Cook and Wildridge; History and Art

My first step in researching the history of the Hull Charterhouse was to read a borrowed copy of a book by John Cook, The History of God's House of Hull, commonly called the Charterhouse, published in Hull in 1882.  It remains the only published book on the subject, and a few copies are still to be found.  John Cook was a Hull solicitor, born in 1850.  He tried his hand at writing fiction, not very successfully, and then turned to the story of the institution (for which he was retained as solicitor).
The book is very important, but there are problems with it.  At times, particularly when dealing with the earliest period, it relies on documents which Cook obviously had access to but which have now disappeared.  We have to take Cook's word for it, which is never satisfactory.  More important is what he misses out.  He has little or no interest in the inmates, so we learn nothing about the conditions in which people lived, or even how they came to be awarded a place.  In his defence, he was reliant on many of the same records which the modern historian has, and they tell us very little; but he shows no curiosity about the residents even of his own day.  The Masters are the important people.
The main problem, however, is Cook's focus on piety.  The Charterhouse is a Christian institution, and its Masters are all well-intentioned men of God.  It was a common approach at the time; there are many locally-published books about individuals which read like hagiographies.  But it leads to distortions.  This is most obvious when we consider the corruption which set in over the awarding of places in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.  Cook clearly knew about it; but he chose to swerve around it.

John Cook had an admirer in Thomas Tindall Wildridge.  Two years after Cook published his History, Wildridge published Old and New Hull, containing short articles about the city's people ("Local Worthies" in his subtitle) and its institutions.  He is fulsome about Cook's work:

"This work, in the first place, is on absolutely reliable authority, and while preserving scrupulous accuracy, is rich in well-conceived argument and conjecture; in addition, it is written with such power and endearing picturesqueness as to be the model of a topographical book. Under the fierce light which his patient investigation caused to beat upon the little Kingdom of the Charter House, errors in the accounts of all previous historians are plainly seen."

There is more in the same vein.
Wildridge includes his own article on the Charterhouse in his book.  He gives a complete transcript of a long document from 1451, an agreement between the Prior and the Mayor; but he does not modernise the spelling so it is hard to follow, and not very rewarding.  Wildridge was an archivist and so he demonstrates his access to documents by giving us a good deal of financial information.
More interesting, however, is a drawing, his "Bird's-Eye View of the Charterhouse".  Wildridge had ambitions to be an artist.  His few surviving paintings show little talent, and when he makes drawings from portraits to illustrate his book they are not particularly good copies.  But he was a good draughtsman and his picture is accurate.

However, a mystery surrounds another print. one which is displayed inside the entrance of the Charterhouse today.  It purports to be the ruins of the entrance to the old priory, and bears the signature "TTW".  The assumption has been that it's by Wildridge, although it doesn't appear in his book.  If it is by Wildridge, or even if it isn't, it's a deceit.  We know that such an archway existed at least up to the end of the 18th century.  Tickell's book on the history of Hull shows a picture, dated 1796, of the 1780 Charterhouse building and the ruin is there in the background, roughly where Charterhouse Lane now becomes Sykes Street.  Not only does the "TTW" drawing look nothing like it; 
it is actually a meticulous copy of a 1776 engraving of the ruined archway of Coverham Abbey.