HILLSBOROUGH: Flowers for Liverpool
Liverpool Football Club Museum Curator Stephen Done introduces the painting that captured the moment when the Anfield stadium became a shrine to lost lives.
We have a very important painting on display in the club museum called Flowers for Liverpool.
If you look at it you can probably tell that the subject matter is the flowers that were laid at Anfield in the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster.
It was painted by the late Adrian Henri the brilliant Liverpool painter and poet.
He was inspired to paint it after being overwhelmed by the scene that greeted him when he arrived at Anfield to pay his own respects.
The whole pitch was covered in flowers in what was almost like a shrine dedicated to those that had tragically lost their lives.
The painting is almost abstract because you have to look at it a little bit to work out exactly what it is. Slowly you start to see the wrappers of the flowers, red ribbons, scarves and hints of lines written in remembrance.
It is a lovely painting and yet there is also the obvious element of sadness and tragedy.
Henri was a massive Liverpool supporter. Sadly he is no longer with us. I was always a great fan of his poetry and his painting, so I was delighted that not long after I got my job here, back in 1997, I met him at the Bluecoat gallery and we had a really long chat together - but we didn't talk about art - it was all football!
The painting is very special and is as fitting a tribute to those who lost their lives in Hillsborough as we have on show.
We have also added a poem he wrote following the disaster that can be read below.
THE BELL
The bell tolled
all afternoon
we did not send to ask
for whom.
It told of flowers
heaped in a goalmouth,
red and blue scarves
heaped together at an altar;
it told of
eyes like TV screens
haunted by last night's images
tears dried by the April wind.
As the flags at half-mast
stirred overhead
the deep bell
still tolled in our heads
long after the light had gone.
Adrian Henri, April 1989