Leeds Arts Club

[3] The Club met in rooms on the first floor of Leeds Permanent Building Society on the corner of Park Lane, now Headrow, and Calverley Street.

[4] Members included a large number of teachers, many of them women, journalists, architects, artists, photographers, typesetters, printers, clergymen and a few university lecturers.

[3] The painter William Rothenstein and his brother Charles championed French Impressionist painting, lending examples to exhibitions held at the Club.

[10] In February 1908, the Club moved to 8 Blenheim Terrace, Woodhouse Lane, a 3 storey house near to the University, despite the fact that members were still largely non-university women and men.

[14] Between 1909 and 1911, national figures like G. K. Chesterton, Yeats and Edward Carpenter lectured at the Club where theatre, religion, politics and ecological issues dominated, photographs by Frank Sutcliffe and Frederick Evans were exhibited.

[17] Sadler owned one of the largest collections of Post-Impressionist art in Britain, displayed in his house in Headingley, and had connections to Kandinsky and the Blaue Reiter Group.

[22] He co-founded the Leeds Art Collections Fund with Sadler, to help acquisitions and shows, among them, the seminal show in June 1913 of Post-Impressionism held at the Arts Club, with works by Cézanne, Gauguin, Serusier, Kandinsky, Picasso, Van Gogh, Pissarro, Anne Estelle Rice, Ethel Wright and others, lent by Sadler, Rutter and A. M. Daniel, the Lord Mayor of Scarborough.

When Alfred Orage and Holbrook Jackson left Leeds in 1906 they moved to London and began editing the weekly cultural and political journal The New Age.

As Tom Steele has argued, this was a self-conscious attempt to expand the reach of the philosophy developed at the Leeds Arts Club to a national audience.

Under Orage and Jackson The New Age became, in Steele's words, 'the most influential journal of literature and politics in the country, with regular articles from established writers like G.K. Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw, Hilaire Belloc and Arnold Bennett, reviewing from Ezra Pound and Herbert Read, art criticism and theory from T.E.

The plaque was unveiled on 15 May 2012, by Ingrid Roscoe, Lord Lieutenant of West Yorkshire, and a speech was made by Tom Steele, author of Alfred Orage and The Leeds Arts Club.

Artists, thinkers and writers inspired by the Club include Isabella Ford, Mary Gawthorpe, Jacob Kramer and Herbert Read.