Patti Mayor – an artist rediscovered at 87

With Preston’s suffragettes very much in the news at the moment with the first public meeting of the Friends of Edith Rigby this week, I thought the following transcript of an article that appeared in the Lancashire Evening Post in 1959 might be of interest.

It features one of those suffragettes, the artist Patti Mayor, who was the subject of a recent post here.  She and her mother and sister ‘were ardent but not militant suffragettes’.

The article is credited to a lady simply named Sylvia. This would have been Sylvia Lovat Corbridge, the Post’s women’s editor at that date. Her style reflects the times, when she describes an exhibition of Patti’s paintings as a ‘one-man show’.

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Rare honour for Preston artist

If you are rediscovered as an artist at the age of 87 and are promised a one-man show at an important art gallery, you find life suddenly becoming unexpectedly busy, writes Sylvia.

That is the experience at the moment of Miss Patti Mayor, of Grosvenor-place, Ashton, the Preston artist whose paintings and sketches are to be shown at. the Blackpool Art Gallery during the month of January.

She is at work tracing canvasses, scattered up and down the country, which will probably be included in the show — and no one is more quietly pleased and more modestly surprised than Miss Mayor at the interest taken in her work by Mr. F. E. Cronshaw, Blackpool’s librarian and art director.

It was because she remembered, when in Blackpool with her musician sister, Miss Amy Mayor, not long ago, that the late Sir Cuthbert Grundy, donor of the Art Gallery, had bought two of her paintings many years ago, that she decided to take a look around. A chance conversation with an official led to the exciting prospect of one of the rare one-man shows to be devoted to a North-West at artist.

Miss Mayor and I are old friends, and I enjoyed chatting with her at. home the other day. She told me of her early days at the then Harris Institute when aa a girl of 15 she sketched classical casts and life models and became fired by enthusiasm for more ‘modern’ techniques in the Fishergate studio of Mr. Joseph Cross, who had come under the influence of the French impressionists.

The time came when the local artist knew he could teach her no more, so one of her sketch books was sent to the Slade School in London which, says Miss Mayor, was not easy to storm in those far-off days.

But she was accepted immediately, and spent a happy year there.

One canvas she hopes will be in the Blackpool exhibition is her ‘Half-timer,’ a. wistful study of the little mill girl of Victorian days, her shawl over her head, her dinner can in her hand.

It. brings back vivid memories for Miss Mayor; for she, her mother and her sister were ardent but not militant suffragettes.

‘When the time came for the Northern women‘s delegation to march in London the “Half-timer” was taken from its canvas and made into a banner which we paraded through the street,” she recalls.

‘After that, for 20 years it lay in a cupboard in my studio but was eventually shown again at one of the Lancashire Art Exhibitions.’

Not all her memories, however, are of painting for she was, about the time of the first World War, a classical dancer of some repute, teaching herself the art of interpreting the music played by her sister on the piano.

Eventually came the day when she visited a matinee in Liverpool given by the then famous Margaret Morris. She was entranced by the natural rhythmic style of her dancing and straight away went. back-stage to be asked if she could be accepted as a pupil.

An audition was suggested so Miss Mayor hired a theatre in Chelsea, and danced before the famous choreographer. She was offered tuition in exchange for her services as pianist.