HAMPSON, ROGER

Roger Hampson was an important Northern School painter and printmaker of the post WW2 period. He was born in 1925 and grew up in the working class village of Tyldesley, Wigan. He is and is best known for his paintings, drawings, lino prints and mono prints of the industrial surroundings in which he was brought up and specialised in mining scenes, mill scenes, street scenes and pictures of the people that he encountered in these surroundings.


Roger Hampson studied at Manchester College of Art from 1946 - 1952 and followed a career in teaching art, becoming the principal at Bolton College of Art & Design from 1978 to 1986. He was also a graphic designer with a succession of Manchester firms and was elected president of the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts from 1969 to 1976.


Hampson's inspiration stemmed from his childhood and upbringing. Early experiences of clogs on cobbled streets, mines, factories and grey northern skies shaped the artist's values in life, beliefs which forged a signature for his art. He was motivated to paint a landscape and way of life that he knew was fast disappearing. He painted what he knew - real people in real places doing everyday things. His paintings are social documents and capture the bleakness of the northern landscape as well as the warmth and humour of its people. Busy factory scenes, quiet landscapes, men on their way for a day's work at the mine, old people with wrinkly faces, women in head scarves are all painted in muted colours to emphasize the drabness of the period.

He died in 1996 aged 71 after suffering from Leukaemia.