Ahead of the Harold Riley Exhibition Some information about the man himself Harold F. Riley Esq. DL DLit FRCS (Hon) DFA ATC Harold Riley was born in Salford in 1934 and attended Salford Grammar School. He sold his first painting to the City Art Gallery when he was 11. In 1951 he won a scholarship to the Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London. After a one year postgraduate course at the Slade he won a travel scholarship to Italy, followed by a British Council Scholarship to study in Spain and went on to study in Florence and Spain before returning to Salford, where he has lived ever since. Harold has been awarded honorary doctorates by the Universities of Salford, Manchester, London and Florence and completed his National Service as an Officer in 1957. In 1960 Harold returned to Salford, where he now lives and works. He believed his main work was to document the city and his life-cycle in Salford in paintings, drawings and photographs. His deep affection for his home town cemented a friendship with L.S. Lowry which began when Harold was a student; together they worked on a project to record the area and its people, a project which Harold continued until the end of the twentieth century. Harold’s commissioned painted portraits include Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia, Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester, Pope John XIII, Pope Paul VI, Pope John Paul II, American Ambassador Elliot Richardson, United States Presidents John F. Kennedy, Gerald Ford and Nelson Mandela. (The painting of Nelson Mandela, which was unveiled in 2005, raised more than $1m for charity at an auction held at the Rockefeller Centre in New York.) Harold is famous worldwide for his sporting pictures, particularly of golf and soccer. His golf images are in private and public collections throughout the world. His football pictures have centered largely around his links with Manchester United with whom he played as a junior, before going to University. The club has an extensive collection of his work, but the majority remains in his Archive.
Posted on: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 13:05:27 +0000
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