Lost and found

One depicts the old Ouse Bridge as it would have looked in 1807. The other shows Briggate, now Bridge Street, looking over the old Ouse Bridge towards Micklegate.

St Martin cum Gregory Church can be seen in the distance, further up Micklegate Hill. The building on the right is the old St Williams Chapel, demolished in 1809. The old bridge is about half the width of the one that replaced it which we still use today.

These wonderful works of art are by York painter Edwin Ridsdale Tate. He lived from 1862 to 1922 but specialised in recreating York scenes from earlier times.

The two pictures are among the latest examples of his talent uncovered by Peter Stanhope, historian and Freeman of the City.

Over 16 years Peter has been piecing together the life of this almost forgotten York artist with the intent of publishing a biography of him.

Ridsdale Tate was an architect who specialised in the restoration of historic buildings. He loved York's history and never hesitated to capture it via a pencil sketch, a pen and ink drawing or in a watercolour.

It was that most valued of modern research tools, the internet, that led Peter to his latest ERT discoveries. Putting the artist's name into a search engine, he uncovered an article from Homes And Gardens magazine about an organic farm and country house in Lincolnshire in which "on the Georgian panelled bedroom walls are three pictures by E R Tate - to whom the owner is distantly related".

Peter immediately got in touch with the young couple who inherited the business, and they put him on to their mother. "Yes, we have lots of paintings by Ridsdale Tate - he used to come down to see us from York and visited various family members at their Lincolnshire homes, and I used to visit Mrs Tate at her York home when I was a young girl," she told him over the phone.

This was a real breakthrough for Peter's research, and he arranged to visit the family.

"My worst fear would be that they would simply be what we have seen so many times before - the sketches from the portfolio of Quaint And Historic York which was ERT's commercial tour de force and was sold so many hundreds of times over that I now find them all over the place," said Peter.

"But we had to take the chance of making the visit to near Scunthorpe to find out - and so we went there recently on a misty, murky day."

His fears were completely misplaced. He discovered that the mother of the woman who owned the paintings was a bridesmaid at Ridsdale Tate's marriage to Mary Louise Elsworth Wray at Holy Trinity Church, Micklegate in 1916.

She was Mabel Scrimshaw, a cousin of the bride. So were the other two bridesmaids, also from North Lincolnshire where Miss Wray's farming family came from. The "family seat" was Theddlethorpe, near Louth.

"When we got there our lady had everything laid out around the kitchen, pictures, paintings, postcards, family albums, family tree... there was so much of it," Peter said.

There were lots of paintings. Many were quite small, as if they were pages from ERT's sketchbook given to the family and later framed.

Some major pen sketches were also in the collection, including one of the St Johns College, the diocesan training college as it was then. To Peter's expert eye, it looks like a limited edition print, perhaps commissioned by the college and published by a Coney Street firm.

As well as paintings of Theddlethorpe Hall and other North Lincolnshire scenes, there were small pictures of St Michael's Mount and a Cornwall village - possibly a record of one of the artist's holidays.

"Most exciting was that, apart from seemingly hundreds of ERT viewcards of York (all of which I had seen before - most likely published by Arthur & Co, Davygate), the lady also had the original paintings of two of the postcard scenes framed on the wall," said Peter.

"These are most interesting as they portray the old Ouse Bridge pre 1810 - but with skaters on the frozen river and stalls pitched on the banks of the ice. The winter of 1807 must have been particularly cold.

"There was also the original of the snow-covered view over the same old bridge towards Briggate and Micklegate in 1807, which ERT had 'borrowed' from a previous sketch and engraving by Henry Cave."

This visit means Peter has made contact with three of the four aspects of Edwin Ridsdale Tate's family: the Ridsdales, through Peter Ridsdale in Sheffield; the Arthurs, through Christine Lancaster in York; and the Wrays, through the Lincolnshire family.

"The only side of the family that I still know so little about is the Tates themselves. As ERT never had any children - he died 'without issue' according to Hugh Murray's pedigree - I am still casting about trying to find any Tate relatives who may have some family memorabilia or pictures which might interest me in completing his story."

The artist did have brothers and sisters and Peter believes that the house he lived in at 4 Clifton Vale in the early years of 1900 may have belonged to a Christopher and Mary Hannah Tate. Are there any members of the Tate family still living in or around York?

"Mystery surrounds one Florence Tate who, it is said, was the last person to have been at the Bishopthorpe Road home of ERT's widow, Louise Tate, after she died in 1955," Peter said. "Maybe Florence was a niece? In any case it seems as though she sold off the house and all of its contents after 1961 - the walls were said to be "simply dripping with paintings and sketches, all along the passageway and on the stairs" - went to Cramptons salerooms."

Can you help? Peter would love to hear from anyone with information or artwork. He can be contacted via email at PJStanhope@aol.com or on (01904) 471800.

Peter is preparing a public lecture on Edwin Ridsdale Tate for April.

Updated: 09:37 Monday, January 10, 2005