The Mussel Gatherers at Sunderland Point
The Mussel Gatherers at Sunderland Point 1908 By William Page Atkinson Wells (1878 -1923) Oil on canvas. With the permission of Fleetwood Museum. The painting is owned by Lancashire County Council and on loan to the Fleetwood Museum Trust, an independent charitable trust since 2018.
This is one of our favourite images of Sunderland Point. Fleetwood Museum have described it as follows -
‘There is a timeless quality to this broad landscape view along the shore at Sunderland Point showing women collecting mussels from the waters of the receding tide. The artist has captured the fleeting light of a summer's day on an area that has changed little in generations.’.
We have been hard at work on a biography of William Wells and contacted Stephen Sartin who was instrumental in bringing this painting into public ownership. We asked for his help - what did he know about the painter?
We were thrilled to receive considerable material from him including the original proposal for the purchase of this painting in 2003. By sheer coincidence, I had seen the picture on display in that year at the Bourne Gallery in Edinburgh. The very kind folks in the gallery gave us a high-resolution negative of the picture from which we could make a good copy. Which we did.
Unbeknownst to me, the existence of the picture had come to the attention of Stephen, then the Curator of Art for the Lancashire County Museum Service. He recognised its importance and gained vital support for an application for ts purchase through the grant fund of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
He was successful and this glorious picture now resides in the inshore fishing gallery of the Fleetwood Museum, available to seen by any of us.
This is an abridged and slightly edited version of the supporting statements written by Stephen. He has very kindly given his blessing to publish it on our website:
Over to Stephen -
William Page Atkinson Wells (1872-1923), landscape painter, was born in Glasgow where he lived until 1885. In that year he went to Australia with his parents and lived in Sydney and Melbourne for five years. On his return to England, he studied art at the Slade School under Alphonse Legros (1837-1911), after which he studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris under William Bouguereau (1825-1905) and Gabriel Ferrier 1884-1916). He was inspired by artists of the Barbizon School and, in catching the transient effects of nature, some aspects of Impressionism. This is well illustrated in The Mussel Gatherers, or more correctly Mussel Gatherers at Sunderland Point, Lancashire, which combines careful observation with the changing light of a summer’s day on the Fylde Coast.
The Mussel Gatherers is one of the finest of the known works of William Wells. It depicts a historic part of the Lancashire Coast to the west of Lancaster, called Sunderland Point. Centrally placed on the promontory is “First Terrace”, part of the Old Quay erected as warehouses by the West Indies trader Robert Lawson in 1720. The building at the nearest corner was formerly an inn, at the back of which, seen here to its left, is a brewhouse, where Samboo, a slave whose tomb is at Sunderland Point, is said to have died in the 1730s.
The principal subject of the painting is a cobbled and sandy shore, strewn with seaweed, on which three women are collecting mussels from the waters of a receding tide. Wells, who lived at Sunderland Point, was familiar with this traditional local occupation, and here shows the mussel gatherers using small two-pronged forks to scrape the mussels away from the stones and wearing gloves to prevent their hands being cut by the shells. Each has a wide-brimmed basket made of hazel and willow branches. The contents of the baskets were transferred to sacks, two of which can be seen in the right foreground, which were then loaded onto horse-drawn carts, one of which is in the distance to the left.
As part of its Acquisitions Policy, Lancashire County Museum Service has actively sought paintings, drawings and other works of art relating to the County Palatine which illustrate Lancashire, its topography, architecture, people, and their occupations. This painting fulfils those criteria as being a topographical record of an historical part of the Lancashire coast and a carefully observed depiction of the traditional local occupation of mussel gathering. In addition, Wells was a Lancashire man by adoption, having lived at Sunderland Point in the early part of his career.
The painting is of special significance to Lancashire County Museum Service in that Fleetwood Museum, where it is intended to be shown, is a museum of the fishing industry on the Lancashire coast.
Thank you Stephen
Knowing a bit more about Wells we believe the image of the standing woman in the foreground is almost certainly of his wife Helen. She was his model in many, if not all, of his early paintings.
Below is perhaps the largest image of Helen in his paintings. It is dated circa 1905 in the middle of the years they lived at the Point. Helen would have been 28 which seems about right. The location of the painting is unknown. It is rather special.
Helen and William Wells were first cousins and had known each other since early childhood with both families living within a few streets of each other in Glasgow. More later…...
Landscape – Girl in a Meadow c1905: Courtesy of the Harris Museum and Art Gallery.
We also express our thanks to Ben Whittaker, the Museum Manager at Fleetwood who kindly supplied us with a better resolution copy of the Mussel Gatherers. He advises us the gallery is currently closed and will open, refreshed, to the public in April.