Helen Bradley 1900-1970

As Lord Rhodes wrote so succinctly in 1979, 'Her pictures need no explanation. They portray so poignantly the close-knit community of a Lancashire mill town with its clogs and shawls and 'Sunday-best. They capture, too, the customs and occasions which highlighted her environment. But Helen Bradley is doubly gifted. Not only does she paint by brush but by words too. She describes her relatives and friends and the happenings of her early life so vividly with sardonic humour.' (Foreward to Summer Exhibition of Helen Bradley, exhibition catalogue for W. H. Patterson, 1979, pg. 2) 

Bradley was born in 1900 in Lees, a small town near Oldham, and attended the local art school at Oldham where her main interests were designing jewellery and embroidery. She had not intended to be a professional painter and married a textile designer and settled into life as a house wife and mother of two children. When she was sixty-five she began to paint images of her childhood in Lancashire to illustrated the wonderfully woven stories and reminiscences she told her grandchildren. Her paintings were greatly admired and several exhibitions of her work were held in the 1960s and 1970s. L. S. Lowry was a particular admirer of her naive style of painting, which is both powerfully nostalgic and sensitive. It has been suggested that her style derives from early Persian and Moghul art.