It has proved difficult to separate the usually melodramatically rendered life from a creative achievement that, despite a further number of successfully achieved canvases, depends essentially on the series, Landscapes with Handless Man, a linked sequence of large canvases (all approximately six feet by six feet) created in the last years of life before (as he perhaps unbelievably claimed) the events they illustrate and his later incarceration, after a charge of murder. in a Mental Institution. After the first Exhibition of the Landscapes, Matthews achieved a short-lived cult status which to some smaller extent has continued to the present.
The material of the Landscapes is apparently an allegorical interpretation and a reconstruction/prediction (again there must be some doubt) of his own life in which curiously stylised industrial or moorland backgrounds hold recognisable and, though the treatment is hardly realistic, recurrent figures, animals, birds and 'metaphoric objects.'
