MUSEUM quality paintings by a group of impressionist artists from North Yorkshire and the North-East have gone on sale.

The Staithes Group of artists was an artists’ colony that was drawn to the North Yorkshire coastal village between the mid 1800s and the First World War.

Many of the impressionist artists in the group had trained in Paris and Antwerp at the height of the Impressionist movement and exhibited worldwide, with their work sometimes hanging next to paintings by Degas, Monet, Renoir and Sisley.

They brought back a style of painting based on working rapidly outdoors, capturing the light and atmosphere and captured the daily life of fishermen and women, farm hands, jet workers, sail makers and carpenters.

Around 80 pieces of Northern Impressionist art is to appear in a selling exhibition at the Pannett Art Gallery in Whitby.

Also included in the exhibition will be work by Hartlepool artist Robert Leslie Howey, who painted along the Yorkshire coast, and British Impressionist artist Frank Wasley.

Alongside the selling exhibition will be the gallery’s permanent exhibition of work by Staithes Group artists.

Tom and Rosamund Jordan, who run the business, are this year celebrating 40 years of specialising in Northern Impressionist artists.

Mrs Jordan said: “The group is so little known. Other groups who are comparable and trained with the Staithes group artists, like the Glasgow School, or Newlyn School who are well known.

“But one of these artists, Arthur Friedenson exhibited at the Carnegie Institute in America and in Chicago next to Renoir, Monet and all the best Impressionists, yet no one knows his name.”

The exhibition will run until July 20, excluding Mondays. For more information visit the website www.tbrj.co.uk