Stuart Hirst is one of Bradford’s favourite artists and has been for more than 50 years, from the time his long-running series of northern streets began, and his exhibitions drew large audiences to Cartwright Hall, the city’s premier public gallery and museum.

Letters flooded into the local newspaper, the Telegraph & Argus, profuse in praise of him, in response to a feature I wrote in January, as part of a series to coincide with Bradford’s Capital of Culture status in 2025.

“Truly wonderful paintings showing the beauty and history of Bradford … Stuart is a treasure of his city … a regional treasure … his work is stunning … fabulous … I’ve loved his paintings for years … what a talent … I treasure the print I own … .”

Comments like these speak of love rather than simple admiration for his paintings, which bring alive the terraced streets of the West Riding in which he was raised. It is these that have made Stuart one of my favourite artists and, indeed, I have interviewed him many times and written encomiastic features on him.

No other artist for me creates the unsentimental realism of this disappearing world so stunningly, finds such beauty on the cobbles, shows such reverence for quirky old, neglected corners that still survive intact in places like Sowerby Bridge, Hebden Bridge, Holmfirth, Heptonstall, Saltaire and Haworth.

To the public he will perhaps always be the painter of such scenes – which for many years have been widely available and admired as prints.

However, it may surprise some to know he has equal facility in very different styles of art - as can be best appreciated in his latest exhibition, in Scarborough, in the Dorothy Rowan Gallery. Opened in 2020, it is named after his mother, who bought him his first set of paints when he was only five and inspired him for life.

The first picture I see, in the window, is one of his father. I recognise it immediately and am transported back many years to when I first met Stuart, my direct contemporary.

It was hanging behind the bar of The Queens, in Daisy Hill, Bradford, where his father, Brian, was the genial landlord. I remember Stuart pulling pints of Webster’s bitter for me, after he had returned from a three-year course at Exeter College of Art and before at a remarkably early age he became a full-time professional artist.

Better than any formal exhibition, The Queens was the place to see portrait painting at its very best, real-life, flesh and blood character studies of the pub’s regulars - reminiscent in style perhaps of Stanley Spencer. Talk about ‘Art for the People’, as many did in the Sixties and Seventies: this was it, the very thing: of the people, for the people, by a man of the people.

The striking naturalness combined with a sympathetic understanding typical of his portraiture is seen at its best in this homage to his father now displayed to the public after a long absence.”It’s been rolled up for thirty years,” says Stuart, “but I wanted to show it as a tribute to him and because the exhibition combines several different styles.” This one is not for sale!

The gallery fronts onto Eastborough, the long and busy street that begins on the seafront and climbs to the town centre, twice changing its name on the way. From the rear of the building are stupendous views of the harbour and south shore but the centrepiece of the exhibition, High Tide, Eastborough, transforms the view outside the gallery.

“I imagined a tsunami surging up the street, depositing strange sealife in front of the astonished residents.” Recognisable shopkeepers and ‘Bottomenders’ from the Old Town are crowding the raised terrace. It’s easy to pick some of them out among the invited guests in this extraordinary canvas teeming with interest.

The remarkable painting in oils combines landscape realism, stylised portraiture and playful fantasy. It is teeming with incident, provokes laughter and surprise, maybe even carries a contemporary subliminal message about global warming and rising sea levels.

Some of old Scarborough’s cobbles, glistening after rain, are captured in characteristic watercolours but most of these 40 or more canvases explore different styles and leave no doubt about Stuart’s unusual versatility. “At the risk of putting all my eggs in one basket,” he says, “there are also oil paintings based on memory or fantasy or simply my whimsical imaginings.”

In the late 1990s, Stuart developed a radically different style in oils. Large, brasher, stylised indeterminately, they featured isolated buildings that remained when the rest of the street has been pulled down. They have a slightly surreal aspect which prefigures, in many ways, the dominant tone of this exhibition, seen in the lively parody of The Eve of Construction, the profound questions raised by Canyons of the Mind and and the visual pun in Eddy Wood For Teddies, featuring a tennis player in search of a partner.

There are contrasting and complementary scenes in diptych and triptych form, a stunning street reminiscence of the Coronation Day of the late Queen Elizabeth, an interplanetary orbiting as well as a couple of seascapes featuring the iconic local lighthouse.

It was a great pleasure to attend Stuart’s preview, along with so many of his friends and admirers, not least the Lady Mayor, Janet Jefferson. John Dalton provided the most sensitive of background music on the harp - and Marcus Romer, actor, playwright, stage director and filmmaker was on hand to quietly intone: “Lowry meets Edward Hopper.”

Praise indeed and very well merited.