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.'