Once upon a time Leeds was a grimy city.
Great Britain may have been the birthplace of the industrial revolution but all it did really was to give us 50 years start on the rest of the world when it came to pollution and grime.
By the time Victoria was on the throne Leeds was a well established metropolis of engineering and clothing production and wherever you had factories and associated dwelling houses for tens of thousands of people, you had smoke, and lots of it, not the "clean" sort of smoke (by comparison) that gets burnt today, but the thick, black smoke that comes from not having any regulations on what you can burn and where you can burn it.
Every town had to have a monument to civic pride and Leeds got their's in 1858, a colonnaded centre of local government and a place to lock up the drunks, the silver and honey coloured millstone and sandstone was soon blackened, as was every one of the buildings in the city centre.
The photo from the Leeds photographic archive at www.Leodis.net is taken from Gt George St behind the Town Hall but its a view I particularly like because of the buildings in the foreground. In the picture, even though its a black and white picture, you can clearly see that all the buildings are black, and thats the way it was right up until the late 1960's when some bright spark at the council decided to scrub away at the stonework a bit and found sandstone underneath.
Throughout the 1970's and after the inttroduction of strict smoke control measures, most of the public buildings in Leeds were pressure washed to reveal some spectacular and beautiful facades of sandstone, millstone, gleaming white portland stone, and terracotta tiling and sculpting.
So here's the quandry.
Top right is the photo of the Victorian or possibly Edwardian street scene in coal blackened Leeds.
Top left is the modern day scene, a watercolour winter scene that I did a few years ago for a christmas card.
And lower down is the acrylic version of the same scene that I'm currently on with.
And I'm seriously thinking - should the acrylic (36" square) one really be done almost monochrome, sticking to its victorian roots ?
Or should I save that for the next painting and do a snowy winters scene in monochrome, literally black and white ?
2 comments:
I'd say save it for the next painting. A snowy monochrome rendition would give it an almost Dickensian air, which is somehow appropriate for the mucky version of the Town Hall which anyone who lived in Leeds in the 60s and 70s would remember.
My uncle was a painter for the council and one of his jobs every year was to whitewash the lions outside the town hall :)
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