Crowd Painting and the Northern Tradition

Crowd painting is the art of showing many people at once: a street, a match, a beach, a school gate at home time. In Britain the subject is closely tied to the North of England, where painters spent much of the twentieth century recording working towns and the people who filled them. British artist Neil McBride paints crowds from his studio in North Yorkshire, and his work carries that tradition into contemporary life.

What is the Northern tradition of crowd painting?

The tradition is best known through L. S. Lowry (1887–1976), who painted the mill towns of Salford and Manchester crowded with small, hurrying figures. Lowry rarely painted individuals in detail. He painted people in the mass, flowing out of factories, to football matches and along terraced streets.

Around and after him, a loose group often called the Northern School painted the same world. Artists such as Theodore Major, Alan Lowndes and Helen Bradley each found their own way of showing everyday Northern life, from industrial gloom to nostalgic childhood scenes. What links them is a shared subject: ordinary people, together, in the places they lived and worked.

Why paint crowds?

A crowd shows how people behave together: who walks with whom, who stands apart, where everyone is heading. A single figure tells one story; a crowd holds dozens at once. That is why crowd paintings reward long looking. Each time you return to one, you notice a different pair of friends, a stray dog or a figure going their own way.

How Neil McBride's crowd paintings fit the tradition

McBride has painted full time for more than twenty years, after a career in advertising. Like the Northern painters before him, he paints people in groups rather than as portraits. His crowds, though, belong to today rather than the mill town: children racing out of school in End of Term, an afternoon at the races in Race Day, dog walkers, queues, dancers and protesters.

He often works from a high viewpoint, looking down on figures as they gather and scatter. Some paintings are bursts of bright colour; others are stark black silhouettes or monochrome, where the shapes of the crowd do all the work. He thinks about composition as a puzzle of fit: every figure has to sit right against its neighbours for the whole crowd to hold together.

"My most popular crowd scenes, for a while, are the ones on a white ground, which is why some collectors aligned me with Lowry, I guess. One of my collectors asked me how I decide where to position each figure, and I replied that it was purely intuitive. Apparently we all use this intuition when walking amongst a crowd of people, and it is called constraint satisfaction – an exciting phenomenon worth investigating if you are interested.

Crowds in eventful situations are my definitive area of exploration. Specific landscapes and townscapes act merely as places to populate in my recent work. My core signature style of painting crowds is so strong that I can modify my techniques regularly without losing my own identity as an artist."

– Neil McBride

Is Neil McBride part of the Northern School?

Not as a historical member. The Northern School usually means artists working in the industrial North during the mid-twentieth century. McBride is a contemporary British painter working in that tradition: the same fascination with people together, applied to the way we live now.

Choosing a crowd painting for your home

• Scale. Crowd paintings gain from size, because each figure has room to read. A large canvas makes a focal point above a sofa or in a hallway.
• Colour or monochrome. Colourful crowds bring energy to a neutral room. Monochrome and silhouette works suit modern, pared-back interiors.
• The story. Choose a scene you recognise yourself in, whether that is a day at the races, a beach or the school run. Nostalgia is a very powerful emotion.

Every painting is a signed, one-of-a-kind original, shipped free worldwide. If you can't find the right scene, McBride takes open-brief commissions, usually completed in four to six weeks.

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