Our summer is racing away with us so Bookhound and I need to get a wriggle on and see everything we want to see before the rest of the world arrives for some well-earned rest and respite from the rest of the world. To that end we headed off to the Penlee House Gallery in Penzance for their latest exhibition, Stanhope Forbes : Father of the Newlyn School (on until 9 September 2017). On a good day it takes us about ninety minutes to reach Penzance, on a mid-summer tourist day we would turn round and come home again before we'd reached Launceston.
In keeping with our new rule we take a packed lunch and spend the lunch money on the catalogue...good economic strategy eh... though we did allow ourselves coffee and cake because there have to be some treats in life.
Born in Dublin in 1857, Stanhope Forbes arrived in Newlyn in 1884 intent on setting up an artistic community. Like many creatives of the day he had studied in Paris, settling for a while in Brittany but ,having decided that French subjects weren't going to sell well, Stanhope Forbes set off for Cornwall in search of an ideal location. Falmouth, Helston, Portleven, Penzance and thence to Newlyn where he found rooms and a studio for fifteen shillings a week, plenty of attractive models and ideal locations down the narrow cobbled streets, along the quayside and, with the fishing industry as a backdrop, many of his most iconic paintings emerged.
We have loved Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach for as long as we have lived down here, the picture for many years prominently displayed in Plymouth Museum and now on extended loan to Penlee House so it was no surprise to see it at this exhibition...
We tend to say 'ahh there it is,' whenever we see Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach, as if it's ours, just unhooked from the sitting room wall and generously loaned by us for everyone else to enjoy. That sense of ownership feels like one of the hidden glories of our art galleries and museums, especially those we revisit frequently. This one of the first pictures that Stanhope Forbes painted on his arrival in Newlyn...
' Anything more beautiful than this beach at low water I never saw and I can only paint figures against such a background as this shining mirror-like shore makes, the result should be effective...got blown about and rained upon, my model fainted...'
Welcome to the South West Stanhope.
However in amongst the familiar were the new; pictures generously loaned from private collections that we had never seen before, and as the years progressed how fascinating it was to see the colours lift, the hem lines shrinking, life changing..
The Pond, 1930 Newport Museum & Art Gallery
...as the exhibition traced Stanhope Forbes painting out of the Victorian era, into the Edwardian and thence into the early years of the Second World War. I'm not sure I had really appreciated the vast time span of his creative career before.
Village Rendezvous, Copperhouse Creek 1938 ( Plymouth City Council)
Frank Johns, the little boy in the blue shirt who sat for this painting, remembers Stanhope Forbes 'paying the children 6d, provided that they turn up again the following week for a second sitting.'
There were too many new favourites to mention them all...
The Harbour Window (1910) (Royal Academy of Arts, London)
This is Annie Blewett, painted in the upstairs window of The Ship Inn, Mousehole (say Mowzell if you want to be proper job Cornish) and is Stanhope Forbes's diploma painting that would gain him Associate Membership of the Royal Academy in 1911.
Causewayhead, Penzance 1943 (Private Collection)
An idyllic summer street scene in a Cornish town carefully punctuated by reminders that this is wartime.
There was sadness too. Stanhope Forbes had been devastated first by the death of his wife, Canadian artist Elizabeth (Armstrong) in 1912 who he had meet soon after his arrival in Newlyn; this one of her most well-known pictures and perhaps familiar to some of you...
School is Out 1889 ~ Elizabeth Forbes (Penlee Gallery)
...and then by the loss of the couple's only son Alec in September 1916 during the Battle of the Somme.
A Portrait of My Son Alec in Uniform, 1916 (The Stephenson Family )
The portrait is full of poignancy, added to by the exhibition notes which reveal that Alec had sat for the painting during a visit home the previous Christmas...letters to and from the Front reveal that his father was working on the painting and was very pleased with it.
I have just turned the final page of Where the Poppies Blow The British Soldier, Nature, The Great War by John Lewis- Stempel and the book has really surprised me. I was beginning to think I might have read all I wanted to about the First World War and then along comes a book like this which offers a completely new perspective. I can't recommend it highly enough and I'm so pleased that someone reminded me of that incredible nationwide event on the anniversary of the Somme on July 1st last year. The one that was kept a huge secret, did anyone else see and hear the ghost soldiers...
As always, at exhibitions like this a new favourite painting emerges and this one might be new to everyone.
Christmas Eve 1897 (on the right in this catalogue picture)
In the ownership of the Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton and Hove, Christmas Eve 1897 was seriously damaged whilst in storage in Brighton's aquarium during the Second World War (I'm thinking damp might have been an issue). Both Penlee House and the Royal Pavilion & Museums have funded its conservation especially for this exhibition; this the first time the painting has been displayed in over seventy years so a real privilege to see it.
I could go on and on, so much to see, so much to think about and the catalogue well worth forgoing bought-lunch for because we took our picnic to the cliffs at nearby Lamorna Cove and marvelled at what we'd just seen, what we were looking at this minute and how right the Cornish artists got it all and then I could come home and read all about it.
If you are heading west this summer then don't miss Stanhope Forbes at the Penlee Gallery, though hand-on-heart I'm not sure what the steep and narrow hill down to Lamorna Cove might be like on a busy day (two-way traffic not catered for) but meanwhile...
Do you have that feeling about a particular painting in a gallery...
One that you know so well and enjoy so much that actually it's yours...
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