Four Paintings at the Walker

On a recent visit to Liverpool we visited the impressive Walker Art Gallery which has a very mixed collection of art accumulated over about two hundred years. It is worth a visit as there is something for everybody. There are even propaganda exhibits for activists, but what museum these days doesn't have those.

My favourite room though was the British Art from the twentieth century and I picked four paintings to feature. Although by four different artists, in different styles, they fit together very nicely as a set of images. There are many period similarities not the least of which is the colour palette, as you will notice. Or, was it just me picking them that makes them similar? Art is subjective after all.

This one was my favourite. Springtime in Eskdale, painted in 1935, by James McIntosh Patrick.

Patrick had travelled to an actual farmhouse, "The Crooks", in Scotland and made sketches. He used those sketches, his memories and his imagination to create this visual story. You can go for a walk around this image, through the main gate and along the lane while you listen to the children's chatter, and the sheep and the calling of goodbye by the mother seeing her son off to school. It is laundry day and the clothes are fluttering in the breeze, while the sheets and linen are laid out on the grass. The winter storms have broken some branches off the tree and one broken branch still lies on the ground.

The lane winds off into the distance and disappears towards a distant lake. The lambs have arrived, and some new leaves are starting to appear on the tree.

The farmer is ploughing with horses, no tractor here yet, and the birds are following for worms. The painting is diagrammatic in style, almost like a three dimensional map. The stone walls act like boundaries of activity.

Patrick was a soldier in Africa during World War 2 where he discovered painting outdoors, changing his future working methods away from studio work, so this may have been one of his last in this style. He died in 1998.

Dundee Courier - Published Tuesday, 5 May 1936

HONOUR FOR DUNDEE ARTIST

A notable honour has come to Mr M'Intosh Patrick, the Dundee artist. He has been

invited to send to the 36th annual international exhibition at Pittsburgh, U.S.A., his painting, "Springtime in Eskdale," at present on exhibition in the Royal Academy London. At the Pittsburgh exhibition it will be one of a group of 50 pictures representing British painting. The scene represented is a typical Border croft, where William Telford, the celebrated engineer and founder of the Royal Institute of Civil Engineers, spent his boyhood.

Mum is waving as her son joins his friends, and another boy pets the dog while a hiker or maybe a shepherd walks past.

Dundee Courier - Tuesday, 10 January 1939

£260 PAID FOR DUNDEE ARTIST'S PICTURE

The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, has acquired a painting by J. M'Intosh Patrick, noted Dundee artist. The picture, "Springtime in Eskdale," portrays the house where William Telford, founder of the Royal Institute of British Engineering and builder of the Caledonian Canal, lived as a child. One of Mr Patrick's best-known works, it has been exhibited in the Royal Academy and reproduced in many art journals, both in this country and in America.

Purchase price of the picture, which was previously in a private collection, was in the neighbourhood of 250 guineas. In recent years pictures by Mr Patrick have been acquired by the Tate Gallery, the National Gallery of South Africa, and the art galleries of Dundee, Manchester, Hull, and Aberdeen.

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Four years later than the landscape above, this scene in St Ives, Cornwall was painted by Jack Coburn Witherop. Fishing Nets, St Ives painted in 1939.

Witherop lived in St Ives for nine years from 1930 where he met some of the other St Ives painters. Witherop was in the vanguard of the main St Ives period which centred from the late 1940's into the 1960's. During this mid-20th-century era, the Cornish coastal town transformed into the international centre of British modern art. Artists shifted away from traditional landscapes toward revolutionary abstract art.

This painting is an example of that shift happening in real time.

Witherop has painted this scene using Tempera and has simplified the subject matter and used muted colours.

Witherop is the only one of my four artists to have been born in Liverpool and he studied at the Liverpool Art School winning a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art in London. He also worked later as a conservator at the Walker Art Gallery.

The town of St Ives itself is painted in one pale range of various pinks, serving as a stage set or backdrop for the boats in the harbour.

Liverpool Daily Post - Saturday, 16 December 1939

Permanent Pictures

Of the pictures which the Liverpool Arts Committee yesterday decided, subject to confirmation by the City Council, to purchase from the present exhibition of work by local artists, in Bluecoat Chambers, the most important is a tempera painting by J. Coburn Witherop, "Fishing Nets at St. Ives."

There is a distinct reminder here of the figures we know well, painted by LS Lowry. Again these figures, like the buildings only serve a background purpose to give movement and scale to the scene.

Having already made the observation about Lowry I subsequently found this extract from an article of 1957 describing an exhibition of work by Lancashire artists.

(In the middle of one wall hangs a striking picture of a harbour scene by J. Coburn

Witherop. It is not in the catalogue, perhaps not officially in the exhibition but it is a worthy companion to the Lowry in the middle of the opposite wall.)

Liverpool Daily Post - Published Monday, 19 June 1950

An art conservator ?

NOW that the rehabilitation of the Walker Art Gallery is going to start at last, the work of overtaking arrears in the cleaning of pictures will be accelerated-particularly of the Roscoe collection of primitives. This is work demanding the highest artistic knowledge as well as technical skill, and is in the hands of Mr. J. Coburn Witherop, himself, of course, an artist of note. When the Gallery is completed, the committee hope to establish a properly equipped restoration room of their own, and to appoint an official part-time restorer or conservator, a pioneer post which will no doubt be offered to Mr. Witherop if he is able to accept it.

This one, of my choice of four, is the only portrait. Interior at Paddington painted in 1950 by Lucian Freud. This was painted for the 1951 Festival of Britain. The festival was organised as a shop window of the future, moving on after a World War.

The setting is Freud's London studio and the man is a friend called Harry Diamond, a cockney photographer. There is an edgy atmosphere to the scene, from the stance of the figure to the sharp leaves of the plant acting as a threatening border to his face, to the trip hazard rug at the bottom. The figure also has a clenched fist and looks dishevelled, almost as though he has just risen from the floor after a fight. Or as though he is about to defend himself from another attack.

(The green lines along the top are light reflections that I didn't notice at the time)

Paisley Daily Express - Thursday, 19 April 1951

ARTS COUNCIL BUY FIVE PAINTINGS

The Arts Council of Great Britain announce that the five paintings to be bought for £500 each from their Festival Exhibition, "Sixty Paintings for '51," have now been chosen. They are -" Interior Near Paddington," by Lucian Freud; "Autumn Landscape," by William Gear; "Acquarian Nativity," by Ivon Hitchens; "Bicyclists Against a Blue Background,""' by Robert Medley; and "Miss Lynn," by Claude Rogers. All the 54 pictures completed will be exhibited and their tour will include Scotland.

The Arts Council gave the painting to the Walker Art Gallery in 1952, after it finished its tour of the country.

Freud was born in Berlin, the grandson of the famous psychologist, and his parents moved the family to London in 1932.

In 1954 Hugh Scrutton the then Director of the Walker wrote an opinion piece in the Liverpool Daily Post comparing two paintings in the collection that were 60 years apart. His modern choice was this Freud and he describes it thus.....

"THE march of time from 1891 to 1951 is epitomised in the very titles of the two Walker Art Gallery paintings reproduced above- An Idyll and Paddington Interior."

The modern artist by contrast is involved-as in the picture chosen here-in the world of bus-queues, fag-ends and the assorted wearinesses and tensions of the post - war

world.

The art debate of the day was about the emerging of abstract art versus realism and the fact that the abstract was winning. We saw the trend happening in the St Ives paining eleven years earlier. By 1954 Scrutton already feels the need to make excuses for choosing a realist example.

"The reader may object that the choice of the picture by Lucien Freud is special pleading. He may recall in particular the extent to which abstract art, with its absolute idealism or escapism, still holds the field. I do indeed recognise that the arts to-day

are engaged in a civil war, with the realists on one side, and the abstractionists on the

other."

Having admitted however that many artists are still keeping as far as they can out

of the world, I repeat that this Lucien Freud painting seems to me eminently of our time. To put it another way, Lucien Freud's man, and his whole picture, might be described as the visual equivalent of a Graham Greene novel - a small shabby man confronting with desperate courage the drab and prickly present...... It is certainly Lucien Freud's most important work to date; and it is at present being shown at the Biennale Exhibition at Venice, an Exhibition which is of the highest international standing.

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The painting took six months to complete and Diamond posed for it almost daily. Diamond complained to Freud that it made his legs look too short while Freud countered that they were too short. Getting close to the image you almost feel you could trip on that carpet. Imagine the painting without that carpet detail and it would be severely lacking in something important.

I am finishing with a painting that couldn't be more Liverpool, and I chose it before I realised it was by Laurence Stephen Lowry, better known of course, as LS Lowry.

Without his famous stick figures, of which very similar ones are ironically seen in the St Ives picture above by another artist, it didn't jump out immediately as a Lowry. It was painted in 1950, possibly as Freud was painting his portrait of Harry. It is of course the Liver Buildings, Liverpool. Lowry actually did paint a similar view with stick figures in the foreground in 1962.

The view looks across the river Mersey and was included in an exhibition at the Walker in 1973. It was previously in the collection of a Lowry fan, Mr. AD Fisher, the head accountant of Vernon's Football Pools and is on loan from the Alderson Smith family. Thank you to the Alderson Smiths for making it available for anyone to see for free.

NB- There seems to be a lot erroneous information online about rare Lowry paintings, dates, and "million pound" Lowry paintings, probably caused by there being more than one view of the Liver Buildings, so I have used the date and information supplied by the Walker Gallery on their display.

This detail shows the brushstrokes up close of the Liver building itself. It is pure Impressionism. For a tour and history of The Liver Building, see my other post.