RUTHERFORD, HARRY

Harry Rutherford (1903-1985) has often been recognised as one of the unsung heroes of the L.S. Lowry era.

Rutherford attended the Hyde School of Art and studied at the Manchester School of Art taught by Pierre Adolphe Valette, an extraordinary art teacher and an amazing artist in his own right, and alongside fellow pupil L.S Lowry, who went on to achieve worldwide fame.

In 1925, he was the first and youngest pupil to enrol in Walter Sickert’s new school of art in Manchester.
Sickert had, in turn, trained under Edgar Degas, a French Impressionist artist famous for his pastel drawings and oil paintings. Rutherford’s association with Sickert was lifelong, with Sickert calling him his “intellectual heir and successor”.

Rutherford moved to London and to the world of television in 1931, where he presented a BBC programme called Cabaret Cartoons in which he drew various artists as they performed their acts. He then starred in his own programme called Sketchbook between 1950-1956.

In 1957 he became the first western artist to hold a series of exhibitions in Borneo.

After returning to Hyde in the late 1950s, he was elected President of the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts and later taught at the Regional College of Art in Manchester, where one of his pupils was a popular and present Collect Art artist, none other than Geoffrey Key.