News & Views

Middleton Garden of Remembrance is highlighted by English Heritage in its annual review of listings across the country.  The garden and loggia are one of only a handful of Arts and Crafts inspired war memorials.

The whole report can be viewed here…

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From http://www.artnet.com

James William Booth (1867-1953) Booth was a leading member of the Staithes Group. He studied at Manchester School of Art under Elias Bancroft. He was a friend of Fred Jackson. Bancroft and Jackson visited Whitby and Hinderwell to paint and Booth followed. He initially shared a studio with Laura and Harold Knight in Staithes. Booth was a member of the Manchester Academy and the Royal Cambrian Academy.

See http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/artists/james-william-booth

From http://www.fwjackson.co.uk/

Frederick William Jackson was born in 1859 at Middleton Junction. He was one of three children, and his father worked as a photographer in Oldham. His two brothers were Vincent Jackson, a musician trained at Leipzig Conservatoire, and Charles Arthur Jackson, who was an art dealer and owned a gallery at 7 Police Street, Manchester. Charles gave considerable support to Frederick during his career, helping with both money and materials. Many of Jackson’s pictures bear labels inscribed with the address of his brother’s gallery.

Jackson had relatively little formal training. His interest in painting was evident from an early age: as a boy, he went on sketching tours with his friend, the future architect, Edgar Wood. After leaving school, he attended evening classes at Oldham School of Art, where he studied painting under John Houghton Hague. (William Stott of Oldham was another of Hague’s pupils).

John Houghton Hague’s brother, Joshua Anderson Hague, was the leader of a group of young artists known as the ‘Manchester School’. Nearly all these artists had been trained at Manchester Academy of Fine Art and they met together in Wales at the studio of the self- taught, Joseph Knight, in the early 1870’s. They were influenced by the Barbizon School of painters and by Israels, Mauve and Maris, and they made a number of trips to Brittany between 1871 and 1878. The group was making, a considerable impact in the mid 1870’s and Jackson was drawn towards them, being influenced by their choice of subject matter and style of tonal painting. Academy where he attended life classes for six months. In 1880, he went to live in North Wales, where the artists H. Clarence Whaite, Joshua Anderson Hague and Edward Norbury were planning to found the Royal Cambrian Academy. He joined the already considerable number of Manchester artists living in the Conway Valley.

The 1880’s was an important decade for Jackson. He was made a member of the Arts Club in 1879 and a member of the Limners Club in 1880-1. Following the Manchester Academy exhibitions of 1880 and 1881, he was elected a member of the Manchester Academy of Fine Art. Over the next few years, he exhibited a good deal of his work, including two coast scenes at the Paris Salon in 1884 and “two splendid landscapes” there in 1885. In 1886, he became a founder member of the New English Art Club. He did not join its ten more progressive members (including Sickert and Steer) who worked in an Impressionistic as opposed to Barbizon inspired manner, and he did not exhibit at their separate exhibition of 1898 entitled ‘The London Impressionists’. In 1894, Jackson became a member of the Royal Society of British Artists. Throughout the ’90’s, and probably through his friendship with Edgar Wood, he became involved in the Arts and Crafts Movement. It was at this point that he did a number of mural paintings. His affinity with the Movement is evident in other areas of his work – his wash drawings to illustrate works by local dialect writers, Ben Brierley and Samual Laycock for example and his oil paintings of hand spinning and handloom weaving.

Returning from Wales, he went to Paris where he studied under Lefebvre and Boulanger. He remained in France for four or five years. It is most unlikely that he was influenced by those masters who taught him in Paris – they worked in a meticulous and academic style favoured by conservative French art lovers of the day, and totally alien to his own approach. At this time, Rochdale born Edward Stott was also in Paris, Studying under Carolus Duran, and Oldham-born William Stott and Henry Herbert La Thangue were studying under J. L. Gerome. During this period, the work of the Barbizon school painters was being hung in the Salon and Impressionism was at its height – with the stir it had caused still very much in evidence! (The first Impressionist Exhibition had been held in 1874 and the last was to be held in 1886).

After completing his studies in Paris, Jackson visited several European countries, spending most of his time in Italy, in Capri, Venice, Florence and Rome. He also visited Morocco before returning to England. He settled at Ivy Cottage, Hinderwell near Whitby, marrying Carrie Hodgeson, the daughter of a Yorkshire farmer. From there he exhibited frequently at the Manchester Academy and at the annual exhibition of the Yorkshire Union of Artists, as well as in London.

After 1900, Jackson travelled to Russia, France and Italy and, as some of his contemporaries noted, his late landscapes executed in these included some of his finest work. Jackson was liked and respected in his day and praised as an artist. It was generally felt that he could have achieved the distinction of R.A. had it not been for his reticence and modesty. He died in 1918 aged 59 and was buried in his native Middleton.

Edgar Wood was an architect, artist, craftsman, conservationist and town planner. At the beginning of the Twentieth Century, he had a national and international reputation and was regarded as the most important avant-garde architect in the north of England.

Wood was born into a wealthy Middleton family in 1860. From an early age he had a passion for art and spent hours sketching with his friend, Fred Jackson, who later became a prominent artist. Wood instead trained as an architect, though he viewed architecture as an “art”. He filled his buildings with beautiful furniture, stained glass and paintings, often of his own design or making. Jackson and Wood sometimes co-operated on painting murals for his buildings.

As an architect, Wood rejected large scale commercial practice and worked as an artist with a small number of assistants designing furniture, stained glass, sculpture, metal and plaster work as well as buildings. Many commissions were from friends and family in Middleton, Huddersfield and Hale. Influenced by the artistic and socialist writings of William Morris, he saw himself as an artisan serving the people of these localities.

Architecture was changing. The Victorian Gothic style was on the wane and architects were looking for a new way to design. Art Nouveau was a new style based on extended lines and sensuous curves. It was used for buildings, sculpture, painting and the graphic arts. Arts & Crafts, another approach, revived traditional building techniques to create beautiful yet practical buildings. It stressed honest craftsmanship, handmade quality and the importance of art in everyday life. Edgar Wood was a leading practitioner in both.

Wood’s early buildings revived vernacular features, crafts and techniques. They were richly detailed and very romantic. Later, his larger buildings took on strange Art Nouveau forms, confirming his avant-garde reputation. Gradually, a plainer style emerged with decoration carefully placed in specific places.

At the height of his fame, Wood worked with an Oldham architect, J. Henry Sellers, and created a series of radical new buildings of a type unseen before. With their flat reinforced concrete roofs and sometimes geometric patterns, they were among the first examples of “modern architecture” in Europe.

Edgar Wood constantly sought new architectural expression in practical and well planned buildings. Today, he is regarded as someone ahead of his time; for example, his avant-garde designs anticipate Expressionist architecture of the 1920s and Art Deco of the 1930s.