PICTURES: LIZZIE RICHES ABOVE: Lizzie Riches’ paintings hold the clues to the treasure of the Golden Caroline – perhaps literally? It’s for you to decipher them!
The paintings that hold the key to a treasure... A fascinating treasure hunt starts this month at Blickling Hall involving a series of paintings, a golden apple and a historical enigma. Bel Greenwood goes on the Golden Caroline trail
T
he creation of the ‘Golden Caroline’, and a series of powerful and enigmatic paintings coupled with a unique treasure hunt sponsored by the Red Dot Gallery in Holt has come about through a series of perfectly timed coincidences. Three years ago, Red Dot Gallery owner Colin Rawlings was given tickets to go to the Royal Norfolk Show. By chance, he visited a stand for the East of England Apple and Orchard Project, an organisation that specialises in saving lost strains of fruit historically grown in East Anglia. With a small meadow next door to his house at the back of the Blickling Estate, he’d often thought of planting a small orchard. It was suggested that he buy some ‘Caroline’ trees, a variety of apples first grown in 1820 and named
KLmagazine July 2012
after Lady Caroline ‘Hobart’ Suffield who had inherited Blicking Hall in 1793 as a young woman of 24. The fruit trees in question appeared to have died out, and the apple had become a ‘lost’ variety – until one tree was found nearly 150 years later near Oxburgh. Colin bought six trees and planted them. Next door to his house and meadow was an 18th century gardener’s and farmworker’s cottage. Colin knew that one of the gardeners on the Blickling Estate would have lived there, and he liked to imagine it would have been the gardener who’d propagated the original
apple tree. He loved the romanticism associated with the story of something that had been lost, and then found again. His imagination was captured. Coincidentally, Colin had curated an exhibition of paintings by Rosalind Lyons Hudson entitled ‘Shadows of Shakespeare’ in the Long Gallery at Blickling Hall in 2010. The National Trust had already said they’d be open to an interesting idea if he ever wanted to come back. He certainly had that idea now and the next coincidence brought him to the perfect painter – Cromer-based Lizzie Riches. “I’d been smitten by Lizzie Riches’ work for years,” says Colin. She had been with the
77