He is known for teaching L S Lowry and his huge oil paintings of industrial Manchester which hang in the City Art Gallery. They include, through his impressionist eyes, the city’s streets, canals, rivers, docks, fog, and the twinkling lights of warehouses and offices like India House, from 1908 to 1916.
Perhaps his most well known ‘Manchester-scape’ is ‘Albert Square’, showing a capped man pushing a wooden cart in the foreground, the memorial statues of Oliver Heywood and William Gladstone, and part of the town hall.
But, an exhibition in the city of 70 of his works will show another side to Adolphe Valette – floral designs for textiles and wallpaper. Although his legacy is mainly seen as magnificent oil paintings of Oxford Road, bridges over the River Irwell, and horse-drawn cabs at All Saints Gardens, he, like other artists, had to earn money through other means.
Born in St Etienne, France in 1876, Valette arrived in Manchester in 1905. By day he worked for a printing firm, and by night he was studying art. In 1907 he was invited to teach at Manchester Municipal School of Art where his students included Lowry.
He was a portrait painter for the well off in Mancunian society and several commercial activities supplemented his income, including private decorations for homes, church decorations, commercial poster designs and textile designs.
In his early training in France at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de St Etienne, Valette attended a class for drawing flowers. At the end of the 19th Century in the St Etienne and Lyon region aspiring young artists learned to draw flowers with the aim of designing wallpapers or fabrics.
There was a need for skilled draughtsmen who could draw any motif requested by textile factories. Hundreds of such artists were needed and Valette was a freelancer in the ‘fabriques’ industry, and did such work while in Manchester.
Cecilia Lyon, a leading expert on Valette, whose book ‘Adolphe Valette & L S Lowry’ was published in 2020, said: “The activity of textile design was quite important for Valette. We can assume that he started while he was still living in Manchester. Indeed, when Valette moved, in 1928, from Manchester back to the Beaujolais in France, his wife Andrée made, as people still do today, a ‘removals list of items’ to be transported.
“The removals company was Harrods and we have had the serendipity to find, in archives, Valette’s removals list of items where there are several mentions of the name ‘cretonnes’ (which is the name in French of these textile designs) and also the mention of a drawing board for ‘cretonnes’ and of large sheets of paper specifically used for ‘cretonnes’, which indicates the importance of this activity for Valette.
“These designs are not signed or dated, which is usual for that type of work. The numbers to be found on some sheets, actually refer to pattern numbers, not to a date. There are many hand-written notes in the hand of Valette on these designs, related to the colours or technical details regarding the patterns. The notes are in French, which indicate he would be working for a French company.
“The motives on the textile designs are varied, and in keeping with the style in vogue at the time used for rich interiors. The level of details are stunning. The style is elegant, intricate and harmonious at the same time. The motives are mostly flowers, sometimes birds-and-flowers motives, as was the tradition. The variety of colours used is wide and researched.
“Quite a few of these designs have romantic and East Asian qualities . Initially Valette aimed to go to Japan to study the influence of Japanese art and prints on Impressionism. One of his teachers in Bordeaux was the Japanese Consul. Asian, Chinese and Japanese designs are part of what was at the time a new modern global trade, which blossomed with world exhibitions.”
From 1905, when Valette was working for the printing company Norbury, Natzio & and Co on Princess Street just opposite the Manchester Art Gallery, where he was creating designs for stock tickets destined for the Far East.
Cecilia added: “We cannot totally exclude that some of these drawings were made for wallpapers, however in one small drawing, there is a direct written link to ‘toile de Tours’, which was another well-known centre for the production of silk fabrics in France, so in our view, and in accordance to what has been explained by the previous owners of these designs, we believe they were meant for soft furnishings and fabric ornamentation.”
The drawings have been kept intact for decades in the same family, the descendants of Mademoiselle Denavit, one of Valette’s friends in Blacé in the Beaujolais where the artist had a house. Later, they became part of an English collection.
They will now be exhibited at Contemporary Six Gallery in Princess Street, Manchester, from April 27th to May 18th and will be for sale.
Alex Reuben, the owner of the gallery, said: “I am delighted that Manchester hosts this remarkable exhibition of never-before-seen paintings by French Impressionist Adolphe Valette.
“Valette is best known for his atmospheric and moody depictions of Manchester created in the early 1900s. His impressive works sit alongside the paintings of his student L S Lowry in the Manchester Art Gallery.
“These works will surprise people. Although they are around 100 years old, they are a beautiful mix of exquisite vibrant floral paintings, some with a Japanese influence and many with colourful birds. They reinforce what we already knew, that he was a superb draughtsman who never stopped creating.”
Ceclia said: “It is a great moment that these drawings, these ‘cretonnes’, can be admired by members of the general public revealing a much forgotten aspect of Valette’s talent, and that these splendid floral designs can give a touch of French brightness and lustre to the homes of collectors in Manchester and its region, where they were initially conceived.”
Lowry later acknowledged the debt he owed to this talented Frenchman. He said: “I cannot overestimate the effect on me at the time of the coming into this drab city of Adolphe Valette, full of French Impressionists, aware of everything that was going on in Paris. He had a freshness and a breadth of experience that exhilarated students, I had not seen drawings like this before.”
While Lowry’s paintings sell in the millions of pounds, Valette’s are in the low thousands – the exception being his Manchester paintings, which rarely come on the market and can sell for £25,000 plus. The 70 works on display this month range in price from £195 to £2,500.
