Outsider art

Artists Ford Madox Brown and Adolphe Valette were two visitors to the city who made a lasting impression on Manchester. Jessica Lack investigates.

Ford Madox Brown and Adolphe Valette were alien artists in Manchester, yet their careers have been intrinsically defined by it. For Brown, Manchester was the setting of his most challenging commission and the realisation of a lifetime ambition, while Valette came in pursuit of the city’s industrial heritage, its creamy grey skies and overcast light. Both artists are the focus of two large-scale exhibitions in the city this autumn.
Brown is the better known of the two artists here; his murals adorn the Town Hall and his most famous painting, Work, resides in the city’s gallery. But the curator of the exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery, Julian Treuherz, argues that Brown is actually under-represented here. “You only see certain phases of his career. I believe he was one of Britain’s foremost landscape painters of the time.” Along with the landscapes will be examples of his design work for William Morris, including furniture and stained glass windows.

The show will also be an opportunity to cement Brown’s reputation as the pioneer of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood thanks to pictures like The Seraph’s Watch, which has been in a private collection and not seen since the 1840s. “Brown was older than the Pre-Raphaelites and the only one to have gone to Italy,” says Treuherz. “He came back inspired by early Italian art and started painting in this radical style which then inspired Rossetti.”

Brown’s relationship with Manchester began late in life when he was commissioned to paint 12 murals in the Town Hall. The project took 13 years, and the final painting was completed in 1893, the last year of his life. There are plenty of entertaining anecdotes about his eccentric behaviour during his time in the city, like the time he smuggled a real pig into the building to copy. Of course it escaped, gatecrashing an organ recital and causing mayhem. “He had to work directly from nature, it was part of the Pre-Raphaelite idea”, says Treuherz.

Adolphe Valette also painted from life. He arrived in the city in 1904 bringing with him the heady aura of the Paris demimonde and French impressionism. For his students at the Manchester School of Art, it was a revelation. Where they battled against the colourless vision of the industrial metropolis he embraced it, instilling a smoky beauty into Manchester’s polluted atmosphere. One of his students was LS Lowry and Valette’s arrival was to be the defining moment of his artistic career: “I cannot over-estimate the effect on me at that time of coming into this drab city of Adolphe Valette…” he said. Born in St Etienne in 1876, just two years after the first Impressionist painting was exhibited by Monet, Valette was well versed in this radical new movement. Yet he was also a child of the factory; his family worked at the local munitions plant. A painting of a working canal boat emerging from the smaze of a factory chimney is imbued with mystical revelation. “Valette was instrumental in transforming the perception of Manchester’s landscape,” says Cecilia Lyon, exhibition curator. “He was the first person to paint its industrial heritage in a positive manner”.

His influence on the young Lowry is perhaps best revealed in a series of seascapes. “You can see it in those dramatic horizons and the lack of detail, and the strength of the paint,” says Lyon. Through Valette’s teaching, Lowry transformed the flat grey expanse of the North Sea into a reflective meditation on his insularity and wariness of what might lie beyond that thin horizon. Lowry said Valette taught him how to look. “Valette would say ‘there is beauty in everything, even pollution,’ and I think that was his legacy to Manchester.”

Ford Madox Brown: Pre-Raphaelite Pioneer, 24 September – 29 January 2012, Manchester Art Gallery, Mosley Street, M2 3JL. £8 (£6 concs, under 18s free). manchestergalleries.org

Adolphe Valette: A Pioneer of Impressionism in Manchester, 15 October – 29 January, The Lowry, The Quays, M50 3AZ. Free. thelowry.com

Images: Tug boat on Manchester Ship Canal © AdolpheValette, private collection; The Last Of England, 1852–55, oil on panel, Ford Madox Brown, Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery © Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery

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