WILLIAM FREDERICK (FRED) MAYOR 1866 – 1916
and HANNAH MAYOR 1871 – 1974 (née HOYLAND)
William Frederick Mayor was born in Yorkshire, in the village of Winksley near Ripon where his father was vicar. A true Yorkshireman, as he grew up he was a keen and excellent cricketer. His Headmaster at King’s School, Canterbury believed him good enough to become professional, but art became his chosen career.
Cricket remained a passion, however, and in later years he played for an artist’s team. Waiting on a station platform en route to a match he took pity on a ragged, hungry looking chap and gave him a handful of coppers to carry his cricket bag. Imagine his consternation when he saw the man playing for the other side, a team of authors, and how his embarrassment must have increased to discover that he was no other than J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan!
Other sports in which he participated enthusiastically were shooting and sailing, both of which served to increase his powers of observation. He made and rigged scale models of sailing ships, a hobby which doubtless enhanced his ability to depict ships accurately.
At the age of nineteen he became a student at the Acade´mie Julian in Paris.
It is not surprising that Mayor absorbed the influences of other artists as he was immersed in their world from 1886 when, like many other Staithes Group artists, he enrolled at the prestigious Academie Julian in Paris. Unlike most other students, however, he studied there for four years and enrolled for a further short session in 1892. During the intervening period he shared a studio with Frank Brangwyn in Chiswick and while he was in Paris he met Philip Wilson Steer and Walter Richard Sickert who remained close friends for the rest of his life. Moving to Amberley he lived close to another artist friend, Edward Stott, and when he went to live amongst the artist’s colony in Staithes in 1899 he shared lodgings with Arthur Friedenson and Harold Knight at the house of Mr. and Mrs. George Porritt in Gun Gutter. He was elected a founder member of the Staithes Art Club in 1901.
Laura Knight said of the work he produced in Staithes, “Fred Mayor made a brilliant showing, but he was full of tricks that he had picked up here, there and everywhere. Some of his watercolours were quite lovely, and he had a beautiful colour sense when he forgot the Stotts, the Brangwyns and the Melvilles he was so constantly imitating.” He had certainly established his own style by the time he was painting in Montreuil. Broad and vigorous brushstrokes placed with great certainty capture the movement and the light of the moment. His oil paintings at times show a vibrancy of line and use of colour, often incorporating flecks of pure and brilliant primary colour, far ahead of their time and which I am sure will be greatly appreciated by our sophisticated Staithes Group collectors. His watercolours are, indeed, “quite lovely” with the melting, wet paper effects used by Melville with much smaller strokes, Fred’s broader ones stamping his own style on them most firmly.
He eloped to live in Montreuil-sur-Mer with Hannah Hoyland, a fellow Staithes artist, in 1902, the year she was elected a member of the Staithes Art Club. Born in Staffordshire, Hannah was the daughter of a wealthy Sheffield brush maufacturer who had a summer home at Runswick Bay. After leaving Sheffield High School she studied at the Royal Female School of Art in London and then at the Westminster School of Art. Back on the Yorkshire coast she mixed with the other artists working there and met her future husband. Her family disapproved of the liaison, despite the couple both being in their thirties and they eloped to marry in London and went to France having been lent ten pounds by Hannah’s sympathetic aunt, the actress Edith Wynne Mathison.
Whilst living in France Fred spent some winters with Spence Ingall who had a house on the outskirts of Tangiers and later would spend the winter in Cassis near Marseilles where some of these pictures were painted.
The couple’s first two children were born in France and when the third was due in 1908 the Mayors moved back to England to live in Buckinghamshire. and in 1912 they went to live in London, renting a big house in Earls Court Square. It was while they were living there that Fred Mayor died tragically early on January 10th 1916 after haemorrhaging during a simple operation connected with the asthma from which he had suffered for many years.
Hannah struggled on, bravely, although hit by another tragedy the year after her husband’s death when one of her sons, Charles, died. She started painting again, mainly flower studies, and was able to have her two surviving children privately educated. Her son, Freddy, went on to found the Mayor Gallery in London, now run by Fred and Hannah’s grandson. Their daughter, Edith is still alive.Women Artists. She has works in public galleries in Sheffield and Whitby.
Fred exhibited at the Baillie Gallery, the Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts, the Goupil Gallery, the Walker Gallery Liverpool, the Leicester Gallery, the London Salon, Manchester City Art Gallery, the New English Art Club, the Royal
Academy, the Royal Society of British Artists, the Royal Scottish Academy and the Yorkshire Union of Artists. He has works in public collections in Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, Middlesbrough, Manchester, Whitby, the Tate Britain, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Hannah exhibited at the Baillie Gallery, the Goupil Gallery, the New English Art Club, the Royal Academy, the Royal Society of British Artists, the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours and the Society of Imperial War Museum.
Bibliography:
Staithes Group Centenary Exhibition, Rosamund Jordan 2003
The Staithes Group, Peter Phillips, Phillips and Sons, Marlow1993
Oil Paint and Grease Paint, Autobiography of Laura Knight, Penguin Books 1936
The Dictionary of British Artists 1880 – 1940, J. Johnson & A. Greutzner, Antique
Collectors’ Club, Woodbridge 1976
Thanks to Mrs. Hannah Chudley, Mr. James Mayor and Mr. Gavin Pearce for additional
information.
© Rosamund Jordan 2003
