Sebastian Neal
James Neal was an avenues resident for over fifty years. He moved to Hull from north London in 1958 to take up a post at the Regional College of Art as Lecturer in Painting and Drawing. ‘You’ll enjoy Hull – the docks and the shipping’, one of his former teachers at the Royal College of Art, the Yorkshireman R.V. Pitchforth told him.
These subjects certainly did give my father much artistic enjoyment; he painted many such scenes. The move to Hull saw a noticeable change in his style. The modernist works of the late 1940s and 1950s by and large give way to realism. Those who knew him around this time remark that he cut quite a dash. He immediately became a founder member of the Avenues Group of artists, The Guardian commenting in 1959 that he was ‘undoubtedly the strongest member of the moment, having a touch of the real fire and driving personality which leads up the ladder’.
He painted – and advised others to paint – subjects that were around him, quite literally close to home. He became renowned for painting the ordinary, unremarkable aspects of Hull, such as the ten-foot between Park Avenue and Victoria Avenue, or the drain that used to run in Queen’s Road. One of his Avenues paintings, ‘View from the House’, is in the Ferens.
In his lengthy career, he exhibited over 40 works in the Royal Academy, a large number of which were Avenues views, including ‘Two Doors, Victoria Avenue: Ancient and Modern’ (1965) and ‘Walk down the Avenue’ (1986), which shows the view from his front window. He told the press at the time: ‘There’s a dog doing its business against a tree and a man out for a walk – one of my neighbours – and a group of people gossiping. It’s a typical scene in Victoria Avenue. Your own sitting room is an easy place to paint from because you are not seen by your subjects, or other people, so they are not distracted and you get a perfectly natural scene which is constantly in front of you.’
One of his most celebrated Avenues views—it even sold out as a greetings card—was ‘Snow in the Avenue’. Again, he painted this from his own front bedroom looking right towards the houses opposite. The winter sunshine gives the snow a lovely blue hue that contrasts beautifully with the red brick of the houses. Of this picture, as I think of so many of his works, the words of former director of the Ferens Art Gallery and Avenues resident the late Dr John Bradshaw are true: ‘... Enjoy the view and appreciate the skill behind the understatement’. He had a remarkable ability to convey the atmosphere of a place and, having grown up in the Avenues myself, I feel his paintings of the Avenues do this exceptionally well.
