Back on familiar territory

David Hockney may, for most people, be Bradford’s most celebrated artistic son.

But there’s another, rather less familiar painter, born and brought up in the city just over a hundred years ago, who became a Royal Academician and surely deserves to become much better known once more, Richard Eurich.

And now, with a handsome new exhibition of some 60 paintings, drawn from his family’s substantial holdings, going on show in Leeds, it is perhaps as good a time as any to start understanding just why his art is so well worth much wider recognition.

Richard was born in Bradford in 1903. His father, of German ancestry, was Professor of Forensic Science at Leeds University where his research for the Anthrax Investigation Board made him a key figure in the eradication of the disease.

His mother, of Yorkshire farming stock, possessed a deeply musical temperament which Richard was also to inherit. The family house was in the centre of Bradford, close to Manningham Lane, and the sights and sounds of what was then a prosperous Edwardian industrial city made an enormous visual impression on a young boy.

In an unpublished memoir he wrote much later in life he describes “the huge boilers being taken to mills by great tractor engines… the processions led by bands, Mischief Night, bonfires and fireworks.”

All these vivid impressions found their way, sooner or later, into his work but the catalyst that decided him finally to be a painter was, paradoxically enough, given the landlocked nature of his Bradford upbringing, his first view of the sea.

In 1919, at 16, he was taken by an art-teacher (and his wife) from Bradford Grammar School for a painting holiday to Sandsend, near Whitby.

As he later wrote: “The sight of the sea at Whitby, and then in the train running along the cliffs at Sandsend was the climax of a feeling that the chains of war and school had been thrown off”.

The sea became for him “a symbol of a certain loneliness which I have always desired and the sight of the sea has always brought that constriction of the throat caused by something of almost indescribable beauty.”

Some 50 or so small paintings resulted from that holiday and Eurich’s career as an artist was set.

Bradford School of Arts and Crafts was the next step but it was not, in those days, the kind of place sympathetic to someone actually wanting to learn how to live by his paintings.

As Richard later grumbled, the only careers they had in mind there were as teachers or in commercial art, and the kind of conversations about painting he now craved simply didn’t happen.

In fact, his real artistic education at this time happened outside, in his contacts outside the college, most notably a visit arranged by friends of his mother’s, to see the great collection of paintings by JMW Turner then held at Farnley Hall near Ilkley.

Turner instantly became, and remained, a lifelong artistic hero.

That might not sound so remarkable now with the general recognition of Turner’s genius but it was certainly not always so.

Thus, when Eurich then went on to London to study at the Slade School, he found his passion for Turner’s light-filled land and seascapes was not generally shared by either teachers or students.

It was in London’s museums and galleries that his real studies took place. An encounter at his first one-man show in 1929 with the youthful landscape painter Christopher Wood that encouraged him back to painting the sea. Advising him “to paint what you love”, this could mean only one thing for Richard – the sea.

One whole winter in 1932-33, for example, was spent in Lyme Regis, the paintings that came out of it forming a highly successful show at the influential Redfern Gallery in London. Boldly painted and highly original they won him growing recognition and allowed him to marry, in 1934, a fellow painter, Mavis Pope.

They settled in the small thatched house they built at Dibden Purlieu close to Solent. They named it Appletreewick in memory of Richard’s childhood holidays in Wharfedale and lived there until his death in 1992.

The decision to settle here rather than Yorkshire had been driven in part by the need to be reasonably close to the London art-world in which he made his living, but also by its proximity to a coastline that he had come to love as a teenager on visits to cousins who lived near Chesil Beach.

Family stories would tell of him painting there in winds so fierce he had to place pebbles in his paintbox to stop it blowing away.

Appletreewick became the focus for his art – he painted in a shed in the garden for most of his life. Visits to see his parents and sisters in Yorkshire were to continue all his life.

Yorkshire, too, provided the earliest subjects for the period in his life when his public reputation stood at its highest, in his work as a war-artist with two paintings, of Robin Hood’s Bay in Wartime and Fishing Boats in Whitby Harbour being produced as a commission from the War Artists Advisory Committee.

Charming and atmospheric, they were however the prelude to a quite remarkable series of major works that were to follow when he was seconded to work as a Naval war-artist. Works like The Withdrawal from Dunkirk and Survivors from a Torpedoed Ship won him huge recognition when they were shown at the National Gallery during the war and comparison with such celebrated Modernist names as Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer. Churchill even used the latter subject in one of his books on the war. Here, in these works, can be seen at is clearest Richard’s astonishing lifelong gift to enter imaginatively and emotionally into a landscape – those who had been in the actual engagements he painted from the imagination commented, without fail, on the sense they gave of what it had felt like to be there.

That is also the real attraction of the works in this show, for the most part from the latter part of his long and prolific career, the astonishingly sympathetic gift he has for conveying the vivid, in almost childlike terms, the sensations he experienced at the moment he witnessed the often odd and unlikely scenes that make up the central core of his work – the oddly looming tankers, scudding, bird-like wind-surfers and huddled, statuesque bathers – among them.

This remarkable ability not only enabled Richard to create some of the best surrealistic imagery in English painting, it also made him one of the most original and poetic figures in 20th century art.

Richard Eurich: Land and Sea. Hester Gallery, 1 Meanwood Close, Leeds, November 2 to December 5. Tel: 0113 262 0056. www.hestergallery.co.uk