The 1970s saw the return of realist painting in Liverpool, as many influential artists in the city looked to American photorealist painting. John Baum, Maurice Cockrill and Sam Walsh – all at the time lecturing at the city’s art school – each adopted the style to varying degrees, yet still produced paintings depicting Liverpool.

Cockrill’s detailed façades of public buildings such as The Walker Art Gallery 1974-5 and Sudley 1974 draw upon the heightened mood in works by American painter Edward Hopper, establishing what Cockrill termed a ‘synthetic realism’. Welsh artist Baum’s painting of poet Roger McGough’s Sefton Park residence Windermere House 1972 imagines a Liverpool redolent of West Coast America, with verdant grass and perfect blue skies. In Five Girls 1973, Baum captures the conversation of his students outside the art college. As with the chatter we cannot hope to hear, we are always at a once-remove with Baum’s work. The artist hoped to ‘retain a gap between the onlooker and the painting, just as with the stage or cinema there is a gap between the onlooker and the performance.’

John Baum
Windermere House 1972
© John Baum
Courtesy of Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool
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Sam Walsh, who had worked primarily in pop and abstract styles during the 1960s, had perhaps the loosest interpretation of the photorealist style. In The Dinner Party 1980, which can be seen as the artist’s response to Adrian Henri’s painting The Entry of Christ into Liverpool 1962-4, Walsh depicts his friends, including his bank manager, sitting down for a meal or ‘last supper’, devotional art in the collections of the Walker Art Gallery being a key influence for Walsh at this time.