‘Storm over Wharefedale’. Image: BBC’ Your Paintings’/Bradford Museums and Galleries
The artist, Francis Wall (1890-1981) was born in Keighley and lived in his latter years at Grove Road, Menston, near Ilkley. He was descended from the Listers of Shibden Hall, near Halifax, although his mother had a centuries old connection with the Wharfedale area.
He was educated privately and pre-1914 studied art in London, then at St. Ives, learning from the St Ive’s Group of artists. He also travelled to Belgium, where he studied art with Luyten, a Belgian painter, who lived near Antwerp.
Francis served in the Army as an officer during WW1 and after the war studied art formally at the Westminster School of Art, where he studied under the tutelege of Walter Bayes and Bernard Meninsky. At Westminster he formed a close friendship with David Jones, the writer and artist.
Another close friend was Father John O’Connor, an Irish Catholic (believed to be the inspiration of G.K. Chesterton’s ‘Father Brown’ stories). Father O’Connor introduced Francis to the sculptor, Eric Gill, who he knew well and who had designed and carved a set of fourteen Stations of the Cross (1920-4) for his church, St Cuthbert’s at Girlington, near Bradford. Francis, in turn, took David Jones to see Gill who subsequently became an important influence on Jones’s life and artwork.
Francis became the Honorary Secretary of the Wharfedale Group of painters and painted many Wharfedale scenes (see example above), but also spent time in Spain, Italy, and the South of France painting predominantly landscape scenes characterised by an emphasis on colour and radiant light (see example below). He also visited California where he painted landscapes of the Nevada Desert.
‘Andalusia’ Image: BBC ‘Your Paintings’/ Bradford Museums & Galleries
He was also influenced by the work of fellow Yorkshire painter and member of the Wharfedale Group, Reginald Brundrit. Francis wrote after Brundrit’s death in 1960: “When sanity returns to the visual arts, I think R G Brundrit will stand out as one of the greatest pure landscape painters of the present century.”
In memory of his mother’s connection with Wharfedale, he gave new choir stalls, made by ‘Mouseman’ Robert Thompson of Kilburn, to Addingham Parish Church.
During the Second World War he painted a striking set of murals for the Officer’s Mess at RAF Yeadon, near Leeds, as a tribute to the pilots of the Battle of Britain.
Francis Wall had solo exhibitions of his paintings at Cliffe Castle, the Manor House, Ilkley, and at Cartwright Hall, Bradford. Bradford Museums and Galleries and Leeds Art Gallery have paintings by him in their permanent collections.