The year 2025 marks the centenary of the birth of Arthur Berry, one of North Staffordshire's most renowned and distinctive cultural figures. Often called the 'Lowry of the Potteries', Berry was not only an artist but also a writer, broadcaster and teacher. Berry was a keen observer of contemporary urban life. His early childhood memories, the North Staffordshire moorland landscape and pit villages, public houses and urban streetscapes, were all sources of inspiration for his recorded monologues, writings and art.
The son of a publican's daughter and a colliery bricklayer, Berry was born in Smallthorne, near Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent – the 'mother' town of the Staffordshire Potteries and the 'Bursley' in Arnold Bennett's 1902 novel Anna of the Five Towns. A disability in his right arm had effectively 'saved' him from the pit and manual labouring jobs, steering him at an early age to pursue an artistic career. Aged 13, Berry enrolled at the local Burslem School of Art where he was taught by pottery designer Gordon Mitchell Forsyth. Forsyth was the tutor of a notable student cohort at the school whose number included ceramicists and designers such as Susie Cooper, Glyn Colledge, Clarice Cliff and Charlotte Rhead.
Berry went on to study at the Royal College of Art, evacuated during wartime to Ambleside, Cumbria. He later returned to Staffordshire to teach at the Burslem School of Art, which was later incorporated into the Polytechnic of North Staffordshire, where he was Head of Painting until his retirement in 1985.
The post-war London art scene was a particularly formative and inspiring experience for the young artist, providing opportunities to visit exhibitions of modern European masters such as Van Gogh and Picasso. Berry's contact with 'the two Roberts' – Ayrshire-born painters Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun, stars of the 1940s London art world – would also influence his artistic practice.
Also influential was art brut (raw or rough art) which struck a personal chord with Berry: a form of intuitive or deliberately naïve expressionism. The term was coined in the 1940s by the French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe unconventional art created outside the boundaries of mainstream culture, inspired by those without formal art training. Dubuffet's work often features mixed media with scratched or gouged lines running across the surface of the canvas, such as his Large Black Landscape (Grand Paysage noir).
Berry's painting, Untitled (Ship at Sea) is clearly inspired by this technique.
Likewise is Berry's Stoke Moon, in which the scored and thickly painted surface imbues the moon with a pulsating, expressionistic effect against the night sky over the terrace streets below.
Berry's long-held interest in local urban life is a constant theme throughout his work, highlighted by this early watercolour in our collection, Slum Backyard, painted when he was around 17 years old.
This interest was to become a rich seam of inspiration for his creative and artistic output. The 'ordinariness' of everyday life is a common focus in his distinctive paintings, often populated by figures characterised by a sense of the dark-humoured macabre. They can range from the strange and unsettling – such as The Good Son, which depicts a corpse-like child alongside a man with a rictus grin – to the melancholic in The Dead Tree, with its figure set against a bleak moorland landscape, empty except for a bare, pitchfork-shaped tree.
Berry's drawings and prints in The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery collection represent a diverse range of subjects. Two of these – Christ on the Cross (above) and The Raft – bring to mind subject matters usually depicted in history paintings (traditionally revered as the highest form of painting), which often have a cast of characters portraying an important historical, religious or mythical event; for example, elements of Berry's The Raft has echoes of the dramatic Romantic painting The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault.
Berry's scratchy, layered and cross-hatched lines delineate the human figures in both of these works. Another of Berry's etchings, The Blind Leading the Blind, especially conveys this. Evoking his painterly technique, the infinite chain of figures clasp each other: appearing to have no end, they trudge along a winding path below the murky terraced streets.
The praying figure on the right-hand side of the print suggests that Berry may have drawn inspiration from Christ's parable for the title: 'Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.' (Matthew 15:14). Bearing in mind Berry's celebrated reputation for social commentary, this is likely his darkly humorous response to the parable, which cautions those ill-informed placing themselves in charge of those who are equally ignorant.
In his 1986 biography, A Three and Sevenpence Halfpenny Man, Berry expressed feeling disconnected from the contemporary modern art world, although he clearly engaged with it and responded to it. In his thought-provoking 2021 monograph, Arthur Berry: A Ragged Richness, Peter Davies highlights that Berry was a man of personal as well as artistic contradictions, 'that saw [his] primitive, naïve and idiosyncratic instincts co-exist with a cosmopolitan intellectualism and sophistication'. Perhaps these contradictions endow Berry's work with a compelling and lasting creative legacy.
Samantha Howard, Curator of Art, The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery