Description

Admire the oil painting ‘Greek Builders’ by Victor Noble Rainbird (1887-1936), on display at the Quadrant,  North Tyneside Council’s collection of paintings at The Silverlink North Cobalt Business Park. Rainbird was a working-class painter and stained glass artist from North Shields, a borough of Newcastle where the economy was based on fishing and coal.

Rainbird lived his whole life in North Shields. A blue plaque on the exterior wall of 71, West Percy Street commemorates the years he lived in this small terraced house (1917–1933). He served in World War I in both the Northumberland Fusiliers and the Durham Light Infantry but then made his living from his paintings. He was fascinated by scenes of work, and his favourite subject-matter was the fishermen and fishwives on the local wharves and sea-shores, as in ‘Fish Market’. But he also painted landscapes and scenes of everyday life in France, Belgium and the Netherlands.

Like the visiting American artist Winslow Homer before him, Rainbird was a leading member of the Artists’ Colony at the fishing village of Cullercoats. His only surviving work in stained glass commemorates six men, all from the Shetland island of Papa Stour, who died in World War I. It is in Papa Stour Kirk.

Nothing is known of the genesis of ‘Greek Builders’. But it is striking that when Rainbird, unusually for him, chose to depict a scene from the ancient world—indeed a beautiful temple with a columned portico–he focuses on the labourers rather than the classical edifice. Realistic, muscular but in no way ‘classically’ handsome or idealised, against a cloudy rather than sunlit sky, his serious-minded ancient Greek labourers are exerting themselves in several  physical tasks: digging, cutting down a tree, stone-working, carrying supplies.

Although under-appreciated in his own lifetime, Rainbird’s reputation has been growing of recent years. In 2013 a new primary school in Newcastle was opened. Its name is Rainbird Primary School.

n.b. around 1920 (painting is undated)