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Sir C J Holmes at Samlesbury Hall

The Long Gallery, annex and Southworth Rooms now host the work of Sir Charles Holmes

These works have a twofold interest for Lancashire people; in the first place Sir Charles Holmes was one of the few notable artists born in Lancashire, his mother was a member of a well known Preston family and he was born in Preston in 1868.

He had an extraordinarily varied career.

After a conventional education at Eton and Oxford he entered the publishing trade and was at one time the business manager of Hacon and Ricketts , the producers of the then well known Vale Press.

Afterwards in rapid succession he became editor of the Burlington magazine, Slade professor of art at Oxford, author of numerous books on Art, and finally Director of the National Gallery.

He was first to discover the pictorial possibilities of factories in the industrial North and found that chimneys lent themselves as happily to composition as the towers or columns sought out by Romans in the past. The ten pictures of the Blackburn district painted for Samlesbury Hall have an air of placidity, of sunlit calm and perfect balance hardly in accordance with the habitual bustle and squalor of industrial life.

The watercolour drawings were taken from his sketchbooks and include subjects ranging from the Alps to Rome and the English North country hills and Yorkshire iron works. The etchings are early work, which were issued in a limited edition after his death.

It is believed that nowhere in England is there such an exhibition of an artist in three mediums.

The exhibition is now available to see at Samlesbury Hall near Preston.