Photographer Martin Ventris-Field collaborated with The Bell pub in Purleigh, England to recreate a series of Old Master paintings using pub regulars as sitters. Peter Dench finds out more…
Community photography projects mean well but can be tricky to get right. Often drifting into a visual language that reeks of amateur dramatics. When photographer Martin Ventris-Field LRPS began describing a collaboration with his much-loved country pub perched atop the hill in the beautiful village of Purleigh, alarm bells started ringing.
Thankfully it’s not another calendar of naked locals with their rude bits obscured by a pint, carrot or candle? Martin’s project was fully attired, recreating twelve of the most famous paintings in Western art history – Girl With a Pearl Earring by Vermeer, Renoir’s Girls at the Piano and American Gothic by Grant Wood among them. It could easily have tipped into parody but under Martin’s stewardship, the series made in collaboration with The Bell pub and its regulars, manage to honour the essence of the original paintings. Some are playful, others more considered, all of them rooted in the social fabric of the place that produced them.
The origins of the project are telling. There was no grant application, no strategic brief, no fixed outcome. ‘The whole thing started about three or four years ago,’ Martin recalls. ‘Someone came into the pub and said what a great background it would make for The Potato Eaters [by Van Gogh].’ The idea percolated for several years The Bell’s landlady, Kirsten Webb (who has an art degree) returned to it with a more developed idea of staging a series of photographic scenes inspired by major works of art, using the pub and its community as both backdrop and cast.
Kirsten was familiar with Martin’s passion for photography and a natural ally. ‘It really took my fancy,’ he says. Rather than a giddy rush to production, the duo spent around six months discussing the idea, negotiating what might be possible within the physical constraints of the building and flow of village life. Martin admits he initially wanted more control. The 16th-century Essex pub isn’t blessed with glass skylights and sliding doors – it’s dark and intimate, far removed from a controlled studio environment. ‘I said I wanted some kind of say over which pictures we did and also where they’d be set.’
As the project ignited, it became clear that this wasn’t going to be a conventional photographer-led production. ‘As things go, I didn’t get much say at all,’ says Martin laughing. ‘Kirsten’s a very singular woman. She knows a lot more about these images than I do,’ he adds. Kirsten knew her pub and her regulars. Each painting was carefully paired to a space within The Bell and to specific people who frequented it. ‘She’d always got someone from the pub in mind for each picture,’ explains Martin. The Friday cribbage group became Cézanne’s The Card Players. The Bell’s Head Chef of 15 years and brilliantly named, Gerald Dumas, transformed into Frans Hals, The Laughing Cavalier. Kirsten starred as the waitress from Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère
Martin stepped in to put his foot down when Kirsten floated the idea of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch. ‘It’s got about 25 people in it with spears and muskets. We can’t do that in this blooming pub, unless we start drilling holes,’ he says. Eventually they settled on a carefully curated selection of artists and paintings that carry cultural weight, but crucially, lend themselves to reinterpretation. The Wednesday lunchtime jazz group stepped seamlessly into Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, the dissected body of petty thief Aris Kindt substituted with a barrel.
To avoid slipping into a game of spot-the-difference, a key decision was to avoid literal reconstruction and focus instead on the essence of each painting. Martin explains, ‘Kirsten wanted the pub to feature, which is fair enough. The pub and the people involved share equal beats with the picture. Not to the extent that one crowded out the other. You want the essence of the painting, but not at the expense of the people or the place.’ That balance between homage and autonomy elevates the series beyond a simple pub project.
Working with pub regulars, friends and families inevitably brought a glut of challenges. Some were confident, others deeply self-conscious. Martin’s experience as a Secondary School Teacher in Design and Technology proved exceptionally useful. ‘You have to take control,’ he says, although he was likened to a dentist more than a tutor. The shoots often arrived with an entourage of parents, partners, friends, all offering opinions. ‘You could have four wives or husbands all saying what should be done. So you just have to say, ‘Shut up.’ Otherwise nothing happens,’ remembers Martin.
Detailed preparatory documents were produced showing the original paintings and explaining the intention behind each image. Arguably works of art in their own right, they had a practical role. ‘They’d often only seen the pictures on a mobile phone. You don’t get much from that,’ he says. Whenever possible, Martin would talk people through the idea a week or two in advance to ease nerves and reset expectations. ‘Some were brilliant and needed no support at all. Others just kept relying on you,’ he says.
The project was technically demanding. Recreating Caravaggio’s The Supper at Emmaus is no small feat. ‘Chiaroscuro was the hardest thing,’ Martin admits. ‘The dark and the light were just impossible.’ He resorted to careful post-production, spending hours in Photoshop attempting to echo painterly textures. ‘I probably only got halfway there, but at least it gives an idea of what they were aiming at,’ he says.
The temptation to over-polish was resisted and use of AI and heavy digital manipulation restrained. ‘I describe my use of AI and Photoshop as quite minimal,’ he says. Where details from the original paintings couldn’t be replicated like an architectural element absent from the pub, he allowed himself some artistic licence, borrowing cues from other works by the same painter or simplifying the scene entirely. ‘You can’t get it perfect. So what? It doesn’t matter. You just go with what you’ve got,’ is his pragmatic assessment.
Using a Canon EOS 5D Mark IV, all the images were shot tethered allowing sitters to see the results in real time. ‘I could turn the laptop around and show them what was happening. They learned from the photos I was taking,’ says Martin ‘We absolutely loved taking part,’ said regular Lauren Wilson-Kerslake. ‘I was in The Umbrellas [by Renoir] and Martin showed us the painting and helped us get into character. It was brilliant!’ To balance maintaining energy and achieving the necessary precision, each shoot typically lasted around an hour. Not always. Automat by Edward Hopper was a night shoot, beginning after the last customer had left the pub and finishing around 2am.
An exhibition was installed in The Bell’s upstairs space that functions as a rotating gallery, offered free to anyone who wants to show work. The only requirement is an opening night, usually on a Friday, with drinks, nibbles and inevitably, a full pub. The opening night was packed and the response exceeded expectations. ‘You could hardly move,’ Martin recalls. A small book, calendars and other modest items were produced and sold at cost raising about a thousand pounds. ‘That was an indication of how interested people were,’ he says. There was no marketing push, no social media blitz, just word of mouth and genuine curiosity.
Photography increasingly feels aggressively commercial or desperately self-conscious. The success of Martin’s collaboration with The Bell lies in taking art history seriously without being irreverent. It treats its subjects with respect without idealising them. And it demonstrates what can happen when a photographer relinquishes a little control and allows a project to grow from the ground up.
‘I’ve got a big smile on my face. And I think that’s the success of the photography,’ says Martin. It’s hard to disagree. The images are infectious. They have warmth and invite you in, much like the pub that inspired them.
Martin Ventris-Field BIO
Martin Ventris-Field is a Maldon-based photographer who has documented life at The Purleigh Bell since 2018, charting its refurbishment, its people and its resilience through and beyond the Covid era. A retired secondary school Design and Technology teacher, he returned to photography on retirement after an early start as a school photographer, gaining his LRPS distinction in 2018 under the mentorship of Tony Bramley FRPS. Working primarily in astro landscape, landscape and portraiture, he shoots with a Canon EOS 5D Mark IV and uses a light-touch digital workflow.
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