The Kirklees collection is diverse, but at its heart is a magnificent group of British paintings from the early twentieth century by artists connected with the New English Art Club and the Camden Town Group. Huddersfield Art Gallery moved out its iconic Art Deco library & art gallery building in the centre of Huddersfield in 2020 in anticipation of a major regeneration project to create Huddersfield’s vibrant new Cultural Heart. Currently we are operating our pop up Unit 7 gallery in a former retail unit, maintaining a programme of temporary exhibitions with an emphasis on emerging artists pending the construction of a splendid new art gallery building. While the collection is in store we’re doubly grateful for this opportunity to tell you about our pictures.


Art Unlocked is an online talk series by Art UK in collaboration with Bloomberg Philanthropies. This Curation is based on a talk by Simon Poë, Welcome Officer at Kirklees Museums and Galleries, on 10th May 2023. You can watch a recording of the talk on Art UK's YouTube channel.

6 artworks
  • In 1885 Philip Wilson Steer was one of a group of young, French-trained painters – whose work was too ‘modern’ to stand much chance of being accepted by the Royal Academy – who founded the New English Art Club in order to have somewhere to show their work. Steer remained a loyal member all his life. When his friend Walter Sickert was elected to the Royal Academy in 1934 and tried to lure him away, Steer told him: ‘Because you are a **** there is no need for me to be one.’


    In 1892 Fred Brown, a fellow member of the Club, was appointed Professor of the Slade School of Art and recruited Steer to be Professor of Painting, a job he kept until he retired in 1930. For more than two decades Brown, Steer and their friend WC Coles spent the summer vacation together, painting. In 1907 they went to Montreuil-sur-Mer and Steer painted their landlady, Marie, taking advantage of the morning sun to do a bit of mending.

    Quiet Occupation
    Philip Wilson Steer (1860–1942)
    Oil on canvas
    H 60 x W 49.5 cm
    Kirklees Museums and Galleries
    Quiet Occupation
    Image credit: Kirklees Museums and Galleries

  • Were the colourful pebbles in Steer’s Knucklebones, Walberswick (1888, Colchester and Ipswich Museums Service) a sly dig at the ‘pointillist’ style unveiled two years before at the eighth Impressionist exhibition? Steer would have been interested in – though probably sceptical about – Seurat’s scientific theories of colour. He was an instinctive artist, rather than a theoretician.


    George Clausen – like Steer, a graduate of the Académie Julian in Paris, who had gone on to be Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy Schools – remembered when they were fellow members of the NEAC. ‘My impression at that time’ he said, ‘was of a man with a lazy mind, but gifted with a wonderful sense of colour; he never made a mistake about that. Since those days I have come to the conclusion that it was not a lazy mind but a concentration on the problems of colour, almost to the exclusion of everything else.’

    Willow Tree Farm
    George Clausen (1852–1944)
    Oil on canvas
    H 51 x W 61 cm
    Kirklees Museums and Galleries
    Willow Tree Farm
    Image credit: Kirklees Museums and Galleries

  • Steer once admitted that he wished he could draw like William Orpen, who studied at Dublin Metropolitan School of Art before coming to the Slade. He joined the New English in 1900 and painted ‘Lillo’ Lumb in 1906 for her father, the Huddersfield textile magnate Joseph Lumb. In the painting, Orpen paraded his influences: most obviously, Whistler’s Miss Cicely Alexander. The convex mirror is surely a nod to Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait (Orpen loved painting mirrors). Certainly also Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez. In 1865 Édouard Manet had pronounced Velázquez ‘the supreme artist’. RAM Stevenson’s The Art of Velasquez, published in 1895, hailed him as the first Impressionist, and the book was in every art student’s pocket. Orpen visited Madrid and saw Las Meninas in 1906. Infanta Margaret Theresa in Velázquez’s painting is the ancestress of both Cicely Alexander and Lillo Lumb.

    Miss Annie Isobel 'Lillo' Lumb 1906
    William Orpen (1878–1931)
    Oil on canvas
    H 88 x W 64 cm
    Kirklees Museums and Galleries
    Miss Annie Isobel 'Lillo' Lumb
    Image credit: Kirklees Museums and Galleries

  • Since 1898 Sickert had been living in Dieppe but in 1905 he was visited there by a young painter called Spencer Gore, whose account of what was going on in London so intrigued him that he decided to return to England. Gore was an exact contemporary of Orpen’s, born like him in 1878 and part of the same remarkable generation at the Slade. Soon after his return Sickert declared that ‘I particularly believe that I am sent from heaven to finish all your educations!! And, by ricochet, to receive a certain amount of instruction from the younger generation.’ He started an informal group (including Spencer Gore and his friend from the Slade Harold Gilman) who took rooms in Fitzroy Street where they could store work and show it during weekly Saturday ‘at homes’. There was tea and cake and pictures that cost ‘less than a supper at the Savoy’. This one shows the Terrace Gardens near Gore’s home in Richmond.

    The Terrace Gardens 1912
    Spencer Gore (1878–1914)
    Oil on canvas
    H 50 x W 60.3 cm
    Kirklees Museums and Galleries
    The Terrace Gardens
    Image credit: Kirklees Museums and Galleries

  • Other artists joined the Fitzroy Street Group, including Lucien, the eldest son of the ‘Father of Impressionism’, Camille Pissarro. Born in 1863, he had accompanied his parents when they sheltered in London from the Franco-Prussian War and returned during 1883-84. A Neo-Impressionist or ‘Divisionist’, he was influenced by Seurat and Signac and had exhibited beside them in the final Impressionist exhibition. He settled permanently in London in 1890 around which time he met Steer and wrote to his father: ‘He divides his tones as we do and is very intelligent; here is a real artist!’ His arrival gave the British art scene a new, direct link to the Impressionist tradition. He joined the NEAC in 1906.

    Milton, East Knoyle 1916
    Lucien Pissarro (1863–1944)
    Oil on canvas
    H 53.2 x W 65 cm
    Kirklees Museums and Galleries
    Milton, East Knoyle
    Image credit: Kirklees Museums and Galleries

  • Like many people, institutions grow more conservative with the passing years, and the NEAC was no exception. By 1911 it had begun to reject work by Harold Gilman and his friends, whose Post-Impressionist inspired art was too much for the old guard. He rallied support. Over a boozy dinner at Gatti’s they discussed the possibility of ‘capturing’ the New English, but decided instead to form a new, breakaway society, and thus was born the Camden Town Group. Spencer Gore was elected its first President. Most of the members – including Robert Bevan, Charles Ginner and Malcolm Drummond – are represented in the Kirklees collection, but Gilman’s Tea in the Bedsitter is one of our greatest treasures. Striding out of the restaurant, Sickert turned and waved his arm exclaiming ‘We have just made history’.

    Tea in the Bedsitter 1916–1917
    Harold Gilman (1876–1919)
    Oil on canvas
    H 71 x W 92 cm
    Kirklees Museums and Galleries
    Tea in the Bedsitter
    Image credit: Kirklees Museums and Galleries