ONE evening earlier this year, the phone rang at local historian Peter Stanhope’s home in Haxby. It was a woman from Hull. Had Peter ever heard of an artist named ER Tate, she asked?

That’s a bit like asking Wayne Rooney if he’s ever heard of a game called football. Peter has been researching the life of the Victorian artist and architect Edwin Ridsdale Tate for almost 30 years. He’s given many talks and lectures about Tate - and in March this year he published a book about the artist, Quaint & Historic York Remembered, which was illustrated with many of Tate’s drawings and paintings of York.

So yes, Peter had heard of ER Tate. How could he help?

The woman was the former landlady of a Hull pub. For years, a painting of the Hull quayside had hung on the pub’s wall. When she retired and moved to the outskirts of Hull, she took the painting with her. And a little while ago, when having it reframed, she was astonished to find that, underneath the Hull scene by Grimshaw was another painting - an original watercolour of York signed ER Tate, 1907.

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Peter Stanhope: an expert on Edwin Ridsdale Tate

Curious to find out more, she Googled Tate - and up came Peter’s details. Hence her phone call. Peter asked her to describe the painting: and she obliged, also reading out an inscription: Red Tower, Foss Islands. Peter recognised it immediately from a postcard he had in his own private collection (top) - a reproduction of a Tate original painted in 1907.

He has since seen the retired Hull landlady’s painting for himself - and identified it as the original watercolour from which his postcard must have been reproduced.

“But how did it get to be in Hull, behind another picture by a different artist, and for so many years?” he says.

He’s still not been able to solve that mystery. But he does know a lot about the postcard of the Red Tower - and the painting of which it was a reproduction.

Just over 100 years ago, in about 1907, Tate made a series of watercolour paintings of York scenes, Peter says. Some were of contemporary York scenes: others were a ‘look back’ to life in York 100 years before, in the early 1800s. Tate then struck a deal with his brother-in-law, James W Arthur of Arthur & Co, the postcard publishers in Davygate.

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Sheep walking through Walmgate Bar: postcard from a Tate original

“Edwin painted the pictures and ‘JW’ had them printed and published,” Peter says. “It was a profitable venture in those early days of the increasing popularity of postcards and the gaining popularity of York as a tourist centre following the arrival of the railways.”

Peter has so far been able to collect eight of these cards in all, which were published as ‘The Sketch Block Series’. We reproduce some of them here today.

They provide a fascinating glimpse of York in times past, as seen through the eyes of this most meticulous of artists, whose architectural training gave him a strong sense of the shape and form of buildings.

One (above) shows sheep being driven to market through Walmgate Bar in 1907. Another is the view of York Minster from Fishergate Postern Tower - a view unobstructed by the taller buildings which have since grown up.

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View of York Minster from bar walls at Fishergate. Postcard from a Tate original

There is a view of sheep being driven along Lawrence Street; figures playing on an iced-over River Ouse in an imagined scene from 1807 - and that view of the Red Tower itself in 1907, the foreground dotted by what look, at first glance, like bales of hay.

It appears to be a very rural scene, until you notice that, in the distance to the left of the panting, a factory chimney is belching smoke into the air. And then you realise that those bales of hay are no such thing: they're great chunks of masonry - possibly, it has been suggested, left over from the building of York'sd Victrian prison, and stored here near the Red Tower.

There is no way of knowing how many more postcards were in the series, Peter says. “All members of the Arthur family who remembered those days have now passed away.”

But the Red Tower wasn’t the first of Tate’s original watercolours to have been turned into postcards.

More than ten years ago visited the home near Scunthorpe where a distant cousin of Tate’s second wife, Louisa, lived. There he saw the original paintings of two views of the old Ouse Bridge.

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The Old Ouse Bridge as it might have looked in 1807: postcard based on a Tate original

There may well be more out there. Peter and other collectors keep a sharp eye open whenever postcard collections come up for auction. But if you come across a brightly-coloured postcard showing a scene from York 100 years ago, with the signature ER Tate or E Ridsdale Tate in one corner, you know who to turn to form more information.

  • The original print run of Peter Stanhope’s book Quaint & Historic York Remembered sold out within six weeks. A second edition is available, priced £20, from Fossgate Books, or from the author himself (with £5 to cover p&p) from 01904 760467 or pjstanhope@aol.com

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