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 Foregate
Street - Chester is a walled city, originally entered only through narrow gates. "Foregate" means outside the
gate, so above we are approaching Chester from the Eastern side, and hence towards the East Gate. Internal peace and
growing prosperity has made business boom, diminished the need for gates, and made tolls a nuisance, so these have
steadily been replaced by bridges to allow traffic to move more freely. The old Gate was demolished circa 1766 and this
overbridge erected in its place so that the walls of the city can still be walked for business or recreation. This
bridge often appears in Chester publicity with a charismatic clock above the centre of its span - but that (dated 1897)
didn't get added until 1899. [Print availability not known.] Louise Rayner lived in Chester for many years and painted the same scenes several times. A Busy Street is practically identical to our main picture but steps back to include more of the surroundings. We have a section of it here on the right showing the local emporium (a popular term for a large store through the 19th century and much of the 20th, but rare now with the advent of "supermarket"). While we have no date for either painting, the rebuilt tower of St Peter's Church in the distance and the absence of the clock put both paintings between 1886 and 1899. [We bought a framed print of this for about £10 from a market stall in Blackburn, Lancashire, c.1996, but there is no source on it. Try art shops that do cheap framed prints. Also take note that 'A busy street' is a catch-all title used for many different paintings.] |
The above picture was on sale in 1995 as Queen's Head Vaults Northgate Street. The problem
with that is that a horse tram is visible between the pillars of the nearest building, and the tramway didn't go
down Northgate. It isn't Watergate Street for the same reason, and the buildings do not have rows in them, so this
is probably not Eastgate Street. It could be Grosvenor Street, which branches off Bridge Street - we have no images to
compare with - but it most obviously matches the architectural character of Foregate Street. That said, it's hard
to match the arrangement of those familiar-looking over-pavement buildings with the image above. You can
just about make sense of the buildings along the right-hand pavement - but not the left, expecially after considering
the roofs. Our first guess would be Foregate Street, but perhaps a little further away from the Eastgate. The period
is between 1879 and 1903. [Note: the picture has been sharpened from a blurry photograph.]However, Andy King attended one of Peter Boughton's talks at the Grosvenor Museum, Chester, in April 2005. Peter Boughton is the curator there and they have regular Louise Rayner exhibitions. Once again came the reminder that Louise was selling a product. We already knew that she would often enhance the areas she wanted to be seen at the expense of those she didn't, for example compressing less interesting buildings, and would also use artistic licence in moving buildings (particularly church spires) to a more prominent place to produce a picturesque scene. Both of these techniques can be seen on our Lower Bridge Street page (see the Duke Street and Bear and Billet paintings). Andy King believes that there was almost certainly some degree of religious evangelism in this - which would fit with her strong Catholic Apostolic faith. Peter Boughton pointed out that Louise had also painted shadows on the 'wrong' side of some streets, probably to add vitality, depth and interest. She would also subtly alter colour to produce the effect that she - and presumably her customers - wanted to see, (e.g. making red stone appear light 'salmon' pink or even whitish). But the paintings were intended to be art, and should not be taken as completely accurate. Further evidence of this lies in her brother Richard's outlines and watercolour sketches - and what Louise did with the same scene to create her finished work. One such example, Christmas Steps, Bristol (1863), can be seen at Bristol Art Gallery and demonstrates how clever she was at this process. So what we're left with here in Foregate Street is that the view is probably in exactly the location it resembles, and it merely reflects our small-mindedness to complain that some of the buildings have changed! |
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[We have no source for the mono image. The larger picture is from Grosvenor Museum's collection in Chester. No print
is currently available but a larger version of the image appears in Picturesque
Chester.] As we move along Eastgate Street, we finally reach one of Louise's paintings that we do have to hand: North Side of Eastgate Street. This offers our first glimpse from this direction of Chester's famous rows - the first floor (i.e. one floor up from the ground floor) public passageways that run continously from building to building - occasionally enclosed, but usually open-fronted as we see in the buildings towards the right. This particular picture is not later than 1874 as rebuilding began in that year and all the buildings were eventually restored or otherwise changed. Given also Louise's strong religious beliefs, it is most unlikely that she would have omitted the more distant church spire unless it wasn't there to be included, and as we'll see, that pushes the latest date back into the 1860s. The bright slash across the street in the distance marks the point where the north-south route through the city intersects at the Cross with our own east-west route. The junction is staggered rather than a straight crossing, with the southern leg further away from us. To the right is Northgate Street, straight on is Watergate Street, and to the left is Bridge Street. [Grosvenor Museum collection, no print available, but included in Picturesque Chester.] |
Below - untitled, but we'll call it Eastgate Street near the Cross. It is a similar view,
but rather closer to the Cross and significantly later. The stepped pyramidal tower on the nearer church makes
it at least 1886 while the lack of wires or poles for the trams would suggest earlier than 1903 - assuming that
Louise didn't simply suppress them from her painting. Lamposts are visible in profusion, but these are probably gas (going by the top ventilators), so for a moment we cannot be more precise (see the section on Bridge Street for more about dating).  Again unnamed (but we'll call it Eastgate Street at the Cross for differentiation), this image supplied by Peter Cleaver early in 2008 exemplifies why Louise's critics dislike her re-visiting the same material for several paintings, thus undermining the freshness of each. It's essentially the same picture with a few standard elements moved around, and the painting style lacks the precision of the picture above it. It does have local history value, however. The business names all appear to be the same, but clothing seems to be subtly more modern. 
The Boot Inn (extreme right) reveals more detail, and then when you look over the Cross to the building on the far left corner, it has clearly undergone rebuilding into the style it would be recognised by in the twentieth century. This rebuilding would most likely have occurred in 1889-92, so this painting is between then and 1903 if the lack of wires can be trusted, and the picture above it is between 1886 and 1889-92.The more precisionist picture - Eastgate Street near the Cross as we titled it - is worth a closer look for several reasons, hence these two enlarged sections of it. The painting has its own quiet energy and is actually a fine and very closely detailed picture, with plenty of merit to call its own. The section here on the left shows only a bare fragment of Eastgate Street's south side, but even so is currently the best we have. The heart-shaped sign is barely legible, but appears to carry the name "Butt". A view from Northgate suggests that the south-side Row continues close to the Cross, but if it's here as well, it must have slipped behind the first floor of these buildings. Beyond the building we see the Cross, and a clear view of the stairs up to the Rows at the corner of Bridge Street and Watergate Street. But if we look down Watergate Street, we also catch the painting in a lie, for the church - as such buildings are wont to do in Louise's paintings - has marched up the hill to gain a more dominant position than it has in the other two views! 
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 In mediaeval times the shops at the corner
were known as the buttershops as they traded in dairy produce. In the earlier picture above, the buildings near the
corner have pillars to support their overhanging bays, but the 1874 (onwards) rebuilds stripped them away and changed
their character. Beyond them, the reddish brown building disappeared altogether, but resulted in making the church
beyond the Cross more visible than it had been previously.The older picture and the general view of Foregate Street are reminders of how characterful our town streets used to be, and of how much we have lost in the pursuit of modernisation and straight-out-of-the-box architecture. Character can also be found in smaller things, and deliberately or accidentally, Louise likes to include eye-catchers in her paintings - and this one is no exception, with the slim barrow with large spindly wheels and a spade handle standing off to the right. But character isn't always attractive. The painting to the right (Eastgate Row North) shows the western end of Eastgate Row where it turns away from the street frontage and drops down to street level out of sight. Known as Pepper Alley Row by the time Louise painted it, it had previously been known as the Dark Row or Dark Lofts, and was not somewhere that polite people would want to go. [Grosvenor Museum collection, no prints available, but both included in Picturesque Chester.] |
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| Many of the images on these pages appear with the co-operation and courtesy of the Grosvenor Museum, Chester |
| Harry Drummond, January 2008. |
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Please take note: we claim no art expertise, and in no way do we offer provenance for any paintings.
What you see here was compiled out of interest in Louise Rayner's paintings and those by her family, but is based on
sometimes very fragmentary evidence. As such, it is inevitable that there will be errors, though we naturally hope to
reduce these over time. We would gratefully receive any information or corrections that will help us to fill the gaps and resolve unproved links - for example confirmation of dates of birth, death, etc., and details of other addresses the family lived at (and roughly when). Images of any of the family's paintings would also be very welcome. Thank you! |
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