Lamorna Birch: A Painter Laureate

This autumn, Penlee House Gallery & Museum, Penzance, is staging two exhibitions. The first, ‘Lamorna Birch: A Painter Laureate’, is a one-room show featuring around 25 paintings by this much-loved artist, all from the collection of the late Austin Wormleighton. The exhibition title echoes that of Austin’s 1995 biography about Birch. Austin was a founding member of the Lamorna Society and was President right up until his death in 2019. This exhibition is being staged to celebrate the second edition of the book, updated by Austin and published posthumously.

A painter of pure landscape, self-taught and self-made, Samuel John Lamorna Birch (1869 – 1955)
was the founder and father figure of the Lamorna colony of artists and writers in West Cornwall.

Birch’s origins were humble. He was born into a working-class family and left school at age twelve to
work for a textile manufacturer. Even at work, the young Birch was forever sketching. Determined to
be a professional artist, he had his first pictures exhibited at Manchester City Art Gallery while still in
his teens. Following a transfer to the company’s Lancashire premises in the picturesque Lune Valley,
Birch began painting the surrounding countryside in his spare time and developed a passion for
landscape painting that would remain with him all his life.

In the early 1890s, Birch began making painting trips to Cornwall, discovering the village of Lamorna,
about four miles along the coast from Newlyn. Unlike the Newlyn School artists, Birch preferred not
to paint people; his subject was always the landscape. He finally settled in Lamorna in 1892 and took
up painting as a profession, later becoming good friends with fellow artists Harold and Laura Knight
and Alfred Munnings.

In Cornwall, he shed his working-class roots and adopted the persona of a country gentleman. When
not painting, he was fishing, and his constant observation of nature and its expression in his work led
him becoming one of the most recognised and popular artists of his time. He exhibited a total of
237 pictures at the Royal Academy over the course of his career, it is estimated that he produced
around 20,000 paintings during his lifetime.

Penlee House Curator, Katie Herbert, says: “We are delighted to be able to stage this exhibition of
Austin’s collection and promote the second edition of his fantastic biography on Lamorna Birch.”

The second exhibition, ‘Biddy Picard: Timeless Penwith’, is a one-room show giving an overview of
one of West Cornwall’s much-loved late twentieth-century artists. Biddy Picard (1922 – 2019) was
born in Derbyshire and studied first at Chesterfield School of Art and subsequently at the Slade.
Arriving in Cornwall on a French fishing boat in the late 1940s, she initially lived in Lamorna as part of
the post-war art colony, before moving to Mousehole and setting up a pottery with her husband Bill.

Her paintings vary greatly in style, ranging from classical life studies of family and friends to domestic
drawings and landscape paintings, through to semi-abstract and abstract work, often inspired by
visits to the Isles of Scilly. However, she was most renowned for her distinctive semi-naive harbour
scenes in which she evoked the feeling and spirit of west Penwith in timeless compositions.