Lady Drury's Closet

{{Short description|Series of painted wooden panels}}

{{Use dmy dates|date=April 2022}}

File:Lady Drury's Closet.JPG near Bury St EdmundsCullum, J., The History and Antiquities of Hawstead and Hardwicke (1813).]]

Lady Drury's Closet (also known as the Hawstead Panels) is a series of painted wooden panels of early 17th-century date, currently installed in the room over the porch of Christchurch Mansion in Ipswich, Suffolk, England.Christchurch Mansion (Colchester & Ipswich Museums), Museum Booklet.

They originally decorated a painted closet, about {{convert|7|ft}} square, adjacent to a bedroom in Hawstead Place, near Bury St Edmunds.Partner, Jane, "Vision, appearance and skin colour in the painted emblems from Hawstead Hall," Word & image, 25/2 (2009): 178-191. It is believed they were made for Anne Drury, Lady Drury, wife of Sir Robert Drury of Hawstead and Hardwick, who died in 1624. They were removed to Hardwick House, probably by Sir Robert, before 1615; and when the Hardwick House contents were sold in 1924, they were purchased for and installed in Christchurch Mansion when it had already become the home of the Fine and Decorative Arts collections of the Ipswich Museum.

The panels contain a series of emblems of the kind associated with emblem books—images fashionable throughout Europe for private religious meditation in that age. The original sequence of the emblems is unclear, although the panels as arranged under their Latin "headings" are as originally devised.{{cite book|last=Meakin|first=H. L.|title=The Painted Closet of Lady Anne Bacon Drury|year=2013|publisher=Ashgate Press|location=Aldershot, UK|isbn=978-0754663973|pages=149–153}} In addition to their importance for the study of emblems in general, they are significant because the Drurys were patrons of the poet and divine John Donne, who wrote his two Anniversaries following the death in 1610 of their daughter Elizabeth Drury—namely, An Anatomy of the World and The Second Anniversarie or the Progresse of the Soule.{{cite web|url=https://www.bartleby.com/357/172.html|title=Of the Progress of the Soul: The Second Anniversary. An Anatomy of the World. John Donne. 1896. The Poems of John Donne|website=www.bartleby.com|accessdate=24 June 2018}} The epigrammatic and verbally or visually paradoxical themes of the paintings are, however, linked more directly to the themes and techniques of meditation developed in the writings and sermons of the preacher Joseph Hall, who was chaplain and spiritual advisor to Lady Drury at Hawstead.{{citation needed|date=March 2020}}