The North, in his lifetime, was never generous to William Conor whom the Ulster Museum has dubbed, with some justification, The People's Painter. He died alone, of hypothermia, on the night of FEBRUARY 6th, 1968, out in the back yard fetching coal.
Yet for decades Conor, who had dropped the other `n' in response to the Gaelic Revival of the 1900s, had been the public face of art in the city, walking south Belfast's streets complete with the fedora, Byronic posture and floppy bow tie he'd adopted since his twenties. But it was the subject of the bulk of his work, the city's "poorer classes" as the catalogue arcanely puts it, which won him this sobriquet.
Born a tradesman's son, Conor, with his talent drawing was ushered through technical school, the gateway to the city's linen printing industries where he became a skilled poster lithographer, learning the use of the wax crayon which produced his very best work even when, later on, he had acquired the chic influences of studio residencies in Paris and London.
However, among the rare society portraits (he painted Douglas Hyde) this current exhibition shows him determined to render up an impossibly bonny image of Belfast mill and shipyard workers. For, under their Orange bowlers, duncher caps and shawls, the melodeon players, jaunting car jarveys, evacuees, potato pickers and cinema queuers, these, Conor's buoyant, radiant people, always smile - a propaganda poster, a city's myth.
Runs until April 11th
