Theodore Major Artist BiographyTheodore Major was born in humble circumstances in Wigan in 1908 and it was a place that had a strong influence on both his art and his attitude. He attended the local art school from 1927 to 1932, and taught there for 20 years until 1950.
He was president of the Wigan Art Club, which he founded in 1952, exhibited in Nottingham, Bolton and Manchester, and had solo exhibitions at Carlisle, Blackburn and Salford Art Galleries.
Major never strayed far from his Wigan roots and, in 1950, settled with his painter wife, Kathleen in Appley Bridge, where he lived until his death in 1999.
Theodore Major was a fervent Lancastrian, standing for all the values that a working class lad from a mill-town has instilled in him early in life; he was against materialism and the sale of his pictures to rich collectors. As a result, he kept around 3000 of his pictures back from sale, saying that they were painted for ordinary people, not money.
It's been said that he would have been bigger than that other great North West industrial artist, L S Lowry, if he had sold his paintings during his lifetime, but he stoically refused to adopt a commercial attitude to art. The art critic and novelist John Berger called Major's pictures "among the best English paintings of our time", so it isn't that his work wasn't in demand.
Stylistically, Major was a painter of great variety. As Berger put it, he painted "to disturb and extend consciousness in the mind of the viewer". There are echoes of Lowry in many of his paintings yet other pieces are painted with such a loose freedom and vibrant colour that they almost seem to have come from a different hand.
His paintings are now being discovered and admired by art collectors throughout the UK and beyond, influencing the considerable appreciation that has occurred in the price of his original paintings in recent years.
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