Lady Drury's Closet

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.

[2] They originally decorated a painted closet, about 7 feet (2.1 m) square, adjacent to a bedroom in Hawstead Place, near Bury St Edmunds.

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.

[4] 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.

[5] 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.