John Ralston (1789–1833) was a Scottish artist who spent most of his life and career in Manchester, England. He was primarily a marine and landscape painter, but his best-known works depict the city's medieval and early modern architecture before its demolition and replacement during the Industrial Revolution.
Though his talents were acclaimed by his contemporaries, and he was seen as an important early figure in the emergence of Manchester as a centre of the arts, it never translated into popular or financial success and he died in relative poverty and obscurity.
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Early life
Ralston was 44 at the time of his death in November 1833, implying that his birth year was either 1788 or 1789; sources published after his death, including those written by people who knew him, consistently prefer 1789. He was born in Scotland, though the exact date and location are unknown. The Ralston name is traditionally associated with the historical counties of Renfrewshire and Ayrshire, and he may be the "John Ralston" born in Eastwood on 6 December 1788; the other John Ralstons that appear in parish birth records for 1789 were all born in Argyll and Bute.
Artistic career
Education
Manchester had been a large market town (and the centre of Lancashire's textiles industry) for several centuries, but as the 19th century dawned the city was experiencing an unprecedented population boom due to the Industrial Revolution. Large cotton mills and other factories were being constructed rapidly, as well as new slums to house the thousands of immigrants from elsewhere in the United Kingdom and overseas who came to work in "Cottonopolis". However, the city was not associated with the arts; even as late as the 1870s, the prominent Victorian art critic John Ruskin believed that Manchester could "produce no good art and no good literature" due to its intense focus on commerce and industry.
In this context, it is unsurprising that Ralston came to Manchester because his father—an engraver for calico printing—had moved the family south to Strines in Derbyshire when searching for work when Ralston was a child, rather than the city being chosen specifically as a destination for studying art. At 17 he became a pupil of Joseph Parry, or "Old Parry" as he was known to his contemporaries—a Liverpool-born painter who was given the title of "The Father of Art in Manchester" after relocating to the city in 1790 and earning acclaim for his depictions of everyday urban life. However, with his "predilection being for landscape," he was soon passed on to John Rathbone, an oils and watercolours landscape painter known in his day as "the Manchester Wilson."
Francis Dukinfield Astley was Ralston's first patron; he "was enabled to trace, in the rude attempts of the unassuming boy, the budding power of Linnaeus which ripened to so great maturity." Astley's father, John Astley, had eked out a living as a professional painter for many years before marrying a wealthy widow and inheriting her fortune, and Francis was himself an amateur painter and patron of many local artists with a substantial collection of Old Masters—he had Ralston produce several copies as part of his training.
Sources are inconsistent as to whether Astley first spotted Ralston's talent and arranged for his training by Parry and Rathbone, or whether he was connected with Astley by his teachers. Some modern sources mistakenly claim that Ralston moved to Manchester specifically to study at the Manchester School of Art, which was not founded until five years after his death.
Art
Ralston lived at 26 Brazennose Street from the time he settled in Manchester until shortly before his death. By the late 1810s he had built a reputation as a skilled artist, and much like his teacher Rathbone he had a bias towards "picturesque" rural scenes, with "mouldering castles, ruined abbeys, and dilapidated cottages" his typical subjects. However, he was most well-regarded as a marine painter, which he was said to have "thoroughly mastered."
He typically drew graphite sketches from nature and then later produced oil paintings back in his studio, "rarely" producing colour sketches or watercolours while outside. In his later years his tastes evolved, and he became increasingly as interested in Manchester's new urban environments as much as traditional agrarian scenes.
Like many of the UK's rapidly growing cities during the Industrial Revolution, Manchester's existing medieval urban fabric came to be seen as a hindrance by civic leaders—its small, old wooden buildings were unable to host large machinery, and its narrow streets limited the flow of traffic. In 1821 Parliament passed the Manchester Streets Improvement Act, which empowered local commissioners to begin a 12-year project of modernising the city centre by widening several key roads by up to 15 feet either side, as well as lowering them all to a uniform level. The most dramatic impact was on Market Stead Lane (now known as Market Street), the city's main east–west throroughfare, which had to be lowered up to six feet in some stretches, and where some of the city's most well-known buildings were demolished.
The early 1820s saw a boom in the publication of topographical engravings across England, out of a widespread concern that views of "traditional" buildings and streets needed to be preserved before they were lost forever. The same year the Act passed, Ralston was commissioned by local publisher D. & P. Jackson to document Market Street before its transformation. Ralston sketched a number of locations around the city on location in pencil for the series, then returned home to produce more detailed, "final" versions, from which final lithographic plates were copied and used for publication.
The prospectus announcing the series, Views of the Ancient Buildings in Manchester, stated that subscribers could expect 20 lithographs, split across four volumes—although in the end only just over half of the pictures were actually published between 1823 and 1825, which were then gathered and republished as a single volume after Ralston's death.
Influence and position within Manchester art world
The landscape painter George Wilfred Anthony—who also penned art criticism in The Manchester Guardian as "Gabriel Tinto"—studied under Ralston in the 1820s.
In 1823, a group of local leaders voted to establish the "Manchester Institution for the Promotion of Literature, Science and the Arts" at a meeting to address the widely held perception of Manchester as a cultural backwater (and especially relative to the city's greatest rival, Liverpool). The Royal Manchester Institution (as it would shortly become known) purchased a plot of land on Mosley Street for the construction of a large headquarters and exhibition space, designed by the architect Charles Barry, in 1825.
However, the building (now Manchester Art Gallery) would not be finished until 1835; in the meantime, the Institution held the very first painting exhibition in Manchester, in 1827, at 83 Market Street. Ralston was one of 18 local artists selected for inclusion. Until 1830—when enough of the Mosley Street building had been completed for a partial opening—the Institution would hold a series of further exhibitions at 83 Market Street, featuring both nationally and internationally renowned works alongside those of artists working locally. In each of these exhibitions there was a core group of Manchester-based artists—Ralston, brothers Charles and Michael Pease Calvert, Henry Liverseege, Arthur Perigal, Thomas Henry Illidge, and James Parry (son of Joseph)—whose works were always included.
However, despite this critical success Ralston consistently struggled to actually sell his works. For example, The Manchester Courier's report on a September 1830 exhibition at the Royal Institution noted that Ralston's Storm is "[a] most splendid and spirited production; the execution is vigorous, and the colouring deep and effective, though tender ... and [we] very much doubt if there be half a dozen men in the kingdom who could surpass it," but then added that it was "(unsold!)"—almost in disbelief.
The historian Janet Wolff has pointed out that Ralston was not unusual at this time, noting that the stereotype of the "starving artist" was very much grounded in fact in 19th century Manchester. Of the first generation of Manchester-based artists who were either involved in the foundation of the Royal Manchester Institution, or exhibited there in its first decade, all of Ralston, Liverseege, William Bradley, brothers David Henry Parry and James Parry (both sons of Old Parry), James Gregory Pollitt, and Henry James Holding died from either poverty or illness; there were also a number of high-profile painters who came to the city to explore its emerging art market—such as Mather Brown—who quickly left after failing to find a foothold.
Death and legacy
By the early 1830s Ralston's career and health were both faltering. He died on 1 November 1833, aged 44, after being bedridden for several days, and reportedly while living in a workhouse after having fallen into severe poverty. He was survived by his widow and one son.
Many in Manchester's artistic and cultural community hailed Ralston's "unappreciated" talent upon his death. George Wilfred Anthony, writing in 1857, called Ralston "a man of extremely simple manners; he possessed not the acuteness or business habits of a man of the world, but his honesty of purpose was undeniable," and he "became neglected for newer, certainly not better men." Anthony also partly attributed his commercial failure to a lack of focus, as Ralston was just as passionate about playing the violin as painting: "Often while busily employed on a Picture the remembrance of some strain of melody, haply [sic] snatched from a symphony of Beethoven's rehearsed on the previous evening, would vibrate through his mind, when out came his fiddle, and adieu to all thoughts of his picture." Richard Cudmore—leader of the Manchester Gentleman's Orchestra, of which Ralston was a founding member—is quoted as having told him "if it wasn't for that confounded fiddle you'd be a great man."
Ralston's most extensive (and effusive) obituary was published in the March 1834 edition of Arnold's Magazine of the Fine Arts. The author reported that Ralston's cause of death was "ossification of the heart," which they believed to be a literalised manifestation of his heartbreak at never achieving popular recognition:...[H]e drew and painted from nature with unabated enthusiasm until within a few days of his decease; indeed, when entirely confined to his bed, "the ruling passion, strong even in death," still swayed him, and it gave him pleasure to converse on subjects of Art with those of his professional brethren who hastened to cheer in his sickness one whom they admired for his genius, and loved for the plain, manly, simplicity of his character. A more grateful man perhaps never existed; he never forgot a favor; and often have we heard him, with his peculiar strength and feeling, express his sense of obligation for those little kindnesses and attentions which are usually suffered to pass without observation, as the every day offices of "gentle humanity." ...
The merely pretty and ornamental he despised, he looked for mind, and grappled with a giant's strength with the real difficulties of Art―he dived deep, and not merely skimmed the surface; hence, to superficial observers, his works seemed rude and tasteless. Those, however, who really understood and valued excellence in Art, at once acknowledged the hand of a master, and the powerful impress of truth. Perhaps the strongest proof of this may be found in the high estimation always evinced by his brother artists, those best calculated by previous study to appreciate his abilities and the extent of his acquirements. ...