Peter Brook: The Yorkshire landscape artist who painted Hannah Hauxwell and her farm

Peter Brook’s story is one of a Yorkshire artist whose work remained firmly rooted in the Pennine landscape while his career reached into the wider British – and international – art world.

Born in Scholes near Holmfirth in 1927, Brook was educated at Barnsley Grammar School and Goldsmiths College, London. After National Service, he returned to Yorkshire where he became an art teacher in Sowerby Bridge, near Brighouse, West Yorkshire where he taught until he was 40 years old.

At the same time he began developing the distinctive approach to landscape painting for which he would become known.

He married his wife Molly and in Brighouse he found everything he needed to test his skills and start his life in art: its factories, stone-built houses, colours, shapes and people.

“His parents were farmers initially and Peter grew up among milk carts, helping with the haymaking and drinking ginger beer made by his grandmother,” says Mike Baggs owner of AC Gallery in Huddersfield and personal friend and agent for Brook, who died in November 2009, aged 81.

“He was quoted as saying he couldn’t remember when he first started to paint he just remembered he always had done.”

Back in the 1960s Baggs’ grandma had an art supplies shop in Huddersfield which was then taken over by his parents. “Peter would come in and buy paints, canvases and brushes from them.”

In 1960 Brook had his first one-man exhibition at the Wakefield City Art Gallery. It was a success and was favourably reviewed in The Times.

By 1962 he had been elected a member of the Royal Society of British Artists and was teaching at Sowerby Bridge Grammar School, building up a successful art department, taking pupils out to draw the surrounding country: “If you want a subject, look around you.”

It was only when Agnews, the London art dealers, began to represent him and offered him a five-year contract that he could afford to leave teaching and become a full-time artist.

Their first two shows of his work resulted in more than 100 paintings being sold.

Further shows in America and Australia followed. In 1974 he was commissioned to design the Oxford University Almanac.

“My parents still supplied him with some bits and pieces but really lost touch,” says Baggs.

“In 1999 we were looking for a good Yorkshire artist and somebody had brought some pictures in for framing as we also have a picture framing business.

"They were by Peter and I showed them to my dad who said he remembered him. Within an hour and half I was on the phone to Peter and two days later I was in his front room discussing his art.

"He had no-one representing him back then and that’s how it all began.

“We started selling a few of his prints and then we tried a couple of originals.”

In 2004 he held the first Peter Brook exhibition in the gallery which sold out straight away.

“He lived about ten minutes from me and we got into the habit on a Friday teatime after work I would go up and have a cup of tea and a biscuit and sit with Peter and Molly and talk a bit of shop and put the world to rights.

"I do miss him. He could be quite cantankerous as a lot of artists can be but he was great company and I really miss him.

“Over the years I’ve just become a specialist in his work. We do sell other artists’ work but Peter is far and away our biggest seller. He was a proper Yorkshireman, very modest.

"He wasn’t interested how much his stuff was selling for, just that people enjoyed it. He used to say ‘I’ve always painted what I like, I am just lucky other people like it too’.”

Landscapes of Yorkshire in oil were central to Brook’s work.

The Pennines, their weather, buildings, villages and changing seasons provided an enduring source of inspiration and became the defining subject of his career.

He did a series of painting of Hannah Hauxwell and her farm.

“Peter would visit Hannah a lot and they became friends. He greatly admired and was fascinated by her and her way of life. We think he did about 30 or 40 paintings of Hannah and her farm.”

His work caught the eye of many celebrities of the day including Rodney Bewes, Frank Windsor, Tom Courtenay – who has nearly 40 Brook originals – and others.

Yorkshire-born Hollywood star James Mason purchased more than 20 of Brook’s original paintings and Brook appears in the television documentary Home James which sees Mason visit his home town of Huddersfield and has clips of him out walking on the moors with Brook.

“Peter didn’t tell anyone about his friendship with James Mason who had a collection of his paintings at his house on Lake Geneva,” says Baggs.

“He was asked repeatedly by James Mason to go out there and stay. They offered to fly them out but he wouldn’t go.

"I asked him one day why wouldn’t he go and stay with James Mason and he answered that they wouldn’t let him take his dog on the plane so he wasn’t going.

“He used to holiday in Scotland and Cornwall and that was abroad enough for him.”

“Peter’s paintings show the beauty and vastness of the Yorkshire landscape and of the destruction of the Pennine life that once was,” says Baggs.

“They show Peter and his faithful dog walking over the land, through woods or towns in search of new scenes or a cup of tea and perhaps being watched by the sheep.

"Sometimes we see Peter standing back and looking at the picture that the viewer is also observing, so we get a chance to see what Peter sees.”

The Peter Brook exhibition is at the AC Gallery, 11 Byram Street, Huddersfield, HD1 1DA until October 3. www.acgallery.co.uk