Manchester School of Painters

The ‘School’ began life in 1870 and was established by Joseph Knight already a successful painter and etcher. He encouraged a group of younger like-minded artists who were bored with what were deemed the constraints of Victorian art and chose to paint how and what they wanted rather than sticking to traditional rules of the day. These younger protagonists included Joshua Anderson Hague, James Henry Davies, Frederick William Jackson, William Meredith, John Herbert Evelyn Partington, (1843-1899) and Richard Gay Somerset. They met weekly in Knight's Manchester studio and discuss and try out what they all considered 'new methods' of painting.

Most had spent time working plein-air in Pont Aven, Brittany where many of the nascent French Impressionists had worked and much of their methods and style had no doubt rubbed off on the Manchester ‘upstarts’. Partington was so annoyed with the South Kensington Schools method of meticulous drawing from the antique that he opened his own art school in Stockport in direct defiance of London’s art education system. It was at the time based largely on his own experience of the Académie Julian in Paris where masters and pupils worked jointly with a life model. Women were not excluded unlike in London. It took more than a decade before the Manchester School of Painters was accepted by art critics and the public alike. It was short-lived but as yet I have been unable to establish when it ceased as a group.