Harold Riley, who died last year, had an association with Salford Museum and Art Gallery dating back as far as 1945 when it became the first institution to buy one of the then 11-year-old’s paintings. As such, it’s an especially fitting locale for this retrospective overview, bringing together a representative selection of his works. 

His artistic gifts, displayed across Every Line is Me with a breadth that’s neither immune to influence nor subsumed by it, are beyond dispute. Arguably, however, it’s his talent for forging and developing relationships that sets him apart from his contemporaries.

Most obviously, of course, there’s his devotion to Salford itself. Rendered from the perspective of a native, his paintings of the city frequently reveal details that convey his familiarity with its thoroughfares and ginnels, depicted with a warmth that resists outsider stereotypes of Northern grimness. George Street, Swinton, for instance, depicts an end terrace, stoic in the face of encroaching redevelopment, its interior vibrant with colouring book pastels that resist the clichés of monochrome. Likewise, the glow of a freshly lit cigarette seems to light up the tableau of Mother And Child, like a displaced secular Sacred Heart.

Second only to this attachment to the city of his birth was a steadfast friendship with L.S. Lowry, fostered in the face of a shared vocation in chronicling the working class lifeblood of its cobble and concrete arteries. A more private, less gregarious individual, Lowry nonetheless allowed himself to be captured by Riley, on film and on canvas, on a number of occasions across the years of their association. Perhaps the most evocative of these portraits, Lowry Walking On Swinton Moss, catches the raincoat-wearing artist in muted oils with his back turned away from the viewer, hands clasped behind him, cradling his spectacles. Walking away in silence, the figure he cuts prefigures that of Ian Curtis in the music press photography that Lowry would not, in fact, live to see. Revelling in his friend’s influence, Riley’s painting The Globe is every inch a homage to Lowry, unashamedly advertising the fact through the insertion of a placard-carrying ‘matchstalk man’ proclaiming words to that effect.

Other Salford lads who made their name beyond the embrace of the Irwell are represented. There are fine likenesses of Walter Greenwood, author of Love On The Dole, and Albert Finney on the threshold of his stardom in 1961, old beyond his chronological years playing the title role in John Osborne’s Luther.

While his commissioned likenesses are, in some respects, of lesser interest, the exception to this rule is one that best exemplifies how Riley’s ability to develop a reciprocal relationship with his subjects deepens the effect of his pen and brush. A 1996 study of Nelson Mandela is all the more remarkable in light of the knowledge that Riley was the only artist who the South African leader consented to sit for. Mandela was an amateur painter himself, and there’s a sense in which the creation of his portrait was a collaborative process; the finished work being sold to support work with children in his country’s townships.

If the study of Mandela is evocative, the effect might be said to owe something to the viewer’s pre-existing sympathy for his resolve in the face of oppression. Still more remarkable, however, is Riley’s depiction of those unadorned by the glitter of renown. A portrait of the purportedly reclusive Alice Fairweather, in its respect for her reserve, conveys something of the dignity of her character. More affecting still is The Patient, Riley’s study of his father prior to his death. Framed in oils and bandages, he carries his frailty with an almost Shakespearian nobility, even as the darkness encroaches. Tender, empathetic and unsparing, it’s the best of Riley, the arresting centre of a retrospective that marks out the space he staked out for himself, at the very heart of Salford.

By Desmond Bullen    

All images, including the main image: credit Harold Riley archive

Every Line is Me – A Celebration of Harold Riley is at Salford Museum and Art Gallery until April 27, 2025. For more information, click here.