Nicholas Horsfield; Liverpool painter
Hyfler/Rosner
http://www.liv.ac.uk/artgall/gallery/nicholas_horsfield.htm
14 June 2005
Nicholas Horsfield, painter, teacher and arts administrator:
born New Malden, Surrey 21 January 1917; Arts Council
Regional Officer, Manchester 1948-56; Lecturer, Liverpool
College of Art 1956-82; married 1955 Brenda Buchanan (one
son, two daughters); died Liverpool 27 May 2005.
The painter Nicholas Horsfield was one of the most
influential figures in the arts in the North-West. A
southerner by birth and education, he spent almost his
entire professional life as artist, teacher and art
administrator in the contrasting and rival cities of
Manchester and Liverpool. His role as the Arts Council's
regional officer for visual arts in the North-West between
1948 and 1956 gave him an unrivalled understanding of the
thriving Lancashire art scene. Between 1956 and retirement
in 1982 he taught at Liverpool College of Art.
He was born in New Malden, Surrey, in 1917, the son of a
naval officer. He was educated at Charterhouse School before
going on, at the recommendation of the painter Keith Baynes,
a distant relation, to the Royal College of Art in London.
Horsfield's early still-life and portrait paintings revealed
an accomplished use of structure, tone and rich colour.
A short teaching spell in Leipzig was followed by Second
World War service in India and the Far East. Horsfield then
resumed teaching at Dover College, but his knowledge of art
history and his diplomatic skills predisposed him for a post
as an arts administrator and he moved north to take up the
Arts Council post in Manchester. There he fraternised with
painters such as L.S. Lowry, Alan Lowndes and Harry
Rutherford, with the Manchester Guardian art critic, John
Willett, and with gallery owners such as Margot Ingham and
Andreas Kalman. Horsfield sent his own work in to annual
Manchester Academy exhibitions at the City Art Gallery. He
also organised several important surveys of British and
continental modern art in the region.
Despite Lowry's spectacular rise to national prominence
during the early 1950s, Horsfield did not embrace the local
industrial landscape as a theme. Swayed by his friend
Willett, who was arguing that Liverpool art had a more
challenging avant-garde edge, Horsfield began looking
closely at the assortment of abstract or surrealistic
artists on Merseyside. Artists like Arthur Hallard, George
Mayer-Marton or George Jardine seemed to him more relevant
to the wider international scene. In 1956 Horsfield moved to
Liverpool and began teaching at the local art school, soon
to witness ferment and innovation in the form of students
such as the future Beatles Stuart Sutcliffe and John Lennon.
Horsfield's own painting, however, seldom embraced local
subject matter. His rare Liverpool street view Mount Street
(1957) was donated by John Moores to the Walker Art Gallery
in Liverpool. In common with many northern artists, he
looked south for sources of inspiration. A confirmed
Francophile, he gravitated to Willett's house in Normandy at
Le Thil, near Dieppe, where he painted intermittently for
the rest of his career. Deeply sensuous in its lush handling
of paint and richness of colour, Horsfield's partially
abstracted landscape painting reflected his love of French
art, whose history he knew intimately.
While his teaching career restricted the amount of time
available to him for painting, Horsfield did benefit from
several sabbaticals. The first of these, in 1953, was spent
near Dieppe and yielded another Walker picture, Le Poliet
Cliffs (1954). Other sabbaticals in 1961, 1967 and 1973
resulted in series paintings based on natural motifs like
cliffs, rivers or woods in northern France or Poland.
Horsfield served as President of the now defunct Liverpool
Academy between 1960 and 1965. He enjoyed several solo shows
in his adopted city, notably at the Bluecoat Chambers and in
1997 at the Walker Art Gallery.
In 1984 he held a large exhibition at the Château Musée in
Dieppe and at the Camden Arts Centre in London. Together
with the poet Adrian Henri, and the painters Arthur Ballard
and Richard Young, Horsfield was responsible for an
intellectually rigorous Merseyside arts scene that responded
on its own terms to such developments as Pop Art and other
late modernist movements after 1960.
Horsfield's own way forward in his later career was to
innovate in terms of reworking Old Master themes. The
teaching of art history and life drawing in the later years
had an impact on his work, in which a more visible accord
between drawing and painting was apparent. Using a variety
of graphic media, Horsfield made copies of early Cézanne
portraits, of Tintoretto's St George and the Dragon and of
Géricault's romantic Raft of the Medusa. In the 1970s he
learnt etching, and pulled prints at a press installed by
the Sandon Society at the Bluecoat Chambers.
Horsfield was a social man who enjoyed pub life. He was also
a family man and lived with his wife Brenda in the Liverpool
suburb of Crosby. At coastal locations like Blundellsands
and Hightown near his home, Horsfield found long stretches
of sand dunes beneath large skies. The light and mood here
inspired a "local" phase in his landscape oeuvre.
His status as a leading Liverpool painter was confirmed by
his 1997 Walker retrospective, after which he dedicated his
time to helping younger artists and supporting new local
initiatives.
An exhibition of Horsfield's work, "The Figure in Paintings
and Drawings", continues at the University of Liverpool Art
Gallery until 29 July.
Peter Davies