Just before the local artist, Kathleen Gorell died in October 1989, she donated over 60 portraits she had created over a thirty year period to the Keighley Art Club to dispose of as they wished. The problem was that she didn’t tell the club who the sitters were.
In 1990 the Art Club managed to trace a number of the sitters, but that still left over 50 portraits of local people still unclaimed and unrecognised.
Kathleen lived at 9 Howden Road, Silsden, from around 1975 to 1989, and had lived previously at Bingley, at 11 Westleigh, until she and her husband, John, moved to Silsden.
After the Keighley Art Club’s initial search for the sitters, the unclaimed paintings were then stored in the loft of the club’s secretary, Robert Wilson, for nearly 30 years. After he died, Robert’s daughter found the paintings and in 2019 she donated them to the Silsden History Group.
Not Just Hockney and Silsden History Group are now working together to try and identify the sitters and to offer the portraits to either the sitters themselves, or their relatives, and in the process find out more about the life and work of Kathleen Gorell, the artist.
What is known about Kathleen Gorell so far:
She was born, Kathleen Briggs, in 1911 in Bradford. Nothing so far is known of her early life, but by 1939 she had married John Kenneth Gorell, a police constable, and was living at 121 Bolton Lane, Bradford.
By the late fifties Kathleen and John had moved to Bingley and she had began to study art part-time at Shipley Art and Technical Institute (later Shipley College). At the Institute’s 1957 annual display of part-time students’ art work, the art critic of the Shipley Times and Express (10th April) singled out her work for praise. The painting of two young hikers was described as
… a picture full of movement and feeling very exciting to look at. The brush strokes were full of vigour, somehow depicting the energy of youth, although the two figures were standing quite still.
After Kathleen and her husband had moved to Silsden she became an active member of the Keighley Art Club, 1976 -1984, and it can be assumed that art club members, who sat for Kathleen, probably claimed their portraits in 1990 at the first attempt to identify the sitters after her death.
But that still leaves a lot of people unidentified. It is likely that the sitters were people she knew at Bingley, Keighley or Silsden. Can you help us identify them? The portraits are all unframed, either painted in oil on board, or created using pastels on paper. Judging from the fashion styles, the paintings were made from the mid 1950s onward.
An exhibition of the portraits was scheduled at Silsden Town Hall for the 21st March 2020, but this was postponed indefinitely because of the Covid-19 pandemic. The search to identify the sitters therefore is ongoing and anyone who can identify any of them, or has knowledge of Kathleen Gorell, should contact Colin Neville by email at woodbine@blueyonder.co.uk quoting the number shown bottom right hand corner of the portrait. Relatives, or others interested in the sitter in question, can reclaim the portrait without charge, although a donation to support the now community-funded Silsden Town Hall is requested.
