The Manchester School of Painters was formed by a number of disgruntled young vanguard painters in the 1870s. They were deeply influenced by the artist Joseph Knight, who was a successful painter, etcher and photographer. He was the founder member of the Manchester School of Painters. Knight painted how he desired and refused to conform to traditional Art School rules and this appealed to his young admirers. Twice weekly they would all meet up at Knight's studio in York Place behind the Union Chapel in Oxford Road, Manchester to discuss new ways to develop their techniques.
The group were very discontented with the old school of teaching and working. They decided they would work in a different way, experimenting with different tones and colours especially after a number of them spent four months working in the open air in Pont-Aven, Brittany. The place was vibrant and full to the brim with an eminent and cosmopolitan crowd of painters known as the Pont-Aven School and the group became influenced by all their different ways of working.[1]
They were disillusioned with Manchester Art School's method of teaching, i.e. the South Kensington system of art education (laborious precision drawing from the antique.) [2] Partington was so outraged he opened his own school in Stockport based on the same lines as the Académie Julian, Paris where masters and students worked together with a life model.
The more they experimented the more criticism they received from the Manchester art critics and the old school of painters. It took them over ten years to establish The Manchester School and for them to be finally accepted by the critics.