Mark Senior (British painter) 1864 - 1927
Mark Senior was a well-known Yorkshire post-Impressionist artist and teacher who was born in Hanging Heaton, Batley in 1862, but lived all his life in Ossett after marrying Alice Brook, the daughter of Ossett mungo manufacturer Thomas Brook in 1886. Mark Senior and Alice moved from Dewsbury to live at Fieldhead House in Ossett in 1892, the same year that his picture "Eventide" was exhibited at the Royal Academy. Senior had many more paintings exhibited at the Royal Academy and at the National Portrait Society's exhibitions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Although Mark Senior was never at the forefront of English art, his vividly coloured views of Runswick Bay in North Yorkshire helped to define further the rural schools of post-Impressionism and assure him a place in the history of art in Yorkshire. In his lifetime Mark Senior achieved recognition in his native, much-loved Yorkshire and was able to number among his friends some of the leading artists of his day, such as Philip Wilson Steer, Frank Brangwyn, James McNeill Whistler and William Orpen. However, within a few years of Senior's death in 1927, he had faded into relative obscurity like his lifelong friend Sir George Clausen RA (1852-1944). Clausen was always recognised by Senior as a formative influence and the "Yorkshire Post" critic in appraisal of Senior's work after his death in 1927 recognised this debt; to him Senior: . . . "had the same love of English landscape and of English peasant types, touching them with a glamour of fantasy, which made him less interested in them as concrete individualities than as types . . . He was certainly entitled to the comparatively rare description of a colourist, for there was never any false note in his colour schemes, which to the end of his career, grew in richness and prismatic quality sunlight can give."
