Major Leonard McComb exhibition at the Williamson Art Gallery
The largest ever exhibition of work by leading 20th Century British artist Leonard McComb is going on show at Birkenhead’s Williamson Art Gallery & Museum.
Leonard McComb: Nature & Humanity opens tomorrow and runs until October 31. Entrance is free.
The exhibition, staged in collaboration with the late artist’s estate, features more than 60 of his best pieces in various media, from sketches, drawings and watercolours to oils, sculptures and just a handful of his 250 sketch books, and covering subjects from nudes and flowers to still lives and landscapes.
Ranging across three gallery spaces, with a large-scale sculpture in the Slatey Road venue’s foyer, it includes the monumental Rock and Sea Anglesey, loaned from Oriel Môn gallery on the Welsh island, which is made up of 96 individual sheets of paper which together measure more than 10 metres (32ft) long and 3m (10ft) tall and is the largest drawing on paper held by any UK public collection.
There are also loans from Manchester Art Gallery, the Royal Academy, the Boots archives and private collectors among others.
McComb was born in Glasgow in 1930, the eldest of six, and raised in Northern Ireland and Manchester. His father was a master decorator and keen amateur landscape painter.
“My father died the week I was born and Len brought me out of the hospital,” reveals McComb’s youngest sister Anne Lee-Draycott, for whom he was a father figure and to whom he left his work when he died in 2018 aged 87.
McComb stepped up and took a range of jobs, including as a graphic designer in Salford, to help support the family, and Anne recalls as a child being with her big brother when he met with LS Lowry in the Kardomah café in Manchester.
Above: Play a slideshow gallery of works from the Leonard McComb: Nature & Humanity exhibition at the Williamson Art Gallery & Museum. Top: Two maquettes of angels, and their preparatory sketches.
After studying at the Manchester School of Art, McComb received a scholarship to the Slade where he later became a sculpture postgraduate.
He spent much of his career teaching, with 13 years at Oxford Brookes University and six at various leading institutions including the Slade, Goldsmiths and Royal Academy Schools. He was elected a Royal Academician in 1990 and became Keeper of the RA Schools from 1995-8.
In 1999 he was commissioned to paint a portrait of the novelist Doris Lessing for the National Portrait Gallery, although Anne explains: “He said whether it was a snowdrop or a mountain, everything was a portrait.”
She adds: “He believed in finding the beauty in life, and he also fought for the underdog and making it a fairer world.”
The exhibition includes portraits of artists’ models and other sitters against nature-inspired and complex patterned backdrops, including young family friend Philippa Cooper, seated wearing new trainers, a Cypriot road sweeper called Andros whom McComb had watched at work over several days, and a watercolour of Anne herself, painted in 1976.
Above: Leonard McComb's sister Anne Lee-Draycott, who manages his estate, with the portrait of her he painted 50 years ago.
There is also an oil, from 1993, of McComb’s mother Delia, who moved to Anglesey in later life, where the island’s landscape inspired work by her eldest son. Daughter Anne recalls it was Delia who carefully numbered each of the sheets which make up Rock and Sea Anglesey.
Their mother’s embroidered tablecloths have also been pressed into action by Anne, sitting beneath two complementary delicate floral arrangements which flank the entrance to the exhibition.
Fish are a recurring theme in several works, including a pastel and watercolour design which was then used to inform a tapestry for Boots, although an artwork depicting mackerel - which McComb created after he had a feeling or vision while holding a pair of JMW Turner’s spectacles - has recently been purchased by a private collector.
The exhibition also features several sculptures, including a life-size polished bronze figure of a man – part of a series, Portrait of a Man Standing, which McComb created over the course of two decades, along with two damaged maquettes of angels which were painstakingly restored on an episode of BBC’s The Repair Shop earlier this year.
Williamson Art Gallery curator Josh Mackarell says: “We’re delighted to be able to bring this major exhibition of an important and celebrated artist to Merseyside. McComb’s work is not just relevant to our modern times for its beauty and technical brilliance, but also because its environmental outlook speaks to the fundamental debates of our time.”
In addition to the Leonard McComb estate, the exhibition is also a collaboration with Art Space Gallery| Michael Richardson Contemporary Art.
Leonard McComb: Nature & Humanity is at the Williamson Art Gallery & Museum from August 14 to October 31. More HERE