Central Art Gallery

The painting sparked Rutherford’s career as a TV artist and presenter, BBC producer Cecil Madden spotting his remarkable facility drawing and creating a series of programmes over the next 20 years to showcase his talents as a draughtsman.

From the very beginning of Harry Rutherford’s artistic career in the early 1920s he was fascinated by the glamour of the stage. He was encouraged in his passion by Walter Sickert, the most important British artist to paint the music hall and arguably the most influential artist of his day, who acknowledged Rutherford as his ‘intellectual heir’.

Rutherford is well known today as a major Northern artist whose paintings of mill girls, factories, street and pub scenes are highly sought after. This exhibition shows the full range of his work but also highlights his role as a chronicler of the birth of TV. Rutherford painted the first live broadcasts from concert halls and also documented the transition of many theatres to cinemas as music hall slowly died out. He painted a number of portraits of celebrities, including bull fighters, actors, musicians and sporting heroes, many of which will be seen together for the first time in over thirty years.