Heath, Gascoigne Frank

Biography

Frank Gascoigne Heath – 1873 – 1936

Heath was born in Coulsdon, Surrey, as the youngest of twelve children. After a brief maritime career as an apprentice on a windjammer sailing to Australia, he determined to make a career out for his love of painting.

Heath studied art at South Kensington, Croydon, Westminster and Antwerp, and also with Herkomer at his School of Painting at Bushey. He came to Newlyn in c.1901 to study under Stanhope Forbes, and shortly thereafter started to exhibit at the Royal Academy.

In 1908, he met his future wife, Jessica Doherty, who was also a student at the Forbes’s School of Painting. The couple married two years later and moved to Lamorna, where they had a house built, called ‘Menwinnion’ (now a retirement home).

Heath’s early work resembles the style of the early Newlyn artists, painted ‘en plein air’ with a subdued palette. The influence of artist friends such as Laura Knight, Alfred Munnings and ‘Lamorna’ Birch brought a change of style to his painting with a use of brighter colours, earning him the epithet ‘the sunshine artist’.