The term "Newlyn School" refers to the artist colony located in and around the fishing village of Newlyn, in Cornwall, from the 1880s until the early 20th century, which specialized in landscape painting. Like the Continental artist colonies of the Barbizon School near Paris, and the Pont-Aven school in Brittany, artists gathered in Newlyn to paint landscape scenes in a purer setting, with strong natural light. Newlyn's plein air painting followed the Impressionist doctrine of naturalism - working directly in nature, using subject matter drawn from rural life, especially that of the fishermen.

Newlyn's Painting Conditions
Plein air painters were drawn to Newlyn for a number of reasons: many hours of strong light; a mild climate particularly suitable for outdoor work; picturesque scenery, both rural and coastal, reminiscent of Brittany; and cheap living conditions. It was also within relatively easy reach of London, following the extension of the Great Western Railway to West Cornwall in 1877. And there was plentiful subject-matter. The day-to-day issues, dangers and disasters of life at sea, along with the everyday scenes of harbour and village activity provided immense scope for genre-painting as well as landscapes.

History of Newlyn School
The post-Impressionist artist colony of Newlyn experienced its heyday in the decade prior to the First World War, although a number of well-known artists continued painting there until much later. The first of Newlyn's artists to settle in the town was Walter Langley (1852-1922) who arrived from Birmingham in 1882, followed not long after by his artist friend, Edwin Harris. Stanhope Forbes (1857-1947) arrived in 1884, although he didn't settle until after his marriage to the Canadian painter Elizabeth Armstrong (1859-1912). Forbes was soon joined by Frank Bramley (1857-1915). Both men had almost immediate success with their Newlyn paintings, and the Newlyn School soon became identified with them.

Other Newlyn members included the talented Irish artist Norman Garstin (1847-1926), Thomas Cooper Gotch (1854-1931), Fred Hall (1860-1948), Henry Scott Tuke (1858-1929), Harold Knight (1874-1961), Dame Laura Knight (1877-1970), Dod Procter (1892-1972), and Ernest Procter (1886-1935), as well as Lamorna Birch, Frederick Hall, Harold Harvey, Ayerst Ingram, Henry Herbert La Thangue, Fred Millard, Albert Chevallier Taylor and Ralph Todd. A good number of these artists who settled in Newlyn were members of the New English Art Club, but they also exhibited at the London Royal Academy. Among numerous artists who spent summers at Newlyn, was Mildred Anne Butler (1858-1941) another great Irish landscape and watercolourist artist, who visited Newlyn in 1894 and 1895.
Encyclopaedia of Irish and World Art

The section includes artists associated with Newlyn, including those not belonging to the "Noewlyn School" and those from a later period. For each artist paintings are included created before their arrival and after their departure from Newlyn and during periods of absence from the village .

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Born in Camberwell, London, Martin began adult life as a midshipman, sailing around the Cape of Good Hope to India before 'discovering' Newlyn in 1870. He painted coastal landscapes and scenes of fishing life. He was the only artist listed as resident in Newlyn at the time of the 1871 Census, and the only one of the first-generation of Newlyn artists to be in the vicinity at the time of the 1881 Census.

Martin and his wife, Helen Amy, retained their tenancy at Castle Cliff until 1883, later moving to the Plymouth area: thus he had been painting in Newlyn for up to twelve years prior to the arrival of the main body of artists to the locality.

Two of his paintings were included in the 1889 West Cornwall Art Union Exhibition in Penzance. He exhibited at the NAG Opening Exhibition in 1895, and was described in the reviews as 'the original Newlynite' although he was, by that time, exhibiting from a London address.

The artist married a second time, after the death of his first wife, to Rosina Blake (called Rose) and with her had two children, the second of whom, Nora Kate Lympany, died in 2002, aged 99 years. Martin spent the last years of his life living at 5 Brunel Terrace in Saltash, Cornwall, beside the River Tamar.
Cornwall Artists Index

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Born in Caherconlish, County Limerick, Republic of Ireland (28 August, 1847), the son of Mary (née Moore) and Captain William Garstin. From a difficult childhood (his mother’s paralysis and invalidism, and his father’s suicide), he was brought up by loving aunts. After school at Victoria College, Jersey, he had short-term ‘trys’ at engineering, architecture and finally diamond hunting in South Africa (becoming a close friend of Cecil Rhodes), becoming involved in the Cape government and journalism.

In 1880 he began his art training at the Royal Academy in Antwerp with Verstraete, and then studied at Carolus-Duran’s Academy in Paris (1882-84), beginning to exhibit in British galleries during that period. Always he wrote, and recorded his reactions, journalism proving an excellent avocation throughout his life and one which he would pass on to his sons, Crosbie GARSTIN and Denis Garstin. His articles in The Studio and other magazines thread their way through the history of the Newlyn colony, always supportive of his working colleagues and their art. His daughter, Alethea GARSTIN would follow his other route and take-up art.

He married Louisa ‘Dochie’ Jones in 1886 after his ‘grand tour’ to Venice, Italy, Morocco and Spain, all of which added up to a large portfolio of work. The couple settled in Newlyn where many of his former colleagues from Antwerp had already set up, and where the general aversion to academic art agreed with his individualist and realist inclinations. In 1886 they lived at Mount Vernon, in Newlyn, though by 1895 they had moved into Penzance.

He was on the Provisional Committee of artists when NAG opened 22nd October 1895, and worked steadily with it over many years (see his Introduction to the Whitechapel Spring Exhibition of 1902, repr Hardie 2009), showing the work of artists from the various West Cornwall colonies. He regularly took groups of art students to his favourite painting haunts on the Continent, and he was a popular and much loved teacher.

Of his many titles, The Rain, it raineth every day (Penlee House Collection) is undoubtedly one of his finest. A portrait of Mary Augusta Carlidna Bolitho was exhibited at Penlee House, Penzance in 2005 (Private Collection). Norman Garstin died on 22 June, 1926, age 78, in Penzance.
Cornwall Artists Index
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Wikipedia
Art UK

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Sutcliffe was born in Heptonstall, nr Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire on 26 March, 1848. He was first discovered (by us) when he exhibited with the Cornish artists in the Dowdeswell show of 1890. He had been resident in Newlyn prior to that exhibition, as a letter from Forbes, describes a visit to his lodgings in Newlyn on 20 Oct 1887. He also exhibited with the Newlyn artists in the Meadow Studios, though had left Newlyn well before the advent of NAG.

Sutcliffe married the artist Elizabeth TREVOR (sister of the late Edward TREVOR) in 1891 in Wales, and the two were considered distinguished artists of their region, in which they lived and worked for the remainder of their lives. Sutcliffe died in Leeds on 17 December, 1933, age 84
Cornwall Artists Index

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A Birmingham-born artist (29 July 1850), shown in the 1891 Census to be a Newlyn resident; he is also listed by Charles MARRIOTT as a St Ives artist. Before taking up painting, and studying in Paris, he spent some time as an engineer of design. His subjects were landscapes, genre relating to ships and boats, and still-life. In 1883 he went to Venice for further study.

On his return he exhibited at RBSA (becoming ARBSA in 1884), and in 1885 moved to Newlyn with Phil Whiting (Frank), then to Paul, where he was near his close friend Stanhope FORBES (mentioned in 1885 Forbes letters), after which he moved to St Ives in 1894, settling in Treloyan Cottage and working from the Malakoff Studio. A colour plate of his painting The Forge (By Hammer and Hand, All Arts doth Stand) is included in Hardie (2009), and reflects the depth, richness of colour and realism of the Newlyn school of artists.

At the St Ives Show Day 1911, he exhibited Fuel and Intruders. He was one of the signatories of the Glanville letter (1898) expressing artists' concerns regarding over-development in the town. In 1899 he was Elected RBSA . He specialised in subjects showing work in the countryside such as woodcutting, hoeing and blacksmithing, working more in the Newlyn tradition of narrative painting. He often rode a horse cross-country, with his paints and easel strapped to his back. He died in St Ives age 73, and is buried at Zennor.
Cornwall Artists Index

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Born 1851 at Madras, Tamil Nadu, the son of a British civil servant, Frank studied at the Slade School of Art when age 31 and then spent a year in Paris (1983-84). He moved to Cornwall (Polperro) in 1886 and came to Newlyn in 1887, remaining until 1892. Henry Meynell RHEAM was to make the same transition a year or two later. In 1889 Frank lived at Belle Vue House with Mrs Maddern, in the same house as Stanhope FORBES, and became a particular friend of Norman GARSTIN whose work he greatly admired.

The 1891 Census lists 'F Bosendillon' [sic] as living at 35 Paul Hill with Mrs Roberts. Lodging in the same house were Mary and William D FROSTEAGUE, the latter an artist painter from Birmingham. Bourdillon painted romantic Elizabethan seascapes, also landscapes and figures, and liked to paint models in period costumes en plein air.

He decided to leave art and painting in 1892 to become a CMS Missionary in Burdwan, India (1896-1901), where he married a fellow missionary, Kathleen Edwards. Due to ill health, they returned to England, and Frank took up a curacy in Ramsgate before becoming the Rector of Horton, Gloucestershire (1914-1923). Bourdillon died on 18 February, 1924, aged 72, at Little Sodbury, nr Chipping Sodbury, south Gloucestershire (GRO).

The whereabouts of his collection of letters, which show him to have been generous and concerned for his fellow artists [as reported in Fox & Greenacre], are unaccounted for, and are unfortunately not lodged in the WCAA.
Cornwall Artists Index

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In eighteenth century France, Rococo was the popular style of art. Painters such as Antoine Watteau, Jean-Honoré Fragonard and François Boucher had given art lovers a highly ornate and decorative form of art with its elegant, delightful, if somewhat voyeuristic, depictions of the good life. There was a playfulness about the depictions and all thoughts of seriousness was substituted by eroticism. The minority who were able to live the lifestyle shown in the Rococo paintings were pleased with what they saw but of course this was not real life for many of the citizens. Change had to come, and it did in the form of Realism. One of the leaders of this movement was the French artist, Gustave Courbet and he set out a manifesto, La Réalisme which stated that art should be about truth and depictions must be objective records. Realism was to be an art in which the painter put on his canvas what he saw, “warts and all” and not be concerned as to whether it was appropriate or inappropriate. This new form art was to move away from bourgeoise tastes.

Probably Courbet’s most famous painting was pure Realism. It was entitled The Artist’s Studio, which he completed in 1855. The work baffled many, so much so Courbet clarified the ideas behind the depiction, declaring:

“…It’s the whole world coming to me to be painted. On the right, all the shareholders, by that I mean friends, fellow workers, art lovers. On the left is the other world of everyday life, the masses, wretchedness, poverty, wealth, the exploited and the exploiters, people who make a living from death…”

The painting depicts two groups of men and women. In the first group on the right, there is the bearded profile of the art collector Alfred Bruyas, and behind him, facing us, the philosopher Proudhon. Jules François Felix Fleury-Husson, who wrote under the name Champfleury. He was a French art critic and novelist, and a prominent supporter of the Realist movement in painting and fiction, and is seated on a stool, while the French poet and essayist Charles Baudelaire is absorbed in a book. In the right foreground we see a couple who exemplify a pair of art lovers, and in the background, near the window, we see a couple unashamedly wrapped in a loving embrace and they have been included to symbolise free love.

However, the group on the left symbolise the reality of life. There is a priest, a merchant, a hunter, and even an unemployed worker and a beggar girl symbolising poverty. These last two insertions were controversial. Look on the floor by the dog and you will see a dagger, a guitar and large hat with a black plumed feather. Courbet added these items alluding to what was often seen in Academic art.

In the centre, Courbet sits at his large-scale painting of a beautiful landscape with its blue sky and verdant background and this is in direct contrast to the depiction of his grimy and crowded studio. This is a reminder of the difference between real life and an idealised life. This work was destined to be exhibited at the 1855 Universal Exhibition but was rejected on the ground of it being too big but maybe it was because it was too controversial. Courbet, however, was determined that the work should be seen by the public and so, not to be deterred, Courbet, at his own expense, built a Pavilion of Realism close to the official Universal Exhibition site and showed this work and thirteen others including his famous A Burial at Ornans.

From this eighteenth century Realist movement came Social Realism which developed to pictorially arouse concerns about the squalid living conditions suffered by urban poor, and farming and fishing communities. In Britain, artists such as Luke Fildes, Hubert von Herkomer, Frank Holl, and William Small were at the forefront of this movement. In America the beginnings of Social Realism started life with the Ashcan School painters, who in the early 20th century depicted through their art, the everyday, stark, and unglamorous truths of city life. Artists such as John Sloan, Robert Henri, George Bellows, and George Luks were prominent members of this diverse group who painted scenes from everyday life.

In Russia, Social Realism came in the form of paintings by Ilya Yefimovich Repin who declared that the reason for his art was to show and criticize all the monstrosities of our vile society of the Tsarist period. One of his most famous Realist paintings was his 1883 work entitled Barge Haulers on the Volga.

The reason for this introduction regarding Realism and Social Realism is that the artist I am looking at today is an English Social Realist painter. His name is Walter Langley. He was born in Birmingham, England on June 8th, 1852. Although attending normal school, because of his interest in drawing and painting and artistic ability, at the age of ten, he was also enrolled for evening classes at the Birmingham School of Design. He left school at the age of fifteen and was taken on as an apprentice to a lithographer, August Heinrich Biermann, but still continued with his classes at the School of Design. Langley began to teach himself to paint, and first exhibited three water colours at the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists in 1873. His wish was to become a professional artist and that year, at the age of twenty-one, he won a scholarship to the National Art Training School in South Kensington, now known as the Royal College of Art. It was there that he took part in a two-year design course and began to exhibit his works of art. It was also around this time that he married Clara Perkins, with whom he had four children.

In 1875, when his course had ended he had to decide whether to stay in London or return home. The decision was made for him as August Biermann, his former employer, offered Langley a partnership in his lithographer business and so he returned to Birmingham to resume his career as a lithographer. However, Langley did not give up his love of painting and, because he decided that he needed to make progress with his artwork, he enrolled in classes firstly at the Midland Art Guild and then at the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists. It was during this period that Langley became influenced by the works of Realist painters and one who had his works exhibited at the Birmingham Society was the German-born British realist painter, Hubert Von Herkomer, who took a realistic approach to the conditions of life of the poor.

Langley would have probably continued his career as a lithographer but in 1876 the demand for such items fell drastically and he soon realised that his artwork was needed to bring him a living wage. In 1877, Langley married Clara Perkins and the couple went on to have four children. In 1879 he left Biermann’s lithographer business and concentrated on his art. In his early years Walter Langley painted rural scenes close to his home in Birmingham and it was not until the summer of 1880 that he first visited Newlyn in Cornwall with his friend William Pope whilst on a sketching holiday.

In 1881 he was elected an Associate of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists, which is one of the oldest Art Societies in the United Kingdom. The Royal Birmingham Society of Artists played an important part in the Pre-Raphaelite movement and Sir John Everett Millais and Sir Edward Burne-Jones both served as presidents. Other eminent presidents were the painters, Lord Leighton and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema.

Whilst plying his artistic trade in Birmingham a well-known and wealthy Victorian photographer, Robert White Thrupp, approached him and offered him a commission of £500 to go to Cornwall and paint a series of twenty pictures of the local Newlyn scenes and so in 1881 Langley left his wife and family behind in Birmingham, and rented a property, Pembroke Lodge. The Penwith Local History Group wrote about Langley’s new home:

“…Pembroke Lodge was a grand house that had been home to bankers and gentry since it was built in 1791.Langley’s first year’s rent of £62 (payable in advance) gave him two parlours, two kitchens, a dairy, pantry, four good bedrooms, and a dressing room. It also had a studio in the garden. The house was a good size for Langley, his wife Clara and their four children who moved into their new home in March 1882. Clara had not long given birth to her fourth child, a son Cecil born in February that year. The other children were son Lorraine (born September 8, 1877), daughter Eleanor (born March 15, 1879) and son Gabriel (born November 21, 1881)…”

Once settled in, Langley began to paint local scenes and portraits featuring the people of Newlyn, most of which depicted the women and their role in the community. Langley could empathize with the plight of the fishermen and their families because 0f his own working-class origins in Birmingham and his socialist beliefs.

One of his first paintings he completed after his arrival at Newlyn was his 1882 watercolour work entitled Time Moveth Not, Our Being ‘Tis That Moves. It is a depiction of a local woman, believed to be Grace Kelynack. It is a portrait of great compassion and one that detects Langley’s understanding of the plight of the elderly. There is a sense of loneliness and solitude in this depiction of the woman as she ponders the hardships she has had to endure during her long life. In the painting we see her sitting at a table, with her right elbow on an open Bible. She rests her cheek on her fist as she gazes downwards, lost in her own thoughts. It was the first work that Langley exhibited in London and was widely acclaimed by both critics and the public. The watercolour painting led to Langley being elected to the prestigious Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolour.

Walter Langley soon became a leading figure in the Newlyn School, which was an art colony of artists based in or near Newlyn. Another of the founding members of the Newlyn School was Stanhope Forbes who arrived at the Cornish fishing village in 1884.

Like other artist colonies such as the Barbizon and Skagen Schools, as well as the artist colonies scattered along the coast of Britany, the attraction of Newlyn was its fantastic light, and mild climate which made it an ideal location for plein air painters. It also provided many opportunities to paint seascapes, and for the Realist painters, the chance to record the harsh life endured by the fishing community. Another attraction was the ability to live there cheaply and employ local people as models at much lower rates than would have been the case in big cities. This magnetic pull towards Newlyn was summed up in the Victorian writer, Mrs Lionel Birch’s 1906 book, Stanhope A. Forbes, and Elizabeth Stanhope Forbes, in which she quotes Stanhope Forbes’ take on Newlyn:

“…I had come from France and, wandering down into Cornwall, came one spring morning along that dusty road by which Newlyn is approached from Penzance. Little did I think that the cluster of grey-roofed houses which I saw before me against the hillside would be my home for many years. What lode-some of artistic metal the place contains I know not; but its effects were strongly felt in the studios of Paris and Antwerp particularly, by a number of young English painters studying there, who just about then, by some common impulse, seemed drawn towards this corner of their native land… There are plenty of names amongst them which are still, and I hope will long by, associated with Newlyn, and the beauty of this fair district, which charmed us from the first, has not lost its power, and holds us still…”

Walter Langley was always an advocate of the working class and was noted for his left-wing views. Whilst a young man in Birmingham, he was influenced by the stance taken by the firebrand politician and advocate of trade unionism, Charles Bradlaugh, a radical socialist who fought for the rights of the working class. It was these strong-held beliefs of Langley that ensured he empathized with the harsh life of the Newlyn fishing folk and their families. It was through his paintings depicting their hard life and their worries that classed him as a Social Realist painter.

One of his most poignant paintings is a watercolour entitled For Men Must Work and Women Must Weep which he completed in 1883 and focuses on the plight of wives and mothers who are left behind when their husbands and sons head out to sea. The title of the painting comes from a line of a poem by Charles Kinsley, The Three Fishers:

Three fishers went sailing out into the West,
Out into the West as the sun went down;
Each thought on the woman who lov’d him the best;
And the children stood watching them out of the town;
For men must work, and women must weep,
And there’s little to earn, and many to keep,
Though the harbour bar be moaning.
Three wives sat up in the light-house tower,
And they trimm’d the lamps as the sun went down;
They look’d at the squall, and they look’d at the shower,
And the night wrack came rolling up ragged and brown!
But men must work, and women must weep,
Though storms be sudden, and waters deep,
And the harbour bar be moaning.
Three corpses lay out on the shining sands
In the morning gleam as the tide went down,
And the women are weeping and wringing their hands
For those who will never come back to the town;
For men must work, and women must weep,
And the sooner it’s over, the sooner to sleep—
And good-by to the bar and its moaning.

Newlyn was a mix of the good and the bad. The good was the picturesque landscape and the bad was the terrible poverty suffered by the local people who struggled to eke out a living from the fish they caught. Add to this the ferocious storms and tumultuous seas which brought death to many of the fishermen and made widows out of many of the women.

His one-year commission was completed at the end of 1885 and he moved back to Birmingham to be with his wife and children. He returned for a brief visit to Newlyn in 1886 to complete his unfinished watercolour which was shown at the Institute’s Spring Exhibition that year. In the Spring of 1887, Walter Langley, along with his family, moved permanently to Newlyn,

Another title of one of Langley’s paintings was based on a poem. His 1888 work, But O for the Touch of a Vanished Hand was a line from Tennyson’s poem Break, Break, Break which he wrote in 1835 and was about his sorrow at the death of his friend and fellow poet, Arthur Hallam, who tragically died at the age of twenty-two:

Break, break, break,
On thy cold grey stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.
O well for the fisherman’s boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!
And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanish’d hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!
Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead,
Will never come back to me.

On his return to Newlyn with his family, he was unable to secure suitable accommodation in Newlyn and decided to live in Penzance but as his work and models lived in Newlyn he bought a small cottage in Fragdan, the old part of the coastal village, which he converted into his studio.

In June 1890, he brought his family back to Newlyn, and took a two-year lease on Pembroke Lodge. When the lease expired Langley moved his family to Penzance. In 1894, along with other Newlyn artists, he exhibited his work in the exhibition Painters of the Newlyn School at Nottingham Castle. In David Tovey and Sarah Skinner’s 2015 book, Cornish Light – the Nottingham 1894 Exhibition Revisited they discuss the exhibition:

“…The 1894 Nottingham Castle exhibition of Cornish painters was, in its way, ground-breaking. It brought a burgeoning new style and range of subjects to a much wider public and fostered awareness of painters from Newlyn, St Ives and Falmouth. Much of the work was, in typical Victorian style, both art and social commentary and much of it is romanticised – craggy-faced fishermen gaze knowingly towards the horizon and the young women working on the shore have suspiciously lustrous complexions…”

This was the high-point of the Newlyn Colony’s achievements.

In 1895, forty-three-year-old Langley was invited, by the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, to contribute a Self-portrait to hang alongside those of Raphael, Rubens, and Rembrandt in their Medici Collection of portraits of great artists.

That same year, Langley’s wife Clara died at the young age of 45. This left Langley a widower with four children. Two years later, Langley married his second wife Ethel Pengelly in St Johns Parish Church Penzance on June 24th, 1897. The couple went on to have one child. During 1904 and 1905, Langley made visits to Holland and a trip to Belgium in 1906.

Walter Langley died in Penzance on March 22, 1922, a couple of months before what would have been his seventieth birthday. Today his work is described as being fundamental to the representation of the Newlyn School and he was, together with Stanhope Forbes, the most unswerving in style and his large output of works depicting life around Newlyn.
My Daily Art Display (16/1/2018)
Also
Wikipedia
Art UK
Cornwall Artists Index
Roger Langley: Walter Langley, From Birmingham to Newlyn (Samson & Co. 1997, revised 2011)

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My featured artist today is the British painter, Thomas Cooper Gotch. Little has been written about Thomas Gotch and in a way, he appears to be the forgotten man. Part of the reason for this is that he was an unassuming man who preferred to take a step back rather than be in the limelight. Another possible reason was that he never associated himself with painting “schools” and it is hard to compartmentalise his painting style. In the pre-1890’s, his works were mainly depictions of open spaces, subdued in colour and yet full of detail, but then later came his more symbolist-style works. Gotch was unhappy in the way some of his contemporaries painted only what would sell, or as he put it, they painted down to the level of the market, and further derided them by saying that they grew rich as tradesmen but following that path, they lost as artists. Having said that, Gotch was aware that he had to survive financially and took on painting commissions, especially portraiture ones. Once he had earned the money from a portraiture commission, he was happy to return to his Newlyn home, Wheal Betsy, overlooking Mount’s Bay and relax by working on one of his charming landscapes featuring local views of his beloved Cornwall.

To fully understand the person, we need to look at his family and his early life. Thomas Cooper Gotch was born on December 10th, 1854 in the Mission House, Kettering, in rural Northamptonshire, a landlocked county located in the southern part of the East Midlands region. His parents were John Henry Gotch and Mary Anne Gale Gotch. He was the fourth surviving son of the couple. His father, John Henry, and his father’s two brothers, John Davis Gotch and Frederick William Gotch had inherited the family wealth when their father passed in 1852. The three men had been bequeathed two businesses, a family shoe and boot establishment which was subsequently managed by John Davis Gotch and the J.C. Gotch and Sons bank, managed by his father, John Henry Gotch. The artist’s father, John Henry was well suited to run a bank as he was an exceptionally talented mathematician. His younger brother Frederick William played no part in the family businesses and instead became a renowned Hebrew scholar and later was elected President of the Baptist Union.

All was going well for the family businesses until 1857 when a combination of events led to a financial disaster for the family. Firstly, 1857 was the year of a financial panic in the United States which resulted in the declining international economy and over-expansion of the domestic economy. Due to the advance of telecommunications at the time, it meant that the world economy was also more interconnected, which also made the Panic of 1857 the first worldwide economic crisis. Secondly, and more connected with the Gotch bank, John Henry Gotch had been authorising a number of unsecured financial loans, a number of which were given to the Rev. Allan Macpherson, the curate of Rothwell, without due diligence and with the downturn of 1857 the bank collapsed as did the shoemaking business under the terms of unlimited liability. The bankruptcy meant that the brothers had to sell their Mission House and auction off most of the furnishings as well as selling the adjoining shoe factory to pay off creditors. John Henry Gotch sadly realised that authorising so many loans without investigating the circumstances of the borrowers was his fault.

Perhaps poking fun at the prevalence of red-headed women in Pre-Raphaelite art, an acquaintance bet Gotch that he could not paint a red-haired subject with red cheeks in red clothes. His painting of Ruby Bone, a local girl who would have been little over two years old when she sat for the portrait, was the artist’s response. The warm oranges and reds of the sitter’s hair and clothes are balanced against the dull green-grey of the background and off-white of her dress and buttons.

After the financial collapse of the two businesses, John Henry Gotch, along with his wife and family were now homeless and had to rely on the kindness of relatives, including his wife’s brother’s family, the Hepburns, for somewhere to stay. In 1858 they managed to rent a house in Ilford, Essex and this is where his wife gave birth to a daughter, Jessie. It took John Davis Gotch until 1863 to have the bankruptcy discharged thanks in the main to money that he borrowed from the Hepburns. He then set about to revive the family shoemaking business and invited John Henry to join him.

The Lady in Gold, a Portrait of Mrs. John Crooke, dates from the turning-point in Gotch’s career since it was painted in Newlyn early in 1891 and exhibited at the Royal Academy that summer, shortly before he made the visit to Florence which had such a dramatic effect on his style. The sitter’s husband had already commissioned Gotch to paint a small watercolour portrait of her, which was exhibited at the New Gallery in 1890.

Thomas Cooper Gotch attended the Church of England boarding school, Foy’s Academy in West Brompton and, along with his brother Alfred, was looked after during long weekends and school holidays by Thomas and Mary Ann Hepburn. By 1863 the family’s financial problems had eased and Thomas Gotch along with his parents and four siblings returned to live together in Kettering. Thomas Gotch remained at the Foy’s boarding school until 1869, aged nine. He returned to live with his family in Kettering and attended the Kettering Grammar School where he was given an “A” for effort but struggled. He left school in 1872 and in March 1873 he began working at his father’s boot and shoe business.

Working in the shoe and boot industry was not what Tom wanted but on the other hand he did not know what he wanted! He had a hankering for writing and submitted a few of his stories to a publisher to be edited but there is no record of what was thought of his literary efforts but what we do know is that he continued writing stories throughout his life. So, what made Thomas Cooper Gotch take up painting? He never recorded his decision to take up painting in any of his diaries or writings so there is a mystery about what first led him towards an artistic career. It is known that his mother, Mary Anne, enjoyed sketching and her sister, Sarah Gale had married John Frederick Herring Snr., an animal painter, sign maker and coachman in Victorian England. It was also at the insistence of his mother that Thomas always took his painting paraphernalia with him when he went off on holiday. Whatever happened, Thomas Gotch decided to follow the artistic path of life and in May 1876, aged 21, he applied to attend Heatherley’s Art School, one of the oldest independent art schools in London, submitting the required specimens of his work. Attending Heatherley’s was a steppingstone to entering other art schools. Whilst at Heatherley’s Thomas Gotch had his work critiqued by well-known practicing artists.

Buoyed by the praise he received from the lecturers at Heatherley’s, Thomas Gotch applied to the Academy Schools and was taken aback when he was refused entry. A second application was also rejected and Thomas began to believe the training he had been receiving at Heatherley’s was at fault and so, in October 1877, accompanied by his friend Edward Laurie, he travelled to Antwerp where they enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, where the Professor of Art was the Belgian painter and watercolourist, Charles Verlat. It was not a happy time for Gotch who railed against the school’s endorsement of traditional subject matter and the use of a dark palette whilst he preferred brighter colours and a more decorative approach. He commented on this to his long-standing friend and previous fellow Heatherley’s student, Jane Ross. In his letter to her, he wrote:

“…Here we must do what we are told with as good as grace as we can and if we break the rules are reminded that we are only allowed in the school as a favour. Each week, there is a fresh figure wheeled into the room and all who are drawing figures have obediently to draw that and nothing else…”

At the end of February 1878, Thomas Gotch, having completed his painting and drawing examinations, decided to leave Antwerp. He was disheartened by the experience and would have returned home but his brother Alfred joined him in the city and although he could not persuade his brother to stay at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, he did persuade him to carry on with his art and return to London and resume his artistic studies at Heatherleys. Thomas returned to Heatherleys at the end of March 1878 and also enrolled as a private student with the English portrait painter, Samuel Lawrence. Following a number of arguments with the family he realised that to be financially independent he would have to become a successful artist. During the summer of 1878 he set himself the task of completing a number of landscape paintings. He and his artist student friend, John Smith, rented a small house in the village of Goring-on-Thames and set about painting scenes of the surrounding countryside and various farmyard scenes. Thomas Gotch was accepted into the Slade School of Fine Art in October 1878 where he remained for two years. His love of literature encouraged him and some of his fellow art students to form a Shakespeare Reading Society at which they would read the plays.
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Sometime in 1878 their reading group, set up by Thomas Gotch, had a new member. Her name was Caroline Burland Yates. Caroline was one of three sisters born to Esther Burland and wealthy property owner, Edward Yates. The family was from the Liverpool area, later moving to Sway in Hampshire. Caroline was the youngest of the three daughters and educated by a governess. Caroline attended finishing school in Switzerland where she became fluent in French. She, like Thomas Gotch, had studied at the Heatherley School before arriving at the Slade.

Thomas’ progress at the Slade was outstanding and he was the firm favourite of his principal lecturer, Alphonse Legros, the French-born painter who later took British citizenship. During his first year at the Slade, Gotch produced many paintings and sketches which were sold at exhibitions in London. One of Thomas Gotch’s closest friends at the Slade was fellow artistic aspirant, Henry Tuke. Through his friendship with Henry Tuke Thomas met other members of the Tuke family and became friendly with his sister Maria Tuke and medical student brother William Tuke. Thomas was asked by William, and some of his fellow medics, to help form a group of art and medical students which would become a friendly debating society. Thomas, who was extremely popular with the female students at Slade, and so, was asked to entice some “beautiful but well educated” young women into joining the society.

Many agreed to join, two of whom were the Santley sisters, Edith and Gertrude as well as Carrie Yates. Thomas Gotch’s close friend, Henry Tuke, depicted these three in his famous work entitled The Misses Santley which was shown at the Royal Academy. It shows the influence of Henry Tuke’s Slade professor, Alphonse Legros who encouraged his students to study the works of the Old Masters. Frederic Leighton, then president of the Royal Academy, is reported to have said: “Can it be an old master? It could not be by a young man.” The work depicts three women who were all fellow students of Thomas Gotch and Henry Tuke at the Slade. The young woman on the right, holding a music score, is Edith Santley, the daughter of the famous baritone Charles Santley. Next to her is her sister Gertrude, and in front left of the painting stands Carrie Yates, who would later marry Thomas Gotch.

During the summer of 1879 Thomas Gotch and Harry Tuke went on a painting trip to Cornwall, visiting Penzance and Newlyn, where they were joined by Caroline Yates and her sister Esther. The following summer Thomas Gotch and his sister Jessie spent part of the summer in the small North Wales coastal town of Beaumaris on the isle of Anglesey meeting up with Willie and Maria Tuke. In October 1880 Thomas Gotch left England and arrived in Paris where he lodged at the Hotel d’Angleterre for a month whilst he negotiated his entrance to John Paul Laurens’ atelier. In the meantime, in fact a month earlier, Carrie Yates along with two fellow art students, Jane Ross and Alma Broadridge had travelled to Paris and enrolled at the Académie Julian.

Thomas Gotch was influenced by the historical works of Laurens as he was interested in figurative painting. His other overwhelming interest was also Carrie Yates. They had become remarkably close and she was teaching him French. She was lodging at the Hotel de Paris and Thomas had an apartment on the top floor of a building at 17 rue de Tournon. Although it was a Bohemian establishment, the rooms were spacious. Thomas and Carrie visited the artists’ colony at Barbizon. The relationship between the two became ever stronger and before he returned to London to submit a painting for the Academy exhibition, he proposed marriage.

Thomas and Carrie travelled back to England in July 1881 and visited each other’s families to get the parental permission to marry. Carrie had spent the summers of 1879 and 1880 in Newlyn and loved the place. The couple decided that Newlyn in Cornwall should be the setting for their marriage and so they both travelled there and secured separate lodgings. Twenty-six-year-old Thomas Cooper Gotch and twenty-seven-year-old Caroline Burland Yates married on August 31st 1881 at St. Peter’s church which was built in 1866 and nestles underneath Tol Carn, the ancient pile of rocks associated in Cornish legend with Bucca-boo, a male sea-spirit in Cornish folklore, a merman that inhabited mines and coastal communities as a hobgoblin during storms and who was said to steal the nets of fishermen.

The newlyweds honeymooned at Mullion, a quiet village on the Lizard Peninsula in south Cornwall. Once the honeymoon was over Carrie returned to London. Prior to her wedding she had been sharing a house with her sister, Esther (Ess) and now she needed to take back to Newlyn her share of the furniture. Meanwhile Thomas Gotch had begun painting scenes of Newlyn and became friends with three Birmingham painters, Walter Langley, Edwin Harris and William Wainwright. Thomas Gotch and his depictions of Cornish life thrived and maybe it was marriage that buoyed his love of the area.

In October 1881, Caroline and Thomas returned to Paris. Thomas returned to the Laurens atelier and Carrie went back to Académie Julian where there was a separate atelier for women. Thomas also engineered the acceptance at the Laurens atelier of his friend Harry Tuke. That Christmas was spent in Paris but the couple returned to England in time for Easter 1882. During that three-month period Thomas Gotch worked on a portrait of his wife, entitled Portrait of Madame G, which he presented and was accepted at the April 1st 1872 Salon. This life-sized portrait of his wife depicts her dressed in a dark navy dress with gold and white cuffs and collar. Thomas never put the painting up for sale and it adorned the walls of the houses they resided in.

One of the reasons the couple returned to England that April was for Carrie to consult her doctor and have it confirmed that she was pregnant with her first child and to break the good news to their family members. Their visit to England was only short but gave them time to employ a nurse for when the new baby arrived. They all returned to France and rented a small property at Marchand de Bois, Brolles which was owned by a wood merchant. It was a good-sized house for the young couple and access to half of a large garden. Brolles was an idyllic spot situated in a very rural area and the nearby landscapes coupled with the fine summer weather allowed them to paint en plein air. The young couple had domestic help with a young French maid, Marie, and Windsor, the English nurse who looked after Caroline during her pregnancy.

Phillis Marian Gotch was born in Brolles on September 6th 1882. It is thought the name “Phyllis” came from the fact that Thomas’ first painting to be exhibited at the Royal Academy was entitled Phillis and the name “Marian” derived from a character of that name (a pseudonym for his wife), who was a character in his fictionalised novel A Long Engagement.

In late September Thomas and Carrie had to quickly return to England with nurse Windsor as she had told them that she could no longer put up with life in France and they needed to replace her. They left Brolles leaving the maid Marie in charge of the house. Their stay in London had to be quickly curtailed when Thomas and Carrie received a letter from their French landlord telling them that Marie and her friends were leading a riotous lifestyle in their house during their absence!

Although the quiet picturesque landscape around the village of Brolles offered Thomas Gotch the ideal vistas for his paintings there was a problem in finding suitable models from within the village and eventually he and Carrie decided they must give up their rural idyll and return to the French capital where it would be easier to find models for his paintings. So, in February 1883 the couple were once again living in Paris, Thomas returned to the Laurens atelier and Caroline to the Académie Julian.

Life in France ended for Thomas and Carrie when she became ill with a serious lung infection. The couple and their daughter returned to England where they received a second opinion from a London specialist. He confirmed the diagnosis and Carrie was told she had to rest. Their daughter Phillis was taken to Thomas’ parents who began to look after her along with the re-hiring of their first nanny, Windsor. Thomas took Carrie to Newlyn that summer to give her a chance to recuperate whilst he continued to paint depictions of the Cornish fishing village. Carrie’s breathing problems slowly lessened, probably due to the clean and fresh sea air of the Cornish coast and soon she was able to walk freely. By the end of the summer Carrie had recovered her health and the couple returned to London where the specialist gave her a clean bill of health.
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Although returning to live in Newlyn was tempting Thomas decided on another course of action and took his wife on the long voyage to Australia on the fully rigged sailing passenger clipper, Torrens., leaving England on October 30th 1883. Their daughter Phyllis remained in Kettering with her grandparents. Thomas and Caroline arrived in Port Adelaide on January 8th 1884 where they transferred to the SS South Australia and sailed to Melbourne where they were met by John Speechley Gotch, a wealthy distant relative who had met Tom when he visited England in 1874. John Gotch was an art lover and he arranged for Thomas and Carrie to hold a joint exhibition of their work which they had brought with them, at Melbourne’s Fletcher’s Art Gallery in February 1884.

The most important painting exhibited by Thomas Gotch was one entitled Mental Arithmetic. It depicts an elderly bearded fisherman sitting holding a knife and plate of food being watched by a small girl. It is thought that Thomas painted this in November 1883 from sketches he made that summer in Newlyn. Melbourne City Gallery wanted to buy the painting but baulked at the £200 selling price. However, John Gotch bought it and donated it to the gallery. Many of John Goth’s paintings and sketches were sold as well as work by his wife Carrie and the couple made more than enough money to pay for their sea passages.

Tom and Carrie returned to England on the Torrens calling at Cape Town, St Helena and the Ascension Island for the vessel to replenish supplies. They eventually returned to London on July 3rd 1884. The couple left the English capital and journeyed to the West Country looking for suitable accommodation. They tried Brixham and Looe but finally settled on the Cornish town of Polperro where they lodged at the Louriet Hotel and were soon joined by their ten-month-old daughter and her nurse.

Children featured in many of Gotch’s paintings. Probably the best known is his 1894 work entitled Child Enthroned. Like many other depictions of the young there is a mystical element about the portrayal of the young girl. His eleven-year-old daughter Phyllis was the model for The Child Enthroned. Her father’s Madonna like depiction was, he said, down to his time spent in Italy in the summer of 1891. The painting is testament to Gotch’s ability as a portrait painter, especially his love of child portraiture and his competency in depicting fine detail in ornate fabrics. The painting when exhibited to the public that year at the Royal Academy was rapturously received and established Gotch’s reputation as an artist.

Another painting featuring Gotch’s daughter was his 1896 work entitled Alleluia. It was a major demonstration of his Pre-Raphaelite style. Along the top of the painting, we see inscribed in Gothic lettering on a background of gold leaf, a Latin quotation which reads:

“…Sancti tui domine benedicent te gloriam regni tui dicent – Alleluya…”

The inscription is taken from Psalm xlvii: 6 and 7, which was printed in the catalogue of the 1896 Royal Academy exhibition:

“…Sing praises to God, sing praises: Sing praises unto our King, Sing praises, For God is King of all the earth: Sing praises with understanding…”

It is a painting featuring thirteen richly clad children singing against a gilded background and his thirteen-year-old daughter is at the centre rear of the group with her hands clasped in prayer. In front of her is a small figure with amber curls. This is her cousin Hester Gotch. When it was first shown at a local exhibition in Newlyn it was criticised by the local press because they believed Gotch had broken with the Newlyn tradition of painting. The art critic of the Cornish Telegraph quipped that he doubted whether the time it took to complete (nine months) was worth the effort. The art critic of the local weekly newspaper, West Briton, criticised the work saying:

“…It would be easy enough to say outright that we don’t like the thing and have done with it. It is not possible to take ordinary children of today and pictorially attempt to transform them into choiring cherubim, without coming within consciousness of incongruity…”

Fortunately for Gotch when he submitted the work to that year’s Royal Academy exhibition the receiving jury accepted the painting had it hung at the most advantageous position. The work of art, which is part of the Tate Britain collection, was bought for the Nation under the terms of the Chantrey Bequest, following its exhibition at the Royal Academy. The Chantrey Bequest, set out in the will of sculptor Sir Francis Chantrey, was of primary importance to the foundation and development of a national collection of British art at the Tate Gallery and it constituted the gallery’s main purchasing fund from its opening in 1897 until 1946.

Another of Gotch’s paintings featuring a group of children was completed in 1899. It was entitled A Pageant of Childhood. It depicts a procession of nine children of varying age, the eldest at the rear and the youngest at the front crossing a tiled hall in front of a fresco of Father Time, who we are aware will, in due course, carry off even the youngest of the children. It is a colourful depiction of children enacting an historic pageant. Some like the two boys at the centre play long horns whilst behind them are two girls, one with a drum and one with a set of symbols. Take a look at the various children. Some, with thoughtful expressions, are taking the enactment very seriously whilst others appear light-hearted and, in some respect, they personify children of different ages at play, a representation of the stages of life. It was Gotch’s own evocation of innocence and youth. The painting was completed just before the family left Newlyn and exhibited at the Newlyn Gallery in March 1899. It was shown at the 1899 Royal Academy exhibition and appeared at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery, after which the Liverpool Corporation purchased the work and is part of the Walker Art Gallery collection. This painting was completed close to the time that the Gotchs moved to a new house and went to live in Shottermill.

Thomas Gotch had decided to relocate his family to Shottermill close to the town of Haselmere, West Sussex, forty miles south west of London and twenty-five miles from the south coast of England. At the end of 1898 Thomas started building his new home, named Penwith and the family were able to move in in October 1899. Penwith was situated on a hillside at the end of a long twisting drive, which rose above the ponds of Shottermill. It was a large six-bedroom residence with two drawing rooms, a large kitchen and two purpose-built studios.

In 1900 Thomas Gotch’s main work was entitled The Dawn of Womanhood which appeared at the 1900 Royal Academy Exhibition. The painting depicts the child enthroned being confronted by the vision of approaching motherhood. The phantom figure on the left represents Womanhood. She is dressed in opalescent drapery of pale blue, gold and silvery primrose. She is wearing a mask, as legend has it that all who are no longer children must conceal themselves which probably harks back to the story of Eve, who after eating the forbidden fruit was ashamed of her nakedness and sought to conceal it. Sitting on the steps of the throne, to the right, is the familiar winged sprite representing the spirit of childhood, who is aware of the strange presence and makes ready to take flight for ever from the girl on the throne.

Painted around that time, in 1930 — a year before Thomas Cooper Gotch’s death — The Exile is shrouded in mystery. As of now, we know nothing about the identity of the sitter or about the suggestive, tantalizing title of her portrait.

Thomas Gotch exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1880-1931, in all showing seventy of his paintings. He was elected to the Royal Society of British Artists in 1885 and the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolour in 1912. He was a founder member of the New English Art Club in 1886 and served as President of the Royal British Colonial Society of Artists between 1913 and 1928. Gotch was fêted at the Salon and won medals in Chicago and Berlin.

Thomas Cooper Gotch died aged seventy-six of a heart attack while in London for an exhibition on May 1st, 1931. He was buried in Sancreed churchyard in Cornwall. Also in the graveyard of St Sancredus are buried fellow Newlyn School artists, Stanhope Forbes and Elizabeth Forbes.

Thomas Gotch’s wife, Caroline, died on December 14th, 1945 aged 91 and their only child, Phyllis Marian Gotch became Marquise de Verdières when she married André Marie, Marquis de Verdières in 1922. She died in Hong Kong on April 24th, 1963 aged 81. She is buried with her parents in Cornwall’s Sancreed Churchyard.
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Gotch was born in Liverpool. She was the youngest of the three daughters of Edward Yates, a wealthy local property owner. She studied at the Heatherley School of Fine Art in 1878 and then at the Slade School of Art in London before enrolling at the Academie Julian in Paris during 1880. While at the Slade she met Thomas Cooper Gotch and the couple married in August 1881 at St Peter's Church in Newlyn. They returned to France, where their daughter, Phyllis Maureen, was born in September 1882. Despite protracted periods of ill-health following child-birth, Gotch and her husband travelled extensively including an 1883 trip to Australia. They lived in London between 1884 and 1887 before settling in Newlyn where they eventually built a family home, Wheal Betsy. In Newlyn the couple were founding members of the St Ives Art Club and active in the artists' groups then being established in the area.

Caroline Gotch exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy between 1887 and 1895 and with the Royal Society of British Artists throughout the 1880s.[5] Gotch showed at the Paris Salon in 1897 and 1898 where she was awarded second and third place medals. She showed works at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1879, at the New English Art Club in 1888, at the Society of Women Artists in 1879 and 1893 and also with the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts between 1886 and 1894. In both 1895 and 1896 she had pieces shown at the Glass Palace in Munich. Gotch also showed at commercial galleries, including the Grosvenor Gallery, the Goupil Gallery and the Fine Art Society. Despite her exhibition record, very few examples of Gotch's work survive but photographs show sophisticated compositions, often featuring women and children in domestic settings.
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Edwin Harris was born at Ladywood, Birmingham in 1855 and educated at Old Edgbaston School. In 1869 he entered Birmingham School of Art, aged fourteen. Fellow students included Walter Langley (with whom Harris was to pioneer the Newlyn colony of artists), William John Wainwright and William Breakspeare. At the Birmingham School, Harris was appointed assistant master and after two years set up his own studio, painting and teaching. Having completed his studies and a short tenure teaching, Harris enrolled with John Wainwright at the Verlat’s Royal Academy of Antwerp in 1880. The friends’ Birmingham training served them well; Harris and Wainwright were selected to join the group of twelve elite students who were given a separate studio to work life size from the nude.

In Antwerp, Harris was greatly influenced by Charles Verlat, the Academy's Professor of Painting, who advocated a realist approach and working directly from nature, en plein-air. Keen to apply the skills he’d learned in Antwerp, Harris first travelled to Newlyn in 1881 and then onto Brittany, sponsored by the dealer Edwin Chamberlain, for two successive summers in 1881 and 1882. There he painted at the artists' colonies in Dinan and Pont-Aven. These Breton towns were a magnet for the new generation of en plein-air artists attracted partly by the low cost of living but more significantly, by the opportunity afforded to work outdoors recording the life of normal people in their natural environment. As Harris later described ‘… in those days there was hardly a village in Brittany which was not occupied by one or two painters, but at Pont Aven they simply swarmed.’ During his second Breton summer, in Pont-Aven, Harris met Elizabeth Armstrong, later Elizabeth Stanhope Forbes.

Harris married Sarah Chamberlain, niece of his Birmingham dealer Edwin Chamberlain and part of the wealthy and powerful Birmingham family. As Stanhope Forbes put it in 1884 ‘We had a very pleasant evening at the Harris’s yesterday and I was studiously polite to the dealer, who was a very quiet unassuming young man. He is Mrs Harris’s uncle. That’s a good idea to marry the niece of a dealer, especially when she is as nice as Mrs Harris.’

After a couple of ventures to Newlyn starting with the 1881 trip, Harris settled there with Sarah in 1883. Harris' nineteenth-century biographer credits him, rather than Walter Langley and with some bias, with being the first to adopt Newlyn, 'Mr Langley is generally regarded as the 'artistic father' of the small Cornish fishing village, but Mr Edwin Harris was before him, and is undoubtedly one of the first pioneers amongst the Newlynites'. In 1898 in the Magazine of Art, both painters were more reliably acknowledged as pioneers of the Newlyn colony, ‘It was Birmingham that first discovered Newlyn.’ Initially the ambition of the two artists was simply to find for themselves an English equivalent to their Breton retreats; as Langley said, what they had hoped would be their Pont Aven, and of which Stanhope Forbes later wrote, "a sort of English Concarneau." But this English Concarneau was to grow rapidly as an artists’ colony and with the addition of the likes of Forbes, Thomas Cooper Gotch, Frank Bramley, Fred Hall, Henry Scott Tuke, Chevalier Tayler, Elizabeth Armstrong and later Harold Harvey, Ernest and Dod Procter, it was to dominate the modern art scene in Britain through the turn of the century.

After a short stint in the nearby village of Paul, in 1884 the Harrises moved into Cliff Castle Cottage in Newlyn where their son was born that year. At Cliff Cottage the Harrises introduced Elizabeth Armstrong and Stanhope Forbes. Tragically the young family’s life together was short lived. Harris’s young wife died tragically in 1887 at the age of only twenty-five, after being nursed during a short illness (consumption) by Elizabeth Armstrong and others in the growing colony.

After his wife's death, Harris moved with his son and a nurse to Belle Vue House, where Elizabeth and her mother also lodged. Forbes was also to join them there after he and Elizabeth were married.

Harris’s time in Brittany amid the burgeoning en plein-air colonies and their rural realism, was to become central to his and the Newlyn colony’s philosophy. However, as Roger Langley comments in ‘Edwin Harris. An Introduction to His Life and Art', and in contrast to Walter Langley, ’In Newlyn Edwin Harris avoided the harshest realities of fishing life and chose more comfortable themes.’

Such early genre works like 'Mending the nets' and 'An Important Question' employ the characteristic square brush technique with exceptional skill, but it is his portraiture that singles him out among his Newlyn peers. ‘The Lesson’, ‘The Old Salt’, 'A Summer Afternoon' and “Spring flowers’ are such paintings showing Harris’s distinct skill in portraying the natural ease of his sitters going about their everyday lives in their native environments. The artist was equally adept painting his subjects indoors, usually with the Newlyn signature single light source such as that deployed in 'Nearly done’ (possibly with Mrs Betsy Lanyon – Harris’s model in ‘A sniff of snuff’, Penlee House Gallery and Museum) and outdoors as with the exquisite, ‘Under the Blossom’.

In 1895 Harris departed Newlyn meeting his second wife, Sally (nee Cornwell), a Penzance girl and mutual friend of Walter Langley. Harris spent the next three years, in Cardiff, Newport and Bristol before returning to the Midlands in 1898 where according to Forbes, he had inherited a country cottage. Throughout this period he concentrated almost exclusively on portraiture. Edwin Harris died, age 50, on 5 January 1906 in Cleeve Prior, near Evesham, Worcestershire.
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William Ayerst Ingram RBA (27 April 1855 Twickenham – 20 March 1913 Falmouth, Cornwall) was a painter and member of the Newlyn School. He did notable Landscape art and Marine art. In 1906 he joined the Royal Institute of Oil Painters and in 1907 he joined the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours.

His father, Rev. G. S. Ingram, was a vicar from Glasgow who was at Staines in 1862 and the newly opened Vinewood Chapel in Richmond in 1871.

William was the Reverend Ingram's third son. It was first accepted that he would become a businessman, so it was later in his life that he began exploring artistic pursuits by studying with A.W. Weedon and John Steeple.

In 1882 he moved to Falmouth. He married May Martha Fay, an American, by 1896. The couple lived in Tregurrian in Falmouth in 1911. He died on 20 March 1913 in Falmouth.

He set up a studio in Chelsea. In the same year he also founded the Anglo-Australian Society and was established as its President. By this time Ingram was well-travelled, including periods in Australia, according to a fellow artist and friend, George Percy Jacomb-Hood. He became the Royal British Colonial Society of Artists' President in 1888.

Having moved to Cornwall in 1882, Ingram established friendships with people from the Newlyn School, including Laura and Harold Knight.

In 1894 Ingram and two good friends Jack Downing and Henry Scott Tuke established the Falmouth Art Gallery. From 1902 to 1904 Ingram was the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society's Vice-President in Falmouth. His works for 1893, A P. & O. Voyage and 1902, Waters of the Old and New Worlds reflected his world-wide travel experiences. A Saturday Review of A P. & O. Voyage stated that Ingram was "adroit at capturing the "convexity" of the sea waves, but fell short in capturing the reality of some of the scenes, such as of the Australian coast, which for the most part is incredibly monotonous both in colour and scenery..."
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Born on 26 April, 1855, in Oldham, Greater Manchester (GRO), he studied in Antwerp and afterwards in Brittany (1882) where he met Stanhope FORBES.

He is listed in the 1891 Census as a Newlyn resident at Trewarveneth Farm, though family information states that he came to Newlyn first in 1883 (while retaining an exhibiting address in Southport, Lancashire). Wood notes him as 'A minor member of the Newlyn School'.

He remained in Newlyn until 1900 when he moved to Porlock, Somerset (exhibiting address given to the RA), to join his friend, the artist, Fred HALL. He never married, and his death is recorded by the family as being in Williton, Somerset, near Porlock. He died on 11 April, 1924, age 67, GRO. His work was included in both the Painting in Newlyn 1880-1930 Travelling Exhibition (1985) and the Cornwall County Council centenary exhibition, A Century of Art in Cornwall 1889-1989 for which there are catalogues in the WCAA.
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Born in Birmingham on 27 June 1855, he was educated at Sedgley Park College (nr Wolverhampton) till he left at the age of 14: first apprenticed to John Hardman & Co - artworkers primarily in stained glass design. Very soon, he was executing most of the design for the firm and was responsible for windows in the north aisle of St Paul's and designs for St Mary's in Coventry.

Noticing William's great interest in painting, the company released him with regret (in 1880) and supported his further study by sending him to study painting in Antwerp under Verlat. From Antwerp he went on to Paris in 1881 where he remained absorbed until 1884. Returning to London, he shared a studio with his friends William Arthur BREAKSPEARE and Phil Whiting, and after some months of casting around for new painting grounds, with encouragement from Walter LANGLEY, Edwin HARRIS and Phil Whiting, he settled on Newlyn.

He is one of the painters in the 1884 Group Photograph of the 'brotherhood of the palette' at Newlyn. Here he painted Mackerel in the Bay, a large water colour, Ferdinand and Miranda (another watercolour, inspired by Shakespeare's The Tempest) and an oil portrait, The Burgomaster. He much enjoyed living and working in Newlyn, although the brightness of the sunlight directly affected his eyesight (causing increasing loss of sight in one eye), and having made his mark in the plein-air style, he discovered he preferred figure painting in his studio.

In 1886 he returned permanently to live in Birmingham. His mother, who had devotedly inspired him all his life, died in 1888, and he married in 1890, Bertha Mary Powell; eight children (two daughters who died young, and six sons) were born to them. He was one of the founding members of the Birmingham Art Circle, that group which laughingly claimed (perhaps rightly) that 'Birmingham had discovered Newlyn as a painterly place,' and their fortnightly meetings in each other's studios were a great source of friendship and inspiration. The Turner collation of letters, sketchbooks, coloured plates and essays, presents a life well spent in art. Wainwright died on 1 August, 1931, age 76 in Birmingham (GRO).
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Ralph Todd was born in Chelsea in 1856, the son of a builder Christopher W. Todd, who employed some 300 men and boys. He trained at the Royal Academy Schools in South Kensington and continued his studies in Belgium, Holland and Paris, France. After this he spent some time painting in the art colonies in Brittany, frequented by other Newlyn School artists.

By 1883 he had moved to Newlyn and in 1888 he married his wife Vasilesa Ellen Llewellyn (nee Trahair), by whom he had two children, Charlotte born 1891 and the above-mentioned Arthur R. M. born 1892. By the early 1890s, the family had moved to Helson, but in the 1901 Census, they were living in Madron, Penzance. By 1911, they were living in Mawgan in Meneage, 4 miles south west of Truro. Ralph sometimes painted under the pseudonym Rupert Meneage. Arthur R. M. was listed as a part time art student in this Census.

Ralph Todd is listed in a booklet 'Every Corner was a Picture' 50 Artists of the Newlyn Art Colony 1880-1900 compiled by George Bednar for West Cornwall Art Archive. He is also listed in The Dictionary of British Artists (Collectors' Club), The Dictionary of Victorian Painters by Christopher Wood and British Watercolour Artists by Mallalieu.

He died on 28th June, 1932 and is buried in the Parish Church at Devoran, Cornwall, where his wife was also buried in 1956.

He exhibited from 1880-1928. He painted genre and landscapes mostly in watercolours by also in oils. There are 9 of his paintings in the National Collection which can be viewed at ArtUK.org. He exhibited 3 painting at the Royal Academy, Royal Society of Artists Birmingham 53, Walker Art Gallery Liverpool 11, 2 in Manchester City AG, 10 at the Royal Society of British Artists, 6 at the Royal Institute and 1 at the Royal Oil Painters Institute.
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London-born (3 April, 1856) Craft was the son of John Craft, formerly of Milton, Kent. Educated privately, he then attended University College London, and studied art at Heatherley's and the Slade under Poynter and Legros (Gold and Silver medalist).

He was an early arrival in Newlyn (in 1885), and later was intimately involved in the setting up and organising of the Newlyn Industrial Class Project with his wife Alice Elizabeth TIDY, who led classes in needlecraft. They were both exceedingly generous with their time and artistic gifts, and played focal roles in the life of the both artistic communities at Newlyn and St Ives. Craft involved himself with all of the Newlyn theatricals, and served on the Provisional Committee of NAG when the new institution opened on 22nd October 1895, becoming its Honorary Secretary.

Flanagan (2010) notices his arrival to the village of Buckden, Huntingdonshire in 1899 in her review of Artists along the Ouse, where the couple remained for six years in the first instance, then returning for a period during WWI. A local newspaper commented 'Few people have left behind them at Buckden a happier memory than Mr and Mrs Craft.' (p44) This was due to Craft's continuing enthusiasm for musicals, pantomimes and theatricals which won popular interest, as they had in Newlyn. Thomas Cooper GOTCH and his family turned up in the district of the Ouse river at around the same time, as did another old friend who had been at Heatherley's and the Slade with him, George Jacomb-Hood (1857-1929).

Craft continued to exhibit at NAG, showing A Good Hand in 1902 after leaving Cornwall in the late 1890s. Over the following twenty years he was the organising Secretary of the Royal British Colonial Society of Artists (RBC) that he ran with Gotch and Jacomb-Hood, and the first Honorary Secretary (and part founder) of the Imperial Arts League. He was the Organizing Secretary of the Fine Art Section of the British Empire Trade Exhibition in Buenos Aires in 1931.

Percy Craft died on 26 November, 1934, age 78 in London (GRO), his wife having pre-deceased him in 1932.
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Born on 6 May 1857 in Sibsey, nr Boston, Lincolnshire (GRO), he studied at the Lincoln School of Art and Antwerp Academy, and spent a year in Venice before arriving in Newlyn during the winter of 1884. He was considered to be a leading figure of the Newlyn School along with Stanhope FORBES and Walter LANGLEY. Though he was a founder of New English Art Club, he resigned in 1890 following a scathing attack on his work by Walter Richard SICKERT.

Before marriage (1891), his home and studio were at the corner of the Rue des Beaux Arts in Newlyn. In 1886 he produced Domino using the square brush technique. This painting was Bramley's only exhibit at the Dowdeswell Exhibition of 1890, and regarded as the first substantial interior scene by a Newlyn artist. His work is known for its social realism, which Wood described as that 'of Courbet and Millet, combined with the plein air landscape of the Barbizon painters.'

From 1893-97 the Bramleys lived at Orchard Cottage (then Belle Vue Cottage), and then in 1889 at Belle Vue House. In 1895, he served on the provisional committee of artists supporting the Passmore Edwards Art Gallery at Newlyn, and in the Opening Exhibition exhibited three pieces, the sketch for his large painting Saved being purchased by Elizabeth FORBES.

The couple then moved to Droitwich that same year (1895) and on to Grasmere in 1900, spending the last years of their lives in London. His major painting A Hopeless Dawn was purchased for the nation by the Chantrey Bequest. He died on 10 August, 1915, age 58, at Chalford, near Stroud, Gloucestershire. Phryne comments that Bramley was 'Newlyn School's answer to Moore and Whistler'. His colour harmonies and adroit arrangements reflect the Cornish ambience strongly.
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Born in London on 29 August, 1857, he studied in Paris under Jean-Paul Laurens, being a contemporary there of Henry Scott TUKE in 1882. Millard appeared in the group photograph of Newlyn artists in 1884. In 1889 his address was at Belmont, Paul Hill, and in 1891 (age 39) he lived in Fore Street, Newlyn. Lodging in the same Trahair household was the artist S K M BLACKBURN (sic).

Wood notes his association with the Newlyn colony in 1893, but follows him no further, and the artist departed Newlyn before the opening of NAG in 1895, hence no gallery records exist for him. However, Millard was one of the original artists of the group, if not a major one, and one of Bateman's studios in the Meadow was constructed for him. In 1887, a small note in the Cornish Telegraph reported on a violent accident on the cricket field at Tregenna Castle, whereby Millard and Phil Whiting were in a scrum resulting in a fractured nose for one and a 'brain concussion' to the other. Both were playing for the Newlyn team on this occasion, and both were rendered unconscious and had to be removed to the house of 'Mr Simmonds on the Terrace'. It was projected to be a long wait before either sufferer would be well enough to emerge.

A genre painter, he exhibited mainly at SS, and also at the RA, early titles including The Convalescent, Bad News and Walls Have Ears. By 1894, he had moved to Hampstead, London, and in 1896 his address was in Boreham Wood, where Tuke frequently visited him by bicycle in the 1899-1905 period. Tuke also mentions in his diary that Millard had a 'dock studio' in Falmouth in 1902, and it is clear he maintained a home in Falmouth while living primarily in the London area for a number of years. Later he returned with his wife to live on Cliff Road at Falmouth, though continuing to exhibit in London (primarily with the RBA). He died in London, age 80 on 13 October, 1937 (GRO).
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Born in Dublin (18 November 1857), the son of a railway manager and a French mother (Juliette Forbes, neé de Guise) who was a driving influence in his life, his interest in art began on family holiday in Ardennes as a child. His father was transferred to London, and Stanny was sent to Dulwich College.

He later studied at Lambeth School of Art and RA Schools, where he staged his first exhibition in 1878. He spent two years studying in Paris from 1880, with his friend (from Dulwich) Henry LA THANGUE, and also in Brittany. Moving to Newlyn in 1884, he painted his famous Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach (Plymouth City Collection) and exhibited it at the RA the following spring. Also that year he exhibited two paintings at Manchester’s Royal Institution (Second Autumn Exhibition, 1884), virtually putting a seal upon his future: At Newlyn, Cornwall and A Cornish Fisher Boy.

In 1886 he was one of the founding members of the NEAC, and in Cornwall had quietly but effectively assumed the mantle of lead promoter of a self-styled colony, league or ‘school’ of artists. His sale of The Health of the Bride to Henry Tate (Tate Gallery Collection) enabled his marriage to the artist Elizabeth Adela ARMSTRONG in 1889. The birth of their son Alexander (called Alec), and the commissioning of their impressive arts & craft-styled home at Higher Faughan, in addition to their busy and productive output of paintings, is best read in their biographies.

Portraits of Stanhope, as drawn and painted by Elizabeth, are several and listed in Cook et al. A long-term portraiture project being carried out by the National Portrait Gallery will include their recent acquisition of A Portrait of Stanhope (reading, c1889). Ten years later, with the establishment of the Passmore Edwards Art Gallery in Newlyn (NAG, 1895) in between and all the efforts this required, the couple opened their Newlyn School of Painting in 1899, combining a new economic force - art and related tourism - within an area of declining mining, fishing and farming fortunes.

In 1910, the year of his election to the RA, a photo-plate of Snared was included in the Studio-Talk section of The Studio to honour the RA-Elect. In 1915, following the death of Elizabeth in 1912, he married Maudie PALMER, a former pupil of the school and close friend of the family. In August 1916, his son Alec died in the front line (Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry) in France.

Work was the cure, and though critics comment that his later paintings are rather unoriginal, it is equally true that different styles and movements were having their day and his world was gone. In 1924 he designed a poster for the LMS Railway ‘project’. The ‘Round the Studios’ reporter (The Artist, 1932) commented that Forbes was ‘still enthusiastic about out-of-doors painting, to which he had religiously adhered since 1882 when he joined his friends Henry LA THANGUE and Arthur HACKER in France and found that painting en plein air was the only way “to depict nature as she is”.'

Stanhope Forbes, the 'Father of the Newlyn School', died in Newlyn on 2 March 1947, age 89.

In the year 2000 'history was made' when Stanhope's superb painting The Seine Boat (1904) was sold at Phillips Fine Art, New Bond Street for £1,211,5000, taking the Newlyn School 'into hitherto uncharted waters' and establishing a world record for the artist.
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Born 1858 in York; Died 1929 in Falmouth, Cornwall

English landscape and figure painter associated with the Newlyn School. Also an accomplished photographer. He is best known for his nudes depicting boys and young men.

Henry Scott Tuke attended the Slade School of Art in 1875, under the tuition of Alphonse Legros (1837-1911) and Sir Edward Poynter PRA (1836-1919), before winning a scholarship to the Slade School of Art in 1877. In 1880 Tuke travelled to Italy and made his first nude studies from life, a moment which had an enlightening effect upon his understanding of light, colour and the human form. In 1883 Tuke settled in the Cornish fishing town of Newlyn, becoming a founder-member of the Newlyn School - an artist colony specialising in 'en plain air' painting and of scenes from coastal life. During the 1880s Tuke produced a number of dramatic paintings depicting Cornwall's fishing industry (an example is held by the Tate collection: 'All Hands to the Pumps', 1888-9. N01618). After a series of travels around the Mediterranean, Tuke's palette began to lighten considerably. His travels also caused his painting style and choice of subject to shift towards sun-soaked, coastal scenes of nude boys and young men. Tuke's ability to combine perfectly formed, classical compositions with a high level of naturalism secured him a reputation as a fine figure and landscape painter. He contributed to the development nineteenth century nude paintings, and also the varieties of en plein air painting.

Tuke was a founder-member of the New English Art Club (1886) and was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1900. He became a member in 1914. Tuke also received recognition as watercolourist, becoming a member of the Royal Watercolour Society in 1911. Although falling out of popularity after his death, Tuke was the subject of a major retrospective in 2008 at the Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro, entitled 'Catching the Light: A Retrospective of Henry Scott Tuke'.

Tuke is represented across the UK in public collections including Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, Saffron Walden Library, Tate, and The Tuke Collection (Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society), among many others. Non-UK collections include the National Gallery of South Africa.
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Canadian-born artist (29 December 1859) who became a central figure in the art circles of West Cornwall, as well as being a nationally known and respected painter. Her early studies in art included periods at the Kensington Art School aged 14, while living by chance next door to D G Rossetti (but never meeting), and studying the work of the Pre-Raphaelites; then studying at the Art Students' League, New York (1878-81) with William Merritt Chase (1849-1916). Shorter visits, always accompanied by her mother, were made to Munich where she met Marianne Preindlsberger (later Marianne L M STOKES), and Pont Aven where she was tutored in etching.

In 1884 she joined up with the Art Students' League again to visit and work in Holland. In that same year her outstanding painting Zandvoort Fisher Girl was exhibited, a painting destined to become one of her hallmarks, not unlike School is Out. In the period 1883-89 she participated in the name of Elizabeth Armstrong (Specialty: Domestic) in more than sixty-three principal London exhibitions. Her outstanding early work in etching, fortunately collected by her mentor in the art, Mortimer MENPES, is catalogued, but did not develop later in her career.

Scott, in Painting at the Edge, notices a fleeting visit from Elizabeth Armstrong (and her mother) at Walberswick, Suffolk, from which two etchings were produced. After marriage to Stanhope FORBES, her work diminished in quantity though not in quality, and despite preferring the more cosmopolitan art crowd of St Ives, she was always most closely associated with the so-called 'Newlyn school' of artists.

She was a Medallist in the Paris Universal Exhibition 1889, a Gold Medallist in Oil painting in the Chicago Exposition 1893 and the winner of a Merit Award in the Royal British Colonial Society of Artists Exhibition 1910. Together with her husband, Stanhope FORBES, she developed and sustained the FORBES School of Painting from its institution in 1899 until her untimely death in 1912.

Her nickname 'Mibs' was a shortening of 'Forces Mibs', a backslang version of chatting between the friends at Myrtle Cottage (aka 'The Myrtage') where the JESSE cousins (Cicely JESSE and Wynifried Tennyson JESSE aka Fryn) and Dod SHAW (later PROCTER) lived whilst they attended the Forbes School. Both Elizabeth and Stanhope were deeply engaged with the development and life of the new Passmore Edwards Art Gallery at Newlyn (NAG), from its establishment in 1895, and continued to exhibit there throughout their creative lives.

Her watercolour paintings produced both for exhibition and as a book for their only child, Alec, King Arthur's Wood, was published in large (elephantine) format in 1904. Her model for the figure of King Arthur in this mammoth fairy tale was her colleague and friend Thomas Cooper GOTCH. In 1908-9 she initiated the publication of an arts periodical, The Paper Chase, edited by her close friend F Tennyson JESSE. It was discontinued after the first two issues owing to her terminal illness. Elizabeth died of cancer on 16 March 1912, aged 51, in Newlyn, after three years of treatments and recuperative rest-cures in London and France.

In her obituaries, she was described as the 'Queen of Newlyn'. In 2005, in the portraiture exhibition Faces of Cornwall at Penlee House, the following were displayed: Half-Holiday (Alec home from school c1909, Penlee Collection); Newlyn Maid (NAG Collection); Cicely Jesse (Penlee Collection); A Zandvoort Fishergirl (1884, NAG Collection) and her well-known masterpiece, School is Out (1899). Although the latter in the Penlee Collection is a Newlyn School painting, and the subject thought to be from that area, it was painted at the time she was working at Percy CRAFT's Studio in St Ives. Hence the subject may be based on a St Ives school room.
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Born on Merseyside at Birkenhead (13 January, 1859 GRO), the artist studied in Germany, in London at Heatherly's, and in Paris at Julian's Atelier, working primarily in watercolour. He came to Newlyn from Polperro where he first painted in c1890, but may have been present earlier than this.

Stanhope FORBES remarked wittily that Rheam had been 'imported' to bulk up the Newlyn cricket side. By the 1891 Census he was living at St Peters, Newlyn (aged 32 years) as a boarder, with Samuel Green ENDERBY boarding in the same house. A first cousin of Henry Scott TUKE, Rheam was so pleased with Newlyn that he remained for the rest of his life.

A staunch Quaker, his paintings were in a romantic, late Pre-Raphaelite style. At the Opening Exhibition of NAG (1895) a reviewer commented, "Among the watercolour men who choose figure subjects Mr Rheam is conspicuous; his Belle dame sans merci, which was sold, is as complete a realisation of the heroine of Keat's poem as any artist is ever like to give us." He also showed Wrecked, At the Window and Gorse. In that same year at the 'Sketch Exhibition' he showed seven pieces of work and sold them all, the best seller of the show. In 1897 he lived at Boase Castle Lodge, Belle Vue in Newlyn, which he and his wife Alice Elliott Rheam took over from the Madderns (who gave up their lodging house after many years). From that same year, Rheam became the Hon Secretary/Curator of the Newlyn Society of Artists (NSA) and continued loyally in that post until his death in 1920 (14 November, age 61).

In 1903, amongst other exhibits, he sold both Sketch for Pandora and Melisande to the then Bishop of Ripon. His curatorship meant quite arduous administration duties in addition to an active painterly and cricketeering life. The Rheams remained in Newlyn until about 1914 when they moved to West Lodge in Alverton (Penzance).
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Bodilly was unique amongst the first generation of Newlyn artists in that he was a local boy: he was born in Penzance on 5 December 1860. He was a witness at the marriage of Thomas and Caroline Gotch in 1881, and three years later he married Caroline’s sister, Esther, with whom he had one son.

Bodilly joined the Newlyn painters, staying at Mrs Maddern’s (Belle Vue), but after only about two years, he left to study law. He was called to the Bar at Middle Temple on 8 July, 1889. This precipitated his leaving Cornwall in 1889 to join the Civil Service in India, before becoming a Judge in Calcutta in the Colonial Service. On retirement he returned to Penzance, living with his family at Alverton Cottage. He died near Palermo, Sicily, Italy.

Although his artistic career was brief, he did exhibit two works at the Royal Academy (1885-6) and also exhibited at the Royal Society of British Artists. His painting subjects were mainly genre and landscapes.
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Born in Stillington, nr York on 6 February, 1860 (GRO), the son of a physician, he followed Frank BRAMLEY to the Lincoln School of Art (1879-81) and then to Verlat’s Academy in Antwerp (1882). His first exhibit at the RA was the following year.

Fred visited Newlyn first in 1884, settling there soon after and giving a Newlyn address in 1885. In the 1891 Census he was living at Tol-peden in Newlyn and describing himself as an artist-sculptor. At that stage he was painting in the style of La Thangue, Clausen, and the Newlyn painters. He finally departed Newlyn in 1897, where he had last been lodging at Belle Vue.

Hall married Agnes in 1898, a young woman of 24 who had been born in Burma. After a year in Liverpool, they moved to Dorking and then London, before settling in Berkshire in 1911. He lived at Speen, near Newbury (GRO) until his death at 88 years of age. [Photo likeness in Hardie 2009, p27]
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Born in Leytonstone, London on 5 April, 1862 (GRO), the son of a lawyer, William M Tayler and his wife Sarah, he studied at Heatherleys, the RA schools and at the Slade where he met Thomas Cooper GOTCH, and then also at Laurens Atelier in Paris. Another close friend, made in Paris, was Norman GARSTIN.

He lived for 12 years in Newlyn, after arriving first in 1884. (The Centre for Whistler Studies, holding a biography for Tayler, incorrectly states that he spent two years only in Cornwall before settling permanently in London. In fact, he lived successively at Belle Vue House, the Malt House with the Gotches, and later at Park Terrace).

He served on the provisional committee of artists when NAG opened on 22 October 1895, but moved soon after to settle in Kensington, London. Despite non-residence in Cornwall, he continued to show and sell paintings at NAG. In 1896 he married Mrs Elizabeth Cotes, the daughter of a surgeon to the Royal Household, who had one daughter by her first marriage. Together the couple had two sons, both of whom were killed in WWI.

is sister, Mary Beatrice Churchill Tayler (1869-c1939), moved to Cornwall in 1921, and became the resident Assistant Honorary Secretary of NAG and the NSA, with her friend Miss Hall acting as Custodian. Reginald DICK had taken over as Temporary Hon Sec when Henry RHEAM had died in post, and the two women were to rescue the Gallery from the lack of administrative control and direction which occurred. Miss Churchill Tayler remained in post until 1934, when she joined the NAG Committee, and was made an Honorary Life Member. Hence the connections between the Tayler family and Newlyn were to span a period of some 55 years.

His subjects were interiors, dinner parties and other domestic celebrations, later concentrating on religious subjects. He died on 20 December, 1925 in London.
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Frank Richards was born on 18 September, 1863, in Birmingham, and his address remained there in 1883 and 1887. He also worked from Lulworth, Dorset (1885), Newlyn (1892), London (1897), Wareham, Dorset (1902) and Bournemouth (1917).

In the 1890 exhibition at Dowdeswells, that indicates his presence in Newlyn sometime before, Richards showed 6 sketches and watercolours, including Sketch for Cornish Courtyard, Something for Father and The Way to the Laundry-Newlyn.

In an article for The Studio (1895) - 'Newlyn as a Sketching Ground' - he wrote that he had been in and around Newlyn for five years and knew it under 'all its various changes and aspects, according to time of year and weather...' He died in Bournemouth on 12 October, 1935
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Born on 8 July 1838, in London (GRO), Henry Edwin Tozer was the father of Henry Edward Spernon TOZER (1864-1955), Marianne Alice, and Eustace Arthur TOZER. Henry Edwin was the son of a tinplate worker and his stated profession on marriage to Louisa (nee Griffin) in 1861 at St Martin's-in-the-Fields was 'civil engineer'.

By 1888 the family had moved to Newlyn. At the time of the 1891 Census, he had an address in St Just, Cornwall. Bessie BOYNS was a pupil of his, and exhibited with him in St Just in 1892 and subsequently in Exeter. His friendship with her and her photographer sister Gertrude affected his marriage. On his daughter Marianne's marriage, Louisa moved to London with the newly-weds. Henry Edwin moved to Galmpton where he lived with Bessie and Gertrude. He and Bessie held a joint exhibition in Kingsbridge in 1912 and he died in Galmpton in 1913, aged 74. Upon their deaths (Gertrude in 1928 and Bessie in 1947) the sisters were buried beside him.

Henry Edwin Tozer exhibited Surf and Rocks at the Mouth of the Cove at the RA in 1892. Two works by him were shown at Birmingham between 1889 and 1892.
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Born in Wallasey, Wirral, Merseyside (GRO) on 7 June, 1869, Birch grew up in the Manchester area and is recognised as the 'father' of the Lamorna colony. In 1892, he moved to Cornwall, living first at Boleigh Farm. Stanhope FORBES and others suggested further training in France, and in 1895 he spent some months at Atelier Colarossi. Apart from this brief sojourn with lessons, Birch was wholly self-taught.

From his marriage to Houghton VIVIAN in 1902 until his death in 1955, he lived at Flagstaff Cottage, Lamorna, and painted the surrounding lands, cliffs, streams and terrains that he visited and loved. In many ways he was 'the man for all seasons' and is now acknowledged as the 'father of the Lamorna colony of artists' with his home, Flagstaff, serving as the centre and gathering place for artists and writers coming to the area. The many visitors would find him either working in his painting studio by the stream, or fishing in it; art and fishing were his passions and played 'equal first' in his life alongside his family.

Lamorna Birch, having selected the name Lamorna to distinguish him from friend Lionel Birch, also painting in Newlyn at the time, was an extremely prolific artist, taking every opportunity to travel to patrons and to paint to commission. Earning a living from painting, and tutoring was notoriously difficult, Birch was not one with inherited or family money as many of the gentleman-artists were. His work is represented in numerous public and private collections world-wide, and his picture St Ives, Cornwall (1938) was selected by the Chantrey Bequest and is in the Tate Britain Collection. In his lifetime he showed more than 500 paintings at the Fine Art Society, which reprinted many of them for commercial purposes.

Elected to the RWS (1914), an ARA in the 1920s and RA in 1934, Birch was the first RA to work in New Zealand, where he had travelled also to visit his daughter Joan Houghton BIRCH who had settled there (1937), receiving generous receptions from museum and gallery curators who purchased his work. The full story of his life is told masterfully by the author Austen Wormleighton, in A Painter Laureate, Lamorna Birch and his circle (1995). In 1997 the Falmouth Art Gallery mounted a retrospective exhibition which also toured to Plymouth. His work was selected for the RA's exhibition in 1988, The Edwardians and After, and the painting chosen was Our Little Stream, Lamorna. The scene remains the same today. The journal of The Lamorna Society is named The Flagstaff, and Birch's grandson, Adam KERR, is the Hon President of the working group of artists.
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1873-1910: His early life: art schools: arrival in Newlyn: marriage.

Frank Heath was born in Coulsdon, Surrey in January 1873, the youngest of 12 children. He was educated locally and it was while at school that he first showed the talent that was to launch him on an artistic career. His early training began at the South Kensington Schools ( now Royal College of Art), followed by the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium (1895-1897) and the Herkomer Art School at Bushey in Hertfordshire.

While a student, Frank became a friend and admirer of the work of Stanhope Forbes and it was this that was to lead him to Newlyn circa 1900. Upon arrival, he found lodgings and a studio nearby at Trewarveneth Farm, Paul. His paintings at that time were typical of the early "Newlyn School" with their subdued palette and depiction of life of the local people living around the harbour. From 1902, he started to exhibit his work at the Newlyn Art Gallery, the Royal Academy in London and Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool.

When not painting the artists certainly enjoyed themselves with parties, picnics, music and dancing. It was probably at one of these events that Frank first met Jessica Doherty who was studying at the School of Painting run by Stanhope and Elizabeth Forbes in Newlyn. Their romance blossomed and Frank and Jessica married at Paul Church in March 1910. Shortly afterwards they decided to move to the other end of Cornwall and set up their first home together at Polperro.

1910-1920: Polperro: Lamorna: the War years and illness.

Frank and Jessica arrived in Polperro in 1910 and took up residence at Osprey Cottage overlooking the harbour. During the 2 years that they lived in the village their first two children were born, Aileen and Nancy. Frank continued to paint and exhibit his work at the Royal Academy in London and the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool.

With the two children growing up and Jessica's parents living in Penzance perhaps it was the attraction and benefits of being close to them that made Frank and Jessica decide, with the help of Jessica's parents, to return to the Newlyn area in 1912 and purchase 10 acres of land at the top of the Lamorna Valley on which to build a house and create a garden. The house cost £1,000 and was named Menwinnion (meaning "white stone" in Cornish) and became the family home for the next 24 years.

The years before the Great War were a happy time of Frank and the family. Friends such as Alfred Munnings and his first wife, Florence, "Lamorna" Birch, Laura Knight and her husband Harold and Stanhope Forbes spent many hours at Menwinnion. However, the coming of the War brought great change to the artists' colony and 1915 was a good and bad year for Frank and Jessica. The good news was the birth of the twins, Tony and Gabriel towards the end of the year.

However, earlier Frank then aged 42 had volunteered for active service in the War. Upon completing his initial training in Romford, Frank joined the 2nd Sportsman's Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers; this Battalion recruited men from ages 35 to 45 with no previous army experience. While serving, he contracted spotted fever and was admitted to hospital in London. Upon recovery, Jessica travelled up to London to take him back to Menwinnion to convalesce. This illness resulted in his complete disablement for a long period combining with bouts of depression. In the years 1916-1920 he obviously found it difficult to start painting again with records showing that he hardly produced any paintings in those 4 years.

However, the future was going to turn brighter into the 1920s.

1920-1936: Recovery: "the sunshine artist": postscript.

It is difficult to know what the trigger was that lifted Frank out of these periods of depression. Perhaps it was the fun and enjoyment of seeing his children growing up ( at this time they featured frequently in his paintings) and playing cricket, tennis and golf with them; he was also a violinist with the Penzance Orchestral Society. However, there is no doubt that in the 1920s he regained his enthusiasm and produced some of his best and most colourful work and was known locally as "the sunshine artist" exhibiting frequently at the Newlyn Art Gallery, the Royal Academy in London, The Salon in Paris, the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol and the St Ives Society of Artists.

As you will see in the following display of paintings produced in the 1920s and 1930s, Frank was very versatile in his range of subjects and equally at home whether painting his children, animals, interiors, his garden, land and seascapes.

In the mid 1930s, Frank's health deteriorated due to a combination of chest problems and the after effects of his illness during the War and from which he never really recovered. He died peacefully in June 1936 aged 63 and was buried in the family grave at St John's Church, Coulsdon, Surrey.

"The Times" as part of its obituary to Frank wrote
"...tall and handsome, he was for many years a popular member of the artistic colony in Newlyn, Cornwall and his most characteristic work was done in the Land's End district. Painting both the figure and landscape he was essentially an open air artist direct in his method with a good sense of values and a fine taste in colour".
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Born in Kent and educated at Sevenoaks, he trained at Lambeth School of Art (where he was influenced by Buxton Knight) and the South London Technical Art School.

Hughes came first to Lamorna in 1905 with Charles Crimbie (popular illustrator), and became a friend of Lamorna BIRCH. He returned to Kent but came back to Lamorna in 1909, to attend Forbes School with Frank Gascoigne HEATH and Eleanor W WAYMOUTH. In 1910 he married fellow student Eleanor Waymouth at the Church at St Buryan, and they built their own home, Chyangwheal, between the Lamorna Valley and Boleigh Farm, where they remained together for the rest of their lives.

The St Ives Times reported his work extensively during the 1924 Show Day, his principal picture being the original study for a picture of the rhododendron dell at Kew Gardens, painted for Her Majesty, Queen Mary. This depicted a winding path through great masses of bushes of colour: 'Mr Hughes was commissioned to paint no less than eight pictures for Her Majesty...He also showed three oils, intended for the RA, one an evening effect in summer over St Ives Bay, the chief feature of which is the contrast of the patch of warm sand, on which the sun is concentrated with the intense blue of the sea and the greys of the sky.'

Their close friends were the Birch family, the Leaders, the Napers, the Heaths, the Simpsons, and all of the talented, friendly crowd around the Lamorna Valley.
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My featured artist today is one of the famous Newlyn School painters. The term Newlyn school applies to a group of artists who settled in Newlyn and St Ives in the late nineteenth century and whose work is characterised by an impressionistic style and embodies subject matter drawn from scenes of rural life. It was founded by a group of artists led by Stanhope Forbes. who came to Newlyn in West Cornwall in 1884 and was immediately captivated by the scenery and people in the area. The ‘Newlyn School’ became famous for its superb realism, in ‘Plein-Air‘ painting. The artist I am looking at today, Harold Harvey, made his name for his beautiful works featuring the Cornish countryside.

Harold Charles Francis Harvey was born on May 20th 1874 in North Parade, Penzance, Cornwall. He was the eldest of eight children of Francis McFarland Harvey, a bank clerk, and Mary Bellringer whom he married in September 1872. Harold had six brothers, Percival George Harvey; Frank Harvey; Arthur William H Harvey; Wilfrid Vignes Harvey; Leonard Harvey, and Cyril Harvey along with one sister, Gladys Maud Harvey. Harvey trained in painting at the Penzance Art School under the tutelage of Norman Garstin, an Irish artist, teacher, art critic and journalist associated with the Newlyn School of painters. After leaving the Penzance Art School at the age of nineteen, William travelled to France and attended the Académie Julian in Paris between 1894 and 1896.

In the early part of the twentieth century, Harold Harvey’s paintings were impressionistic in style and the depictions focused on people involved in the agricultural and fishing trade. One such work was In the Whiting Ground which he completed around 1900 and depicts a small dinghy at sea with a young man standing holding a fishing line in his hands while an older man is holding a line in the water. St Michael’s Mount the tidal island in Mount’s Bay, a large, sweeping bay on the English Channel coast of Cornwall, can be seen in the far distance.

A small painting completed around the same time by Harvey featuring three young men in a boat had the strange title of Whiffing in St Mount’s Bay. Whiffing is a mode of fishing with a hand line. Another of his paintings depicting life along the Cornish shoreline was one entitled The Seaweed Gatherers in which we see two men hauling a horse and cart laden with fresh seaweed. A more colourful painting is his beautiful work of idyllic tranquillity entitled The Close of a Summers Day which he completed in 1909. It is at the end of a hot summers day and man and beast have need of a rest and refreshment. The young farmworkers have been tasked with taking the horses down to the river for them to cool down and have a drink. The white horse gently splashes in the water attempting to cool down its fetlocks.

From 1909 to 1913, Harvey was an Associate of the Royal Cambrian Academy of Art, Conwy and, in 1910, he became a member of the South Wales Art Society.

It was around this time that Harold Harvey met Gertrude Bodinnar. She was born in 1879 and was the eighth of the ten children born to Ann Crews Bodinnar, (née Curnow), and her husband John Matthews Bodinnar, a cooper. In her twenties, she acted as a model for students at the Forbes School of Painting, which had been founded in 1899 by Stanhope Forbes and his Canadian-born wife Elizabeth as their School of Painting and Drawing at Newlyn. It was indirectly through her work with students at this establishment that she first met Harold Harvey and agreed to act as his model. Love blossomed and Harold and Gertrude married on April 19th 1911 and the couple set up home at Maen Cottage Elms Close Terrace, in Newlyn.

Gertrude appeared in a number of her husband’s paintings. Being around artists, including her husband, and watching them work fascinated her. She would often note down how the artists worked, and she soon realised that she had a talent for art and design. Gertrude used mostly oil on canvas, board, card, or paper, but also tempera, gouache and though largely self-taught she became a talented artist in her own right, and her paintings were mainly of still-lifes, flowers and landscapes. Her paintings were good enough to be sold and exhibited at the Newlyn Art Gallery and in the twenties and thirties her work could be seen in many London galleries including the Leicester Gallery and the Royal Academy. Often, she showed work together with her husband in mixed and group shows. Between 1930 and 1949, Gertrude Harvey had twenty works selected for Royal Academy exhibitions and from 1945 to 1949 she was regular exhibitor with the St Ives Society of Artists. She was also proficient at needlework and clothing design.

Meanwhile Harold Harvey continued painting and exhibiting his work. The First World War began in 1914 but due to health issues, he was exempted from military service. In that year, he started to paint a series of interiors often using his own home. One such painting was his 1916 work entitled Reflections. In another work entitled The Critics, we see three women enjoying coffee and an aperitif as they study some paintings, weighing up the merits of each one. A depiction of domestic living can be best seen in Harold Harvey’s 1920 painting entitled The Tea Table. It is a masterful depiction of a small dining room filled with shelves of crockery and ornaments. It could almost be termed a still-life of household goods.

With such wonderful landscapes on his doorstep, it is no wonder that Harvey continued with his outdoor works featuring young models. One example of this is his 1926 painting entitled Girl on a Cliff. In a way, this is not a true plein air painting as the girl in the depiction is fourteen-year-old Cressida Wearne and Harvey painted her posing in the garden of his studio and he added the background at a later date. Again, we see this technique with his 1922 painting, Clara. It is a full-length portrait of a girl standing by a wall set in a rolling landscape. She is seen holding a rose and in several of Harvey’s portraits his female sitters are holding a single flower. The work is composed mainly of tones of grey and brown but it is the red of the rosebud which creates the focal point of the work.

Harold Harvey completed a number of portrait commissions, such as his 1920 portrait of the youngest son of James Jewill Hill, a partner in the solicitors firm Jewill Hill & Bennett, Penzance. Another portrait he completed was a 1938 commission to paint a portrait of John Humphreys, Professor of Dentistry.

In 1920, Harold Harvey and fellow Newlyn School artist, Ernest Procter, founded the School of Painting, in Newlyn, called the Harvey-Procter School, which ran throughout most of the 1920s.

Harold Harvey died in Newlyn on 19 May 1941 and was buried in Penzance at the St Clare Cemetery. His wife, Gertrude, lived in their cottage until 1960 when she moved into the Benoni Nursing Home in St Just. She died six years late, aged 86.
My Daily Art Display (31/5/2021)
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Painter of sensitive portraits, especially of women, and interiors, born in Nottingham. In the mid-1890s he studied at the local School of Art; also studied in Paris at Académie Julian, his teachers including Jean-Paul Laurens and Benjamin Constant. Knight married Laura Johnson – later to become Dame Laura Knight – the painter, in 1903, having known her in Nottingham and in Staithes, Yorkshire, where he painted on his return from France. With her he studied the Dutch masters in the Netherlands, then from 1908 they lived for a decade in Newlyn, Cornwall, eventually settling in London. Knight was a steady exhibitor at RA from 1896, being elected RA in 1937. Also showed Leicester Galleries, IS and elsewhere. His reticent work and personality were overshadowed by Laura’s ebullient, more colourful nature and painting, but his pictures’ real qualities have been more appreciated in recent years.
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Born in Nottingham, the son of architect and sometime painter, William Knight, Harold won a travelling scholarship while at the Nottingham School of Art, allowing him to study at the Academie Julian under Laurens and Constant. After marrying Laura JOHNSON, a fellow student at Nottingham in 1903, the couple lived mainly in Staithes, but also made several trips to Holland, where Harold became interested in the farming subjects and interiors of simple peasant living, handling these in the manner of the HAGUE SCHOOL of artists.

The couple moved to Lamorna, Cornwall and lived at Oakhill from 1907-18. There he continued to paint genre subjects, but with a lighter palette, and also painted a number of sitters in Cornwall, including Mornie KERR, Blote Munnings (Florence CARTER-WOOD), and Ella Louise NAPER, the latter for whom he cared deeply.

In 1910 he sold his first painting at NAG, Prayer, and in 1914 he exhibited for the first time at the Paris Salon (Un bohemien). Later, when they moved to London, he continued as a portrait painter of the well-known figures in society and politics of the period, and in 1925 received a Silver Medal for his portrait of Ethel Bartlett at the Paris Salons. The couple were to become the first husband and wife members of the RA in the history of the Academy. Harold pre-deceased Laura by some nine years.
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In recent decades, it has been a mark of art-world snobbery to rubbish Dame Laura Knight. The token woman at the top table of British painting for much of the 20th century was too versatile, prolific and popular; too workaday, too vulgar. Now, however — with the first major gallery survey since a Nottingham retrospective of 1970, which opened days after her death — we can see how cleverly she caught the character of her times in lucid paint and how deeply she has seeped into our consciousness.

When we think of a picture of blissful summer on the Cornish coast or of fairs and circuses, boxers and ballet dancers, gypsies, horses, theatres, dressing rooms, courtrooms and, most especially, women at work, we probably have a Knight painting in mind. She was a painter of immense empathy, shifting perspectives in a selfless focus on her varied subjects and forever hiding the titanic effort behind her stellar career. Her famous Self-portrait, with face in profile and further obscured by an all-weather hat, celebrates the nude models she was not allowed to see until she could pay for them herself.

Laura Johnson was born at Long Eaton, Derbyshire, in 1877, the youngest of three sisters. Her adulterous father absconded before her birth and her mother returned to family roots in Nottingham, reliant on the clan’s failing lace factory and her own efforts as an art teacher. Laura’s childhood was a saga of spirit, talent and dashed hope. She was to have studied in Paris, but plunging family fortunes forced a switch to Nottingham art school. Aged 13, she was dazzled by fellow student Harold Knight, whom she soon outshone.

By the time she came to marry Harold, in 1903, all the role models in her early life — grandmother, great-aunt, mother, sister — were dead. Now and always, she was a one-woman show. The passion the Knights shared was for paint and initial subjects were found in the North Yorkshire fishing village of Staithes, near Whitby, where glowering seas and skies and the dour lives of the villagers prompted darkly tonal pictures, followed through in trips to Holland in homage to the Dutch masters. Harold’s art went almost no further; Laura’s was set to leap.

Hearing that radical artists were gathering around Stanhope Forbes in farthest Cornwall, the Knights joined them and, in Newlyn and Lamorna, Laura learned the Impressionist lessons she would have picked up in Paris, had she got there in her youth. Her brightening and sensual scenes caught the pulse of life.

Whereas Harold was a conscientious objector in the First World War, Laura secured the first of many wartime commissions with an image of soldiers bathing in a river. She extended a brief of ‘physical training’ after a chance encounter with a military boxer. Absorbed by the technical challenge of depicting a boxing match, she allowed the viewer a chilling sense of irony.

Her love of ballet erupted with the arrival of Diaghilev’s Russian company in London, in 1919. There was an ensuing frenzy of sketches, watercolours and oils of the great ballerinas of the day — Pavlova, Karsavina, Lopokova — and supporting dancers both on and off stage. Fascinated by the art of preparation, of course, the artist took ballet lessons herself.

A conversation with a Paddington station porter led her to fixed-site circuses in Islington and Olympia and a new obsession for the big top launched her on the open road. She wanted to depict everyone and everything in the circus, quipping that, if she herself had been a performer, she would certainly have been a clown. In fact, with her phenomenal energy, this tireless party-goer and giver played the role of a celebrity with gusto. Smiling in brightly printed dresses, embroidered peasant blouses and swinging skirts, her striking photograph was a fixture in newspapers and magazines.

When painting at Epsom and Ascot racecourses, she did so from a vintage Rolls-Royce. It made for a perfect mobile studio and was sure to win public and press attention. Amid the parades of showy finery, she fell for gypsy princesses in satin gala dresses. Soon, inevitably, a Roller was parked beside the caravans at the Romany camp on Iver common in Buckinghamshire, as the nomadic artist portrayed a new band of friends.

When she went to America, she was drawn to African-American nurses and patients in a Baltimore hospital and their struggle against segregation. The diversity of humanity — and the individuality of beauty — was the artist’s favourite theme.

By 1939, Laura Knight was a Dame, a Royal Academician and a household name, but her finest hour came with the Second World War. She charted the mobilisation of women as land girls, air-raid wardens and barrage-balloon makers — and we should all love her for the painting of Ruby Loftus alone. Loftus was to be honoured for her speed of training in the delicate and dangerous craft of assembling the breech block of a gun. The artist depicted her as part of the machinery of war, against a backdrop of other women powering the armaments industry. Such painstaking realism is now profoundly moving.

The Knights had retreated to a hotel near Malvern, Worcestershire, where neighbouring landscapes became their earthly paradise. Still, Dame Laura pressed to depict the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders until her wish was granted. Approaching her 70th year, she attacked her biggest challenge — first with hundreds of sketches and then an outsized canvas — in the wintry courtroom. The final painting is a study in ruthless conviction in every sense. Although ringed by the uniforms of military police and legal bigwigs, the 20 grey defendants could have been businessmen caught out in an accountancy swindle. Court walls fall away to reveal rubble and flame — the surrounding blitzed city and all the world on fire.

Writing to Harold, Dame Laura claimed to have been concerned with ‘pure aesthetic emotion only — for colour, composition, balance and line. Above all, for space, and an excuse to vary the monotony of line in that lighting, AND the monotony of all those dotted faces, hands and figures’. This was certainly a charge levelled at her then and later: that, fixated on surfaces, she ignored the emotional and psychological. Yet her deceptive detachment leaves us free to draw our own exhilarating or devastating conclusions. The painter Christopher Nevinson praised the ‘vitality’ of one of her pictures. This key word almost covers the artist’s amazing 80-year career: the Nuremberg monsterpiece uniquely proves the point by its very absence.

Born and dying within four years of Picasso, Dame Laura was no great innovator, but she was a brilliant observer. She herself said simply: ‘I paint today’ — and few have done that better.
Country Life (17/12/2021)
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Various authors: Laura Knight A Celebration (Sansom & Co. - 2021)

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The son of a miller, Munnings was born in Mendham on the Norfolk-Suffolk border. He was educated at Redenhall Grammar School and Framlingham College. At age 14, he was apprenticed for six years to the firm of Page Brothers, lithographers, in Norwich where he was noticed by John Shaw Tomkins, a director of Caley's Chocolates, who became his earliest patron. In 1902 he went to Paris to study at Julian's Academy for a few weeks, a practice he repeated several times. He also attended Frank Calderon's School of Animal Painting in Finchingfield, Essex. A passion for horses and horse painting led him to acquire the first of a succession of horses, both to ride and paint. He also visited race meetings and gypsy horse fairs.

In 1910 Munnings moved to Cornwall, which he had already briefly visited, arriving in Newlyn with a group of girl models and soon becoming the life and soul of the artist community in Lamorna. A converted mill served as both studio and stabling for his horses. He became infatuated with a young art student, Florence CARTER-WOOD, who modeled on horseback for him; they were married in 1912, but this disastrous marriage ended with her suicide in 1914.

Records do not show that he ever exhibited in galleries in Cornwall, and since his death his work has been included in only one Cornish exhibition, as promoted by the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol (1992) Artists from Cornwall. However, since there is no list of exhibits in the accompanying exhibition catalogue, it is not known what work(s) of his were chosen.

A five day stay at Mrs. Griggs' at Zennor in 1913 resulted in many fine paintings of his horses and groom, Ned Osborne. In 1917 he joined the army and a year later was sent to France as a war artist for the Canadian Cavalry, resulting in more paintings and memorials. Never afraid to show his dislike for modern art, at the opening of the Stanhope FORBES Memorial Exhibition in Newlyn (1949), he urged those attending 'to march' on the Tate as Forbes' The Health of the Bride was languishing in the basement while "absurd paintings by Matisse were hung preciously on the walls with half a mile between each one".
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The daughter of John Mathews Bodinnar, a cooper, and Ann Crews Bodinnar (nee Curnow), Gertrude was the eighth of ten children and was Cornish-born. Her first contact with art was as a model that included posing for her future husband Harold HARVEY, and the experience fascinated her. She made notes of how the painters worked, and she discovered in herself a talent for art and design.

She and Harold later married in about 1911. Gertrude used mostly oil on canvas, board, card or paper, but also tempera, gouache and sketches (sold at NAG), and also enjoyed needlework and clothing design. In the 1920s and 30s she exhibited her work at various galleries in London, including the RA and the Leicester Galleries. Often she showed work together with her husband in mixed and group shows. Her style has been likened to Alethea GARSTIN's.

Prior to her marriage she lived at Pembroke Cottage, Newlyn (1879-81), and by the 1891 Census she was at 49
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Born in Christchurch, New Zealand, the child of West Country parents, Eleanor Waymouth visited Britain initially at the turn of the Nineteenth Century. She studied art with C N Worsley (c1901-3) and attended the FORBES School of Painting for a short time.

In 1907 she came again to London from New Zealand, accompanied by her sister, to study at Frank SPENLOVE's 'Yellow Door Studio'. Prior to 1908, she drew and painted in Hampshire, Gloucestershire and Warwickshire, with a special interest in country trees. Wallace comments in the Exhibition catalogue for Women Artists in Cornwall (1996) that Hughes 'had a particularly delicate style which has been compared to that of Rennie Mackintosh'. From 1902 she exhibited as Miss E W Waymouth (until 1912 when she exhibited as Mrs Hughes). She was also an accomplished pianist.

From 1908 similar drawings appear in her sketchbook of Cornwall, probably signaling a recent return to the West Country. In Newlyn in 1907 she began to study under Stanhope FORBES and Elizabeth FORBES for the second time. There she met and married Robert Morson HUGHES in 1910, and together they designed and built their own home, Chyangweal, near St Buryan. Living and working in London in 1914, they returned home to St Buryan in 1915.

She and her husband were part of the inner circle of friends surrounding S J Lamorna BIRCH; this included the Harveys, the Napers, the Knights, and the Simpsons. She took up etching in late 1930s, a natural extension of her talent for drawing, but examples have been scarce until recently, when her niece has made the personal collection available. She sold up her studio in 1940 in aid of financing evacuee children. She died at her home in Lamorna in 1959.
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Born in Tynemouth, Northumberland, the son of a scientist, Ernest was educated at Bootham Friends' School in York and then came to Newlyn in 1907 to study with Stanhope Forbes. He quickly become recognized as the best student of the School. He acted as Assistant to Stanhope FORBES and Elizabeth FORBES and contributing significantly to the publication produced by Elizabeth FORBES and Tennyson JESSE, The Paper Chase (1908,1909). Ernest was well loved by all who knew him, and respected for his excellent teaching. He spent 1910-11 studying at Atelier Colarossi, Paris, marrying his fellow pupil and artist, Dod SHAW in 1912. He also loyally served on the Committee of the Newlyn Society of Artists for many years. During WWI, a committed Quaker, he worked for the Friends Ambulance Service in France (See pl 18 in WAR, Fine Art Society 2009).

The couple returned to Newlyn in 1918, and with Harold HARVEY he founded a School of Painting called the Harvey-Procter School (1920) which ran throughout most of the 1920s. Meantime he also designed an altar screen for St Mary's Church, Chapel Street, Penzance (destroyed by fire 1985), and paintings for his friend Father Bernard Walke (called 'Ber') at St Hilary Church nearby, Visitation (1933) and Deposition (1935). In 1920 he and Dod were commissioned to decorate the Kokine Palace in Rangoon; the experience of working with Burmese, Indian and Chinese plasterers, gilders and carvers, and eastern art and design, had an influence on some of Ernest's later works.

In 1931, spurred on by receiving various commissions for industrial designs, he invented a new art form that he called Diaphenicons. These were painted and glazed decorations that provided their own light source, and he exhibited them at the Leicester Galleries.

In 1934 he was appointed Director of Studies in Design and Craft at Glasgow School of Art. The strain of his new role and the travel involved caused him to have a cerebral haemorrhage the following year (in North Shields) en route to resume his teaching duties.

TFG Jones writes: Ernest Procter, painter and designer, came from a Northumberland family of Quakers, following his father as a pupil to Bootham Friends’ School at York. His father, Henry Richardson Procter, was a scientist and a specialist in the chemistry of leather who gained an international reputation, becoming a professor at Leeds University and a Fellow of the Royal Society.

In 1907, Ernest joined the art colony at Newlyn and became a pupil at the Forbes’ School of Painting. In 1910 he spent a year studying at the Atelier Colarossi in Paris, and in 1912, he married the fellow painter, Dod Shaw, who had worked with him in both Newlyn and Paris. When the Great War broke out, Ernest volunteered for the Friends’ Ambulance Unit and returned to France. In 1918, he and Dod came back to Newlyn and remained until they travelled to Burma to work together on the commission to decorate Rangoon’s Kokine Palace. By this time he had proved himself a prolific painter of portraits and landscapes, but he had also produced notable watercolours and drawings, particularly of his war experiences.

During the 1920s Procter achieved more success with his portraits and also explored religious and allegorical subjects. Portraits of Sir Thomas Beecham and Frederick Delius were bought by the National Portrait Gallery, and he painted the allegorical The Zodiac (1925) that was to be bought posthumously by the Chantrey Bequest. He continued to show regularly at the Royal Academy, and produced religious paintings for three local churches, St Mary’s in Penzance (later destroyed by fire), and the parish churches of Newlyn and St Hilary. Through most of the 1920s he ran, with his colleague and celebrated Newlyn artist, Harold Harvey, an all-year-round painting school. And, always adventurous, in the early 1930s, he began to design glassware, furniture and carpets for industry. In 1934, he took up an appointment as Director of Studies in Design and Craft at the Glasgow School of Art.

A year later, this kindly, industrious and highly-principled man collapsed and died of a stroke in his native Tynemouth, when on a return trip from Newlyn to his work in Glasgow. He was 49.
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Born in Reading, Stanley was first apprenticed to an house decorator whilst in his spare time painting with house-paint on card. First winning a Scholarship to Reading University, he further studied at the Allan Fraser Art College, Arbroath, Scotland. He travelled to America but returned during WWI to serve in the Armed Forces.

In Lamorna during 1923-1952, he was encouraged and heavily influenced by Samuel John Lamorna BIRCH, for whom he made frames (and for Stanhope Forbes and others) when finances were tight. He lived at Lily Cottage and worked often in the open air, and in the studio he built for himself (Bludor Studio). He studied at the FORBES SCHOOL in 1926, and showed at NAG in Christmas Exhibition of that year. His titles included Sun Daisies, April Morning, Lamorna, etc. He also took pupils for lessons in the open air, carrying on the long-held plein air tradition.

A major treasure at Penlee House, Penzance is A Portrait of Stanley Gardiner painted in 1938 by the artist Richard Copeland WEATHERBY (Seal), that was shown first at STISA and then hung at the RA in 1945. It depicts Gardiner 'who stands, legs astride, palette in left hand, brush to the fore, facing his easel with the Lamorna Quay in the background.' (D Bradfield)
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Born in Leeds, the artist trained as an architectural draughtsman, specializing in terracotta. During WWI he worked as a draughtsman in a shipyard, as his eyesight was too poor for him to be enlisted. In the early 1920s he traveled to America and became a naturalised US Citizen.

When he returned to England on a painting holiday, Heseldin met Lily Paul, his future wife, in Newlyn. They were married in the village of Rocky Hill, near Princeton, New Jersey, where their daughter, Lamorna, was born in 1922.

After several years of little success in the USA, he brought the family back to Newlyn where he rented a studio and began to paint full-time. His metier was depticting Cornish street and harbour scenes in watercolour, and his compositions were often detailed studies, probably due to his architectural training. He exhibited at NAG.

In the 1950s he and Lily moved to St Austell to live with their daughter and son-in-law, and he became a member of the St Austell Art Society.
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Born in London and at the age of 15 came to Newlyn with her mother and brother, Gerard, to study at the FORBES SCHOOL. Elizabeth FORBES arranged their accommodation at Myrtle Cottage ('the Myrtage'), together with Tennyson JESSE and her cousin Cicely JESSE.

In 1910 both Ernest PROCTER and Dod Shaw attended the Atelier Colarossi in Paris, following which they married in 1912 at Paul Church. Their only son, Bill, was born in 1913, the same year as she first exhibited at the RA. In 1920 she and Ernest were commissioned to work on the decorations of the Kokine Palace, Rangoon. Both also made designs which were used for decorative etching on crystal. On their return to Newlyn, the couple took up residence at North Corner, Newlyn where they remained.

From that time she concentrated on painting mainly figures. Her most famous painting, Morning (RA 1927) caused a national sensation. It is a large portrait of a reclining Cissie Barnes, a local fisherman's daughter. This work was bought by the Daily Mail for the nation, and is today in the Tate collection. After Ernest's death in 1935, she travelled to America and Canada.

In 1938, deciding to move to Zennor nearer her friend Alethea GARSTIN, her style and technique changed direction under the influence of the latter, and she began to paint in a looser fashion.

In 1942, she was elected as a full Royal Academician.

In 1945 she illustrated (coloured frontispiece and line drawings) a story by Clare Collas, A Penny for the Guy.

With Jeanne DU MAURIER she holidayed in Tenerife in 1946, and in 1948 they went to Africa. During the 1950s she spent some time in Jamaica where she painted mainly children. At home she continued with still life, exhibiting regularly at the RA. She is buried at St Hilary Churchyard, with her husband, Ernest.
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The only daughter of the artist Norman GARSTIN and Louisa Jones Garstin (known as 'Dochie'), Alethea was born in Penzance and the only one of the three siblings to become a visual artist (the others were writers like their father). Both Alethea and her brothers Crosbie and Denis, however, are listed by Iris Green in her study of the pupils of the FORBES SCHOOL, though no dates are listed.

Alethea had her first painting accepted by RA in 1912, and she exhibited regularly thereafter. She painted en plein air, subjects taken mainly from her many travels, as well as Cornish village life. She travelled extensively to destinations including Ireland, Belgium, France, Italy, Morocco, Kenya and Australia. She was a friend to many artists and was well-loved by all, accompanying Dod PROCTER on some painting holidays, but finding the experience quite exhausting and sometimes embarrassing due to Dod's drinking habits.

In 1960 she moved to Zennor where she spent the rest of her life, and died shortly before a major exhibition of her and her father's work opened in St Ives in 1978. The general impression is that her work has so far been neglected and that critical acclaim is overdue. Her portrait of Norman GARSTIN is located at Plymouth City Museum. This was illustrated in the Falmouth Art Gallery catalogue for the Women Artists in Cornwall exhibition in 1996, along with seven other oils by the artist.
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Born in Flagstaff Cottage, Lamorna (the eldest daughter of Samuel John Lamorna BIRCH and Houghton VIVIAN), she was often painted by the artists of the Newlyn colony and their visitors (such as Laura KNIGHT and Harold KNIGHT, Thomas Cooper GOTCH, Phil Whiting, etc). Mornie and her sister Joan both showed handicrafts, along with their mother, at the Newlyn Art Gallery in the 1920s and 30s, and both were to develop talents in watercolour and oils. Her beloved Lamorna featured regularly in her work, and she also specialised in flower painting. She was educated at Badminton School, Bristol, taking some classes at Bristol School of Art.

In 1939 Mornie and her husband Jimmy (James Lennox Kerr, the writer) returned to Cornwall from Scotland where they had settled, and where she was taking further art lessons in Paisley. Following her mother's death in 1944, she and Jimmy ran the family home of Flagstaff on the cliffs above Lamorna Cove, looking after her father there until his death in 1955.

A friend to many artists of her father's circle, including a lifelong friendship with Laura KNIGHT, she exhibited regularly in mixed shows at Newlyn. She was Chairman of Council (1953-5), becoming Hon President following her father's death that same year.

Jimmy died in 1963, and she continued painting, setting up a teaching and painting circle which continued under her supervision until her death at Lamorna in 1990.

Their work was displayed annually at the Lamorna Village Hall, where the series continues to the present day. An E L Kerr Archive is kept in the WCAA, gathered for a small Retrospective mounted at the Jamieson Library, Newmill by friends in 1990. Carn Gloose was exhibited at Penlee (2002), and Still life with Jug was sold in 2004 at the Queens Hotel, Penzance Auction for the WCAA Establishment Fund.

A biographical memoir, In Time & Place, Lamorna, was published in 1994 by her friend and pupil, Melissa Hardie, and is based upon her long life among the artists of the West Cornwall area. It is largely abstracted within Artists in Newlyn & West Cornwall: Dictionary and sourcebook (2009). She is buried near her father and her friend Pog YGLESIAS in the burial ground at Paul.

Her son Adam KERR, and his artist wife Judith KERR, keep the artistic traditions of Flagstaff Cottage, Lamorna alive for the area, with Adam serving as President of the Lamorna Society of Artists who work and exhibit together in the Valley. Many of Mornie's former pupils are working today.
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Charles Breaker was born at Bowness on Lake Windermere. In the early 1930s, he went to Spain with his life-long companion and friend, the illustrator and watercolourist, Eric HILLER. Finding themselves in the midst of the Civil War, they moved on to Madeira, South Africa, Morocco, Capri, and finally Brittany, for painting purposes.

At the outbreak of WWII, Breaker returned to England, working in the drawing office of an aircraft factory. In 1947 he and Hiller moved to Cornwall, settling in Newlyn and, with the organising assistance of artist Marjorie MORT in 1948, they began the Holiday Sketching Group based at the Gernick Field Studio where they lived (See Hardie 1995). Breaker, a wonderful enthusiast, was active in arts social activities on both sides of the peninsula, maintaining memberships in both STISA and NSA, the latter of which he served as Chairman betwen 1957-8 and 1961-3. Much of his art work was in watercolour, and showed a spontaneous energy and colourful regard for the life he depicted, be it boats around the harbour and poster-style events.

He is especially remembered for his exciting knitted jerkins and sweaters that he made for himself and for friends, occasionally selling them for extra funds for the classes at Gernick Field (which continued until 1965). He introduced a wild array of colours in intricate design, and inspired a number of noted followers in art-knitwear, especially his niece Pat PICKLES and another artist friend, Jane AKEROYD. A Breaker knit is still treasured today and is immediately recognisable wherever it is worn. In 1986 Pickles and other former pupils mounted a Memorial Exhibition to honour this well-loved artist.

A recent correspondent added to our information about Charles and Eric with the following:

'I first met Newlyn artists in the 1960's, including Eric Alfred HILLER and Charles Clark Breaker. Eric was born in 1893 (not shown on your list) Also another artist there at that time was Alan WHITE (Frank Alan White)1893 - 1974. Could this be the one about which you had no information. He was a water colourist and I have several examples of his work. He was a friend of Charles Breaker and often lived at Gernick Field in those days.'
Cornwall Artists Index

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Thomas Herbert Victor was born on 6th September 1894, the son of Benjamin and Edith Victor of Mousehole, his father being the village shoemaker. By 1911 he is recorded as an art student.

Having shown exceptional artistic promise at school, on leaving, Victor went to art school in Penzance and was granted a scholarship from the first term there. Further scholarships were offered him to study at the Slade School and other famous establishments.

He would not leave Mousehole, however, and never travelled further than Truro during his lifetime. Nevertheless, his artistic abilities flourished and his watercolour paintings of the harbours and streets of all the local fishing villages are, apart from their artistic merit, of great historic value as a record of Mousehole, Newlyn, St Ives and the Lizard Peninsula as they were a hundred years ago. He also painted views of Clovelly. The compiler's mother can remember Victor carrying around a book of watercolour sketches as a sample to show prospective clients. A family member, when visiting from America, commissioned him to paint views of Mousehole and Newlyn where she grew up, and these were forwarded to her in America. Some of his small watercolours have been made into postcards. He also produced a series of postcards from his own local pen and ink views.

Many of his works were produced for the Morrab Gallery in Penzance. He also produced works under the pseudonym, W Sands and it is understood that as he was under a contractable obligation for his works as T H Victor he was able to circumvent that obligation by signing a proportion of his works under the pseudonym.

During the 1960s he had a shop in Mousehole. He died on 10th March 1980.
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Born in Pangbourne in Berkshire, Law was the son of an architect but his parents separated when he was quite young and he lived for a while with his mother and sister in Quimper in Brittany. His mother May LAW (Maisie), herself a keen amateur artist, encouraged his interest in art.

He was educated at St Petroc's School, Rock in North Cornwall, which was owned by a Miss Vivian who had a house in Lamorna. His family probably holidayed with her in Lamorna in these early years. Later he trained as an electrical engineer at Faraday House, worked in the Home Counties during WWII.

After the war, he moved down to Lamorna with his second wife, Ann, as his sister was now the landlady of The Wink public house in the village. He took up painting full time, supplementing his income with a variety of odd jobs including fishing, copperwork, carving wood and making furniture, whilst his wife used a loom to weave textiles. He was greatly influenced by the leaders of the Lamorna artistic community, but did not take lessons with either Lamorna BIRCH or Stanley GARDINER, preferring to approach the artistic challenges of the Valley on his own terms.
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The artist was born into the fishing community and brought up in Mousehole, near Penzance. He began painting in 1936, attending the Penzance Art School for some years before WWII. Later he went on to study in Athens, Exeter and Bristol and did not return to Mousehole until 1956.

Most of his active artistic career took place after WWII, and Pender participated in many group and solo shows locally. In 2008 Penlee House Gallery and Museum mounted a major retrospective of his work, and their website provides ample information about the artist. Two of his paintings are in the permanent collection at the RCM.

He was married to Madeleine, who survives him and who is an active supporter of the Friends of the Penzance Art School and the Friends of Penlee House.
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One of the 'Woodcutters' who came first to the Lamorna Valley, Biddy and her husband Bill PICARD were at the centre of the artistic circles of Mousehole and Newlyn for many years. In 1955 the couple established The Mousehole Pottery and Gift Shop, through which they sold their earthenware pots until 1961, after which time they let the shop to a number of other craft workers, for periods of time. In 1978, Biddy's daughter Greta re-started the pottery from a different location in Mousehole and ran it there for more than a decade.

Born in 1922 in Derbyshire, Biddy attended Chesterfield School of Art before training at the Slade. After a brief period teaching art in Bristol, she moved to Wales and then in 1974, to Cornwall. Both of her children, Peter PERRY and Greta PERRY, have been established artists in Cornwall and abroad since that time, and exhibit their work locally and abroad.

Biddy has been a longstanding member of the Newlyn Society of Artists, and taught painting and ceramics at Penzance School of Art. Now residing near Paul, west of Penzance, since the death of Bill, she continues to exhibit her exuberant and colourful paintings in small galleries and general exhibitions in the local area, and her paintings are highly sought-after in the auction houses. [Further detail: Tyler Gallery, Mousehole, website]
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Ambrose was born in Grays, Essex, and studied at South East Essex Technical College and School of Art in Dagenham, followed by a year at the RA Schools under Peter Greenham. His wife was Moyra GILCHRIST, and the couple lived in Newlyn.

He was an artist of many talents, spanning the full range from teaching art to producing drawings, prints and paintings in oils and watercolour.

Locally he exhibited at the Orion Gallery, Penzance and then at NAG, in mixed and solo shows. He died of heart failure at Penzance Railway station as he was taking paintings to London.
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Ken came to Cornwall in 1960, deciding that he could work as well here as in London, where he had been making his publishing career in art as a free-lance illustrator and designer of book jackets. His studies in art had been on scholarship to the Regent Street Polytechnic, after working for some years for the Great Western Railway, based at Swindon. The Borough of Swindon awarded him their first grant to attend art school after completing his apprenticeship. At the Poly he also met his wife, Jane, who in time forward became a formidable force at the Newlyn Art Gallery, working as 'lady of all arts' to the Director John Halkes and helping to organise exhibitions.

Ken studied for his teaching diploma at London University and then taught for two years in Barnet, Herts, before the couple came to Cornwall and set up their studio in St Erth, near both Penzance, and St Ives. Ken joined both the Penwith Society and the Newlyn Society of Artists, and exhibited often with both. In 1980 they moved into a large old church which they converted into a marvellous living and working space, with storage racks for paintings on the entrance floor, and living quarters above. Ken served the NSA as Chairman for the five year period when NAG was combined with the Penzance gallery, Orion, to effect a stronger financial base in a difficult period.

Aside from exhibiting widely and often, he taught classes at the Penzance School of Art, the St Ives School of Painting and took individual pupils in his own studios. In 1995 he published a portfolio of 30 watercolours 'Around the Penwith' with the St Ives Printing Company, and these were bound into a large cased volume (difficult to shelve!) which is a prized collector's item today.

At the Fourth Annual Newlyn Arts Festival, artist Angela STEAD paid tribute to Ken with her assemblage of life drawings, 'to the late and much-missed Ken Symonds'. The Open Art Exhibition held at NAG, is one in which he had shown each year in Cornwall.
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Art UK

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Bernard was born in Toxteth, Liverpool, and after National Service studied at Liverpool School of Art, followed by three years at the Camberwell School of Art, London, and then a teaching diploma. After more than a decade of teaching, during which time he was a Departmental Head at the Nottingham College of Education, with a family of five children and his wife Audrey he moved to Newlyn, Cornwall. Here he and Audrey M EVANS set up the Mounts Bay Arts Centre which operated as a residential school for outdoor painting in summers up until 2001.

Both engaged in all aspects of the management of the school - teaching and administration and domestic work - and exhibited regularly, mainly at NAG but also internationally and in mixed shows nationally. Bernard served as Chairman of the NSA and Council of Management member of NAG over many years. He and Audrey have also been mainstays of the international charity AMNESTY over many years, organising fundraisers and exhibitions to draw public attention to the plight of political prisoners everywhere.

His work is carefully executed, representational in style, and often focused on the working port around him at Newlyn. As Cross points out in his 2002 book on the contemporary artists in Newlyn, he had then embarked on a series of large-scale paintings of the Thames and London buildings at various times of the day and night. Other paintings have been done from sketches made from the London Eye.
Cornwall Artists Index

Newlyn-based Bernard Evans, who has died after a short illness at the age of 85, was one of Cornwall’s foremost figurative painters.

Liverpool lad, an accomplished musician as well as artist, he started the folk group, Newlyn Reelers, and was a stalwart of the Golowan Band.

Inspired by a school art teacher, he studied at Liverpool College of Art and Camberwell School of Art, where he was tutored by Martin Bloch. Rather like Bloch, drawing, composition, perspective and proportion were important features of his work. He believed that “over-abstraction of form led to a break with realism and an impoverishment of expression”.

It was while trying to teach a studenT how to play the guitar at London’s Institute of Education that he met and married Audrey. An artist in her own right, and the mother of their five children, she would later exhibit alongside her husband, whose first appointed teaching post was that of art master at a school in Bootle. He subsequently taught and lectured for some 20 years in Cheshire and Nottingham before, in 1977, moving to Newlyn where, with Audrey, they set up the Mount’s Bay Art Centre and where for a quarter of a century they were to teach landscape painting to students of all ages from around the world.

A devotee of “en plein air” painting, Bernard thought nothing of standing before an empty canvas on the pier during Newlyn’s annual fish festival and beginning a painting capturing the colour and atmosphere of the day’s events. An accepted and familiar figure on Newlyn’s harbour front and fish market, an area he regarded as his workplace, the many studies he made there add up to an illustrated social history of fishing. Only days before he died he was busily completing what was to be his last painting, yet another study of Newlyn harbour.

He exhibited widely throughout the UK, and many still remember the Evans’ family show, held in 1988 at the Queen’s Hotel in Penzance, comprised of paintings by him, his wife Audrey, and their artist daughter Elizabeth. Somewhat surprisingly, in recent years and in striking contrast to his Newlyn paintings, he made a series of works in the capital in which he looked at London’s huge scale and the diversity of form and life found in the areas bordering the Thames.

A deeply committed and caring man, he was highly critical of and campaigned strongly against the Arts Council’s funding policy for galleries. He was also treasurer of his local branch of Amnesty International. A Roman Catholic from birth, at his local church in Penzance he served as a eucharist minister and member of the choir, and it was said that his chief concerns were “Christianity, morality and art”.

He is survived by his wife, Audrey Evans, their five children, Robert, Catherine, Michael, Peter and Elizabeth, and 12 grandchildren.
Frank Ruhmund - Obituary (Western Morning News 16/8/2014)

My friend Bernard Evans, who has died aged 85, was one of Cornwall's foremost figurative painters. An accomplished musician as well as artist, he was a founder of the Newlyn Reelers and a member of the Golowan Band, based in Penzance. He loved his accordion so much that no one was ever allowed to carry it for him.

The son of Alice and Frederick, a cleaner on the railways, Bernard studied at Liverpool College of Art and Camberwell School of Art, south London, where he was tutored by Martin Bloch. As with Bloch, good drawing and composition were important features of Bernard's work.

He also loved to teach and met his wife, Audrey, a fellow artist, while giving her guitar lessons at the Institute of Education, London. Bernard taught and lectured for some 20 years in Cheshire and Nottingham before deciding it was time for a change, and they moved to Newlyn, Cornwall. There, in the late 1970s, he and Audrey set up the Mount's Bay Art Centre where they taught landscape painting to students from all over the world for a quarter of a century.

Bernard was a familiar figure around Newlyn's harbour front and the fish market, an area he regarded as his workplace. Days before he died he was busy completing what was to be his last painting, yet another study of the harbour. He exhibited widely throughout Britain and, in contrast to his Newlyn paintings, in recent years made a series of works depicting Thameside locations from Westminster to Canary Wharf.

He was a sometime treasurer and chairman of the Newlyn Society of Artists and campaigned against various Arts Council schemes for Cornwall. He was also treasurer of his local branch of Amnesty International.

Bernard is survived by Audrey, their five children, Robert, Catherine, Michael, Peter and Elizabeth, and 12 grandchildren.
Frank Ruhmund - Obituary (Guardian 26/8/2014)
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https://www.bernardevans.co.uk/

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Ken Howard was born in London and now lives in Cornwall near Mousehole, where his studio is in an old school. His association with Cornwall has been over a long number of years, and he was selected as one of the artists representing their work in A Century of Art in Cornwall 1889-1989 held at NAG (put on by Newlyn Orion & Cornwall County Council), that comprised 140 art works executed in Cornwall during that hundred years period. (A coloured photo of Howard appears facing p129, in Hardie 1995).

Strangely, there is no mention in Buckman (2006) about Howard's life in Cornwall in the otherwise excellent summary of his professional life and the numerous awards, scholarships and commissions that he has received. Howard is a Vice-President of the Penlee House Museum, and a Patron of the Penzance School of Art. Ken Howard is Professor of Perspective at the Royal College of Arts, London.
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Audrey Evans works in gouache, pastel and watercolour. Her main subject matter is landscape, particularly that of the Penwith peninsula and her work is based on direct observation. She is a keen draughtswoman and keeps a sketchbook with her all the time. Many of her ideas are interpreted in wood engravings. She was born in Sidcup, Kent but her family moved to Margate towards the end of the war.

She attended Thanet Art School and met her husband Bernard at the London University Institute of Education in the mid 1950s.They married in 1957, and moved to Cornwall in 1976. Audrey has been a member of the Newlyn Society of Artists since the 1980s. From 1977 to 2004 Audrey worked with Bernard organising and teaching at the Mounts Bay Arts Centre from their home and studio in Newlyn. Audrey taught watercolour and drawing at art classes for visiting artists during this period, specialising in the landscape and wildlife of West Cornwall . Audrey has travelled widely with Bernard where they have both painted in the USA, Africa, Oman, Italy, France, and Holland.

She played the double bass and concertina in the Newlyn Reelers through to July 2014 and occasionally now plays in the Golowan Band and participates in the local festivals of Mazey Day and Montol along with other band members. Audrey is also a keen supporter of Amnesty International and is involved with charities for homeless people in Penwith. She has exhibited widely throughout her life and in recent years both in solo shows and group exhibitions.
https://www.bernardevans.co.uk/

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Jeremy LeGrice has been painting in West Cornwall for over fifty years. 100 Years in Newlyn, Diary of a Gallery (1995) reflects his deep involvement and love for the area. It includes photo likenesses, illustrations and a summary of the work of the Gallery from his perspective. He has exhibited widely, locally, nationally and internationally; in 1995 he was a residential painting fellow at Worpswede, Germany in the art colony there.

In 2006 he held a major retrospective exhibition of paintings created since early childhood at the Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro, Cornwall, which was accompanied by the book LeGrice at Seventy. In it he tells of his pupillage with George Peter LANYON at Carbis Bay in the 1950s, his time at the Slade School, his first marriage to fellow Slade student, Mary STORK, his friendship in Cornwall with his neighbouring artist Karl WESCHKE, the re-settling in Cornwall after years away in the Cotwolds with his second wife, designer Lyn LE GRICE, and his continued steady output of abstracted mood and movement based on the natural environments around him. He served for a number of years as the outspoken Chairman of the Trustees of the Newlyn Art Gallery, after serving also for many years on the Council of Management of NAG.

In August, 2012, he died at home of cancer, after some long months of decline. His funeral was held at the Parish Church of St Buryan in West Cornwall, and the wake followed at the Newlyn Art Gallery, to which his family as a whole have given so much over many years.
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Bealing works from Trewarveneth Studios, Newlyn. Since coming to live in Cornwall in 1988 she has proved a popular and inventive artist, with the wit and skill to employ the unexpected and unusual in her figurative and abstract work.

The artist is listed as a member of NSA (2009). She exhibited in the Newlyn Arts Festival Open Studios 2010. Her work has also been shown at the Rainyday Gallery, Penzance.
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http://www.nicolabealing.co.uk

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A painter of the coast and sea, Paul Lewin has emerged as one of the leading contemporary landscape painters in the south west.

Born in Manchester in 1967, Paul studied at Stockport College and went on to complete a BA (hons) degree in Fine Art at Bristol Polytechnic in 1989.

Since leaving college he has lived and worked in the South West of Britain, and he now resides in West Penwith, the western most tip of Cornwall. A fluent “en plein air” painter, his work has developed in response to the characteristic coastal fringes of the peninsular. In exploring its rugged coastlines and wild interiors of moorland and valleys, the resulting works evoke a strong sense of atmosphere, through a sensitivity to the changing light and weather conditions.

His paintings can be found in collections throughout the UK, Germany, Mexico, USA, Australia and the Far East. One commission includes six works for Cunard, hung in their luxury cruise liner Queen Mary II. Paul continues to exhibit throughout the south west, London and the UK.
Cornwall Contemporary
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paullewin.co.uk