A PAINTING created to honour of one of the heroes of the Titanic disaster has gone on display in Yorkshire.

The work was put on show at Leeds Art Gallery this week to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the ill-fated ship.

Violinist Wallace Hartley was the leader of the eight-piece band who sacrificed their own hopes of survival and played hymns in an attempt to calm passengers on the doomed liner which sank with the loss of more than 1,500 lives in the early hours of Monday, April 15, 1912, after striking an iceberg on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York.

Hartley, 33, was born in Colne in Lancashire, but lived in Huddersfield for several years before moving to Dewsbury.

He played with the Huddersfield Philharmonic Orchestra.

He famously led the Titanic band in playing the hymn Nearer My God To Thee according to reports in the final moments before the so-called ‘unsinkable ship’ slipped to the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean approximately 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland.

The band were widely considered heroes for remaining at their posts to the last, with their tale capturing the public mood of shock and grief at the tragedy as shown by the estimated 40,000 people who lined the streets of Colne for Hartley’s funeral.

At the time of his death Hartley was a member of The Leeds Professional Musicians, and shortly after the sinking the group commissioned noted British symbolist artist Frederick Caley Robinson (1862-1927) to produce an oil painting to honour him.

The resulting canvas image entitled The Outward Bound is a soulful, melancholic scene showing a lone figure aboard a small boat watching as the Titanic, at the time the largest and grandest ship ever built, leaves harbour in the distance shrouded in ghostly mist.

It was last on display in 2005 but it is now once again on show to coincide with the memorial events and activities being held around the world to mark the 100th anniversary of Titanic’s sinking.

Leeds Art Gallery’s curator of contemporary art Nigel Walsh said: “Widely reported at the time, the Titanic disaster caught the public imagination and continues to do so.

“The story of Wallace Hartley and his bandmates is one of the iconic elements of the tragedy, and we are delighted to have The Outward Bound in the collection in Leeds and now back on public display again at the gallery.”