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Old Buttermarket Street
Attributed to George Sheffield[?] and Percy Davies 1887
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"The Big Picture", a 7ft x 4½ft
pastel on brown paper, hung in the original Warrington
Police Station in Irwell Street and moved to the parade
room at the new Arpley Street Station in 1901. The
picture was moved in the 1990's to a dryer position in
the main corridor.
It depicts Buttermarket Street,
Warrington looking up to the Clock Tower at Market Gate.
In the lower left corner is a poem signed by Percy
Davies and dated 1887.
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An old
photograph of 1905 (right) shows just how accurate the picture
is. The loading beams of the warehouse in the top left centre of
the picture can be clearly seen in the photograph.
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The small hanging lamp in the centre of the picture is that of
the old Pelican Inn. It can be seen in another old photograph
from the early 1900's.
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"Mr Hunt's on your right"
This stern character is Samuel Hunt Esq,
Chief Constable of the Warrington Borough Police from 1866 to
1895. Also in the collection is a fine clock presented to Mr
Hunt on his retirement.
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Percy Davies was born in Warrington
and after going to sea as a young man became one of the
town's solicitors. He was also an artist and a close
friend of the well known landscape painter, George
Sheffield.
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The painting was made in or just
before 1887 and shows the top end of Buttermarket Street
before that street was widened and the circus at Market
Gate built. Davies presented it to the Warrington
Borough Police. But whereas the poem and its associated
four figures in the foreground are undoubtedly by
Davies, considerable questions have been raised as to
the authorship of the rest of the painting.
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Natasha
Lolljee, Exhibitions & Display Assistant at the Warrington
Museum and Art Gallery, has pointed out that the four foreground
figures are in a very different style to the rest of the
painting and that the background bears a similarity to
the work of George Sheffield, and especially to his painting
"Old Cheap Side" which is in the Warrington Museum.
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The foreground figures are
primitively drawn, very stiff and unnatural. The drunk's
left leg is much longer than the right and both are
twisted out of the body line. Compare them to the small
but deft figures in the background and the detailing of
the folds on the lady's cloak.
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The perspective line of the pavement
in the bottom right is not consistent with its lines
further up, suggesting that the pavement may have been
widened to accommodate the figures.
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The Warrington painting without the figures |
A pastiche of the painting by the
cartoonist John Witt. |
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