Working Drawing for 'The Walker Art Gallery' - Portico and Steps with Statues with Outline around Final Format and Figures on Steps

This watercolour is a study for a painting entitled 'The Walker Art Gallery' by Maurice Cockrill which is in the Walker Art Gallery collection. You can clearly see where Cockrill has outlined the final composition of the painting within this image. The painting was the second (along with 'Sudley') of two paintings of Liverpool’s art galleries commissioned from Cockrill by the Friends organisation. The finished painting exemplified the hyper-realist style of the 1970s in which a camera was often used to achieve photographic effects. A series of elaborate preparatory photographs and drawings helped Cockrill to create this carefully constructed composite image of the Walker. This is one of a large collection of studies that Cockrill donated to the Walker Art Gallery in 1975.