Gregory Fellowship

The Gregory Fellowship was tenure in visual arts, painting, sculpture and also included music and poetry based at Leeds University. It was instituted by Eric Craven Gregory, (1887-1959) in 1949 when he was Chairman of the printers, Lund Humphries. Eric Gregory's covenant made funds available for the Gregory Fellowship scheme to run for nine years, from 1950 to 1959. When these funds diminished, the University itself provided funds for the scheme's continuation and it continued to run, uninterrupted, for some years. The Fellowships prime purpose was to introduce practising artists into the university where they had few obligations beyond pursuing their own work, for which they received a small stipend. Around the same time, Harry Thubron was appointed to Leeds College of Art where he introduced the Bauhaus-inspired regime of Basic Design. This was a course in the theory of artistic form and composition. All students were obliged to take this course which was soon to become a model for art education elsewhere. Thubron encouraged the involvement of visiting lecturers and the Gregory Fellows' all contributed to the programme. The coincidence of the Gregory scheme with the revitalisation of Leeds College of Art, ensured Leeds’ status as an important centre for avant-garde art practice in Britain in the late 1950's. Recipients of the Gregory Fellowship in Fine Art have included Terry Frost, Maurice de Sausmarez, Hubert Dalwood, Paul Gopal-Chowdhury, Ainslie Yule, Alan Davie, Ken Armitage, Martin Froy, Quentin Bell and Trevor Bell. In April 1980, funding for the Gregory Fellowship in Creative Arts ceased. In 1990, the Henry Moore Institute made funds available to re-establish the Fellowship in Sculpture; but there has been no Fellow in poetry, music or painting at the University for over a quarter of a century.

On Eric Gregory's death, he bequeathed his not insignificant collection art works to Leeds University. The first Head of Fine Art, Maurice de Sausmarez was allowed to choose works which were added to the Leeds University collection. His shrewd selection included work by Matthew Smith, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Victor Pasmore, David Jones and Ceri Richards. The collection now includes not only oeuvre by the aforementioned but by all the Fellowship recipients.

The original gallery at Leeds University opened in 1951. During the early 1970's by a clever reshuffling of limited space and by the efforts of Lawrence Gowing, then Professor of Fine Art and a few senior colleagues, additional space was made available. By 1974 a small additional room had been added and this was to be to be, for the first decade of its existence, simply a venue for temporary loan exhibitions. By the early 1980's, the mood shifted towards a greater emphasis on more exhibitions and therefore more space became necessary to show the university's first rate and ever growing art collection. In 1992, grants from the Henry Moore Foundation, the Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund and the University of Leeds Foundation enabled an overhaul of the existing gallery rooms. Early in the millennium, the university began to explore ways that the dual purpose of exhibiting and studying the collection might continue and also be improved. Architects were consulted and retained and with a considerable input from the Burton family of friendship, encouragement and benefaction,the newly extended gallery was dedicated the Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery in 2008.