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Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot
1886-1911 British

Source: Tate Online Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot was a Liverpool born, British painter, and member of the Camden Town Group of artists. He committed suicide in 1911, cutting short a promising career.

"Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot was born on 19 July 1886 in Liverpool. He was the second son in a family of five children born to his father, William Henry Lightfoot, and his mother and namesake, Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot, née Lindsay. His mother had acquired her unusual name on the wishes of her sea captain father who prior to being lost at sea during a voyage and, expecting a boy, had left instructions that the baby should be named Maxwell Gordon. The name was bestowed upon the newborn in his memory despite the fact that she was a girl. Lightfoot’s father earned a living as an insurance agent, a commerical traveller and subsequently as a pawnbroker. The family later moved to Helsby in Cheshire and in 1901, aged fifteen, Lightfoot begun his training in art at Chester Art School. In 1905 the family moved back to Liverpool and Lightfoot attended evening classes at the Sandon Studios which were then under the directorship of Gerard Chowne (1875-1917), a flower painter in the style of Henri Fantin Latour, and J. Herbert McNair (1868-1955), one of the ‘Glasgow Four’, along with his wife Frances MacDonald, her sister Margaret and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Around the same time Lightfoot was able to employ his talents for drawing and design as an apprenticed chromolithographer at the firm of Turner and Dunnett, commercial printers who produced seed catalogues.

Lightfoot cherished greater ambitions beyond a career designing advertisements for seeds. In 1907, aged twenty-one, he took the advice of Gerard Chowne and moved to London to study at the Slade School, the training ground for so many of the leading figures of British art at this time.[1] Lightfoot’s fellow students who were to become well known included C.R.W. Nevinson (1889-1946), Stanley Spencer (1891-1959), Edward Wadsworth (1889-1949) and Mark Gertler (1891-1939). Despite the high standard of competition from his peers, Lightfoot was clearly able to hold his own as one of the most talented draughtsman of his year. In 1908 he was awarded a first prize for figure painting for some drawings of male nudes, and in 1909-10 won the Melville Nettleship prize for Figure Composition.

On leaving the Slade in 1910 Lightfoot formed a reputation as a talented painter with an idiosyncratic style and subject matter. He generally painted atmospheric pastoral landscapes and stylised figure compositions, drawing in pen and ink and watercolour as well as painting in oil. He became particularly fond of the effects of brown ink, creating dramatic, slightly sinister sepia illustrations of figures or trees, and Tate’s one work by the artist is probably from this period. The theme of mother and child came to dominate his art and he produced a number of paintings of this subject which are sensitive and well observed portraits. During the same year Lightfoot began to gain some public recognition. He exhibited in the black and white section of the Liverpool Autumn Exhibition and showed three landscapes at the Winter Exhibition of New English Art Club.

It was probably these landscapes that caught the attention of Spencer Gore who subsequently introduced him to the circle of artists who showed their work at 13 Fitzroy Street. Although he does not seem to have participated much in their ‘Saturday Afternoon At Homes’. He was invited to become one of the youngest of the original sixteen members of the Camden Town Group but the four works which he showed at the first Camden Town Exhibition in June 1911, Mother and Child (private collection),[2] Boy with a Hoop. Frank (private collection),[3] On Luddery Hill (probably Cows and Calves in a Field, private collection),[4] and A Child Playing with a Ball (private collection),[5] demonstrate that his work was stylistically and thematically quite distinct from the main Camden Town impetus. After the exhibition, Lightfoot resigned from the group and his place was later taken up by Duncan Grant.

Lightfoot’s art and career is overshadowed by his premature and tragic death. In December 1910 he had met Lilian Kate Thompson, an artist’s model. They became engaged a few months later but for some reason his parents disapproved of the match. Apparently the emotional strain proved too much for him and on 27 September 1911, the night before he was due to visit Liverpool to introduce his fiancée to his family, he cut his own throat with a razor and died of his injuries. He was twenty five years of age. The inquest passed a verdict of ‘Suicide whilst of Unsound Mind’. Despite the fact that he was supposedly preparing for an exhibition of his work to be held at the Carfax Gallery, no paintings were found in his studio after his death and it is possible that Lightfoot destroyed them all before killing himself. His obituary in the Times on 2 October 1911 mourned the loss of a gifted painter who ‘showed extraordinary promise of a brilliant future’. There are only a few of Lightfoot’s works in public collections. The greatest number is to be found in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, where the only solo exhibition of his art was held in 1972.

Bibliography Gail Engert, Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot 1886-1911, exhibition catalogue, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool 1972 Mary Bennett, Merseyside Painters, People and Places: Catalogue of Oil Paintings, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool 1978 The Painters of Camden Town, exhibition catalogue, Christie’s, London 1988 Wendy Baron, Perfect Moderns: A History of the Camden Town Group, Aldershot and Vermont 2000

[1] R.F. Bisson, The Sandon Studios Society and the Arts, Liverpool 1965, p.33

[2] Reproduced in The Painters of Camden Town, exhibition catalogue, Christie’s, London 1988, no.88 [3] Ibid., no.89 [4] Camden Town Recalled, exhibition catalogue, Fine Art Society, London 1976, no.96 [5] Reproduced in Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot 1886-1911, exhibition catalogue, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool 1972, pl.19"

Original Source: Tate online - Tate Collection.