A MAN gazes in wonder at work from his forebears, highlighting the growing importance of the Carling brothers to the cultural history of Liverpool.

A museum/ gallery dedicated to the family has opened above Maggie May’s Cafe, on Bold Street.

Artists Henry (born 1854) and James (1857) were sent barefoot from their home in Addison Street, off Scotland Road, Liverpool, to earn a crust as pavement artists.

Both would later be celebrated in the USA – Henry as a portraitist and James for his illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem The Raven, as well as his own poems.

But local historian Michael Kelly has unearthed more facts about their brothers. John (born in 1852) was a Liverpool barber, but Terence also crossed the Atlantic to New York, to become a successful songwriter.

The eldest, William (1851), served for many years as a sailor before settling in Plymouth, where he won a place on the School Board, and became a widely published poet and a fine political campaigner, whose sympathies, understandably, were always with the working man.

His great- grandson, Michael Carling Kitt, 76, visited the gallery with his wife, Linda.

“The brothers had great drive to be able to survive at all,” he said. “They had tremendous resourcefulness to find food and a place to sleep for the night. One feels tremendously sorry for them.”

The first annual international Carling Pavement Artist contest was held in Liverpool last month.