New exhibitions on show at Touchstones

Helen Bradley's 'Going Home Through Alexander Park'.

Touchstones Rochdale has announced an exhibition of paintings by the artist Helen Bradley (1900-1979).

Created from the age of 65 until her death in 1979, Helen Bradley’s paintings of her Edwardian childhood have been popular with generations of children and adults alike. Her bright pictures with their own delightful narratives memorably reflect life in Edwardian England - market day, an outing to the seaside, fairgrounds and races, picnics and woodland walks.

Helen’s family and friends repeatedly appear: three maiden aunts with their sweeping skirts, their friend Miss Carter (who always wore pink), Mr Taylor the bank manager and the dogs, Gyp and Barney, along with Helen and her brother and their mother and father.

Ms Bradley, who had been interested in art all her life, only began to paint in her later years in response to her grandchildren’s questions about what her life was like as a child. This was the start of a prolific career with her work being exhibited and collected internationally. In addition to the paintings, four books of her paintings and the stories which accompanied them were published.

This exhibition of over thirty-five original paintings is taken from a private collection and will be accompanied by Edwardian objects from the Arts & Heritage Service collections and other loans including a set of the books.

Fun family friendly activities linked to the paintings will help bring them to life for younger visitors in addition to several bookable workshops for families in partnership with the Library Service and Parks Service.

The exhibition runs from Saturday 21 March until Sunday 14 June and admission is free.

A second new exhibition 'En Plein Air: British Impressionist paintings' has also been announced.

This exhibition from the Art Gallery’s permanent collection focuses on British artists who, during the late 1870s and 1880s, began to take inspiration from artistic trends in France for painting the natural, rural environment in a realistic style.

These artists, sometimes referred to as ‘British Impressionists’, had typically worked in France and had been influenced primarily, not by the French Impressionists such as Monet or Renoir, but by the practice of painting en plein air or out of doors as exemplified by the French artist Jules Bastien-Lepage. He advocated painting even large-scale canvases out of doors rather than in the studio.

Associated with painting en plein air was the concept of the artists’ colony, usually a rural village where artists came together to live and work. In France artists were drawn to the villages of Barbizon and Grez-sur-Loing in the countryside outside Paris as well as villages in Brittany amongst other places. In Britain, three main artists’ colonies developed; at Staithes in North Yorkshire and Newlyn and St Ives in Cornwall.

Paintings by artists associated with the en plein air movement are a strength of the Art Gallery’s permanent collection, including works by Rochdale-born Edward Stott and Middletonians Frederick William Jackson and James Booth as well as other key British artists from the time including Laura Knight, Harold Knight, Henry Herbert La Thangue and Dorothea Sharp.

There are fun hands-on activities in the exhibition to engage younger visitors with the artworks on display.

The exhibition runs from 14 March to 6 September and admission is free.

Touchstones Rochdale is managed by the Link4Life Cultural Trust and is located on The Esplanade, Rochdale, OL16 1AQ. We are open Monday to Saturday 10am – 5pm, Sundays and Bank Holidays 12noon – 4:30pm.