Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot (19 July 1886 – 27 September 1911) was an artist and painter from Liverpool who became known for his depictions of atmospheric pastoral scenes and sepia illustrations of figures. Lightfoot showed great talent as a student whilst at the

Slade School of Art The UCL Slade School of Fine Art (informally The Slade) is the art school of University College London (UCL) and is based in London, England. It has been ranked as the UK's top art and design educational institution. The school is organised as ...

and when he exhibited with the

Camden Town Group The Camden Town Group was a group of English Post-Impressionist artists founded in 1911 and active until 1913. They gathered frequently at the studio of painter Walter Sickert in the Camden Town area of London. History In 1908, critic Frank ...

, but he took his own life at a young age. His obituary in ''

The Times ''The Times'' is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its current name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its sister paper '' The Sunday Times'' ( ...

'' stated, 'All artists and critics.... were united in believing that Lightfoot would have a most distinguished career in the highest rank of painting.'

Early life

Lightfoot was born in Granby Street, Liverpool, the second of five children to William Henry Lightfoot and his wife, Maxwell Gordon Lindsey. Lindsey had been given a male name as a mark of respect to her father who was lost at sea shortly before her birth. William Lightfoot was an insurance agent, a commercial traveller and eventually a pawnbroker. The family moved to

Helsby Helsby is a village, civil parish and electoral ward in the unitary authority of Cheshire West and Chester and the ceremonial county of Cheshire, England. Overlooking the Mersey estuary, it is approximately north east of Chester and south we ...

in Cheshire, where Lightfoot entered the Chester Art School in 1901. The family moved back to Liverpool in 1905 and Lightfoot began attending evening classes at the Sandon Terrace Studios, then run by Gerald Chowne. He became an apprentice chromolithographer with a firm of commercial printers, Tunner and Dunnett, who specialised in printing seed catalogues. Lightfoot continued to paint and had a work shown at the Liverpool Autumn Exhibition of 1907.

Education and recognition

Also in 1907, Lightfoot moved to London to begin studying at the Slade School of Fine Art. Although Lightfoot's contemporaries there included C.R.W Nevinson, Mark Gertler, Edward Wadsworth and

Stanley Spencer Sir Stanley Spencer, CBE RA (30 June 1891 – 14 December 1959) was an English painter. Shortly after leaving the Slade School of Art, Spencer became well known for his paintings depicting Biblical scenes occurring as if in Cookham, the sma ...

, he won several prizes, including first prize in both figure and head painting, painting from the cast, the Summer Composition Competition and a second prize in figure drawing. By the time Lightfoot left the Slade in December 1909 he was painting pastoral landscapes and figures compositions often using brown ink. He produced a number of sensitive and well observed mother and child portraits. Lightfoot exhibited at the 1909 Liverpool Autumn Exhibition and had three landscapes shown at the

New English Art Club The New English Art Club (NEAC) was founded in London in 1885 as an alternative venue to the Royal Academy. It continues to hold an annual exhibition of paintings and drawings at the Mall Galleries in London, exhibiting works by both members and a ...

Winter Exhibition the same year. In February 1911, Lightfoot, along with other former Slade students held an exhibition with Vanessa Bell at the Alpine Club Gallery in London. The Times review singled out Lightfoot and Gertler for particular praise. Lightfoot's work so impressed Spencer Gore that he proposed Lightfoot as one of the original sixteen members of the

. Lightfoot was accepted and showed four works at the first Camden Town Group exhibition held at the Carfax Gallery in June 1911. Two of his figure paintings, ''Mother and Child'' and ''Boy with a Hoop, Frank'' stood out as totally different from anything in the show and Lightfoot resigned from the Group as soon as the exhibition closed.

Death

In 1911 Lightfoot became engaged to a woman he had met the previous year. In September 1911, shortly before Lightfoot was due to visit Liverpool to introduce his new fiancee to his relatives he took his own life at his home at 13 Fitzroy Road,

Primrose Hill Primrose Hill is a Grade II listed public park located north of Regent's Park in London, England, first opened to the public in 1842.Mills, A., ''Dictionary of London Place Names'', (2001) It was named after the natural hill in the centre of ...

. According to

Adrian Allinson Adrian Allinson (9 January 1890 – 20 February 1959) was a British painter, potter and engraver known for his landscapes of Southern Europe and North Africa, and for a series of notable posters he made for London Transport. Life and caree ...

, Lightfoot's fiancee, an artists model, was 'notoriously promiscuous' but his love for her had blinded him to what was 'common knowledge to us all' and the discovery of this 'drove him to the extreme of suicide'. An inquest returned a verdict of 'suicide whilst of unsound mind'. Although an exhibition of his work had been planned for the Carfax Gallery, no paintings were found in his studio and it is thought Lightfoot must have destroyed them.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Lightfoot, Maxwell Gordon 1886 births 1911 deaths 1911 suicides 20th-century English male artists 20th-century English painters Alumni of the Slade School of Fine Art Artists from Liverpool Artists who committed suicide English male painters Suicides in London