall, 1940

Ballroom at the Shire Hall
Bayes, 1940
The Victoria & Albert Museum

This relatively modern watercolor painting dates to 1940 and depicts the grand English tradition of an opulent ball. Here, we see a luxurious celebration in the County Room of Chelmsford's Eighteenth-Century Shire Hall.

This is the type of scene which would have been readily seen at the Shire Hall--men in white tie and tails and women in elegant evening dresses. However, there are strong, individual personal scenes of interaction as well. For example, in the left foreground, a woman in a green gown appears to be either shouting at someone or laughing loudly—not uncommon in either case at such an event.


Designed in the Neoclassical Style, the County Room in Chelmsford's Shire Hall was a frequent location for balls throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Here, the artist Walter Bayes depicts the sort of event which characterized the location.

Shire Hall is also famous for being the scene of one of the strangest events in Early Twentieth Century Society history. In 1938, a woman departing such a dance was killed when her crinoline caught fire on the steps. Curiously, the Coroner's inquest was unable to find the cause of the fire and under subsequent tests, the same dress failed to ignite. Thankfully, we don’t see that scene depcited here.