Art UK Online Art Exchange

This weeks Online Art Exchange Theme is ‘en Plein air’. This theme is in celebration of our new exhibition ‘Painting Between the Tides: Walter Langley’.

Newlyn is a small fishing port lying about a mile and a half from Penzance, on the south coast of Cornwall’s Penwith peninsula. The area’s spectacular scenery has attracted visiting artists since the early 19th century. In the 1880s, numerous British painters began to arrive in Newlyn, many of whom had trained in Paris or Antwerp. In Newlyn they found a similar source of inspiration, but closer to home and with a direct rail link to London.

Newlyn offered scenes and lives scarcely touched by the industrial revolution, with plentiful, cheap accommodation and willing models. Soon, a host of artists settled, forming the colony known as the Newlyn School.

What is your favourite ‘en Plein air’ painting? Tag us and use the hashtag #OnlineArtExchange #WalterLangley2022 so that we can all follow and contribute to the online conversation.

Walter Langley is known as the ‘pioneer of the Newlyn School’, as he was the first of the Newlyn School artists to settle in the village, setting up his studio in 1882. Although Langley was an accomplished painter in oils, he mainly painted in watercolour, often on a large scale. Using this demanding and difficult medium, he portrayed scenes of everyday life in a small fishing village, highlighting the hardships and tragedies that were commonplace during that period.

Stanhope Forbes arrived in Newlyn in 1884 and soon became a leading figure in the growing colony of artists. His national reputation was established with the acceptance of his ‘A Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach’ in 1885 at the Royal Academy, London (now owned by Plymouth City Art Gallery) and the purchase of The Health of the Bride in 1889 by Henry Tate, now at Tate Britain, London.⁠⁠ As the number of artists in Newlyn dwindled, Stanhope and his wife Elizabeth Forbes founded their School of Painting in 1899. This was to attract a whole new generation of artists to the area, including Ernest Procter and his future wife Doris ‘Dod’ Shaw.⁠

Canada-born Elizabeth Adela Forbes, nee Armstrong, was one of the leading women artists of her day. Her marriage to Stanhope Forbes was a partnership of equals, and their School of Painting was very much a joint enterprise. Throughout her career, Elizabeth Forbes continually developed and changed her work in response to new stimuli. Before marriage, she had produced etchings influenced by Whistler and Sickert, while her early work in Newlyn bears the hallmarks of French realist painting. She is particularly known for painting pictures of children, including her own son, Alec.

Norman Garstin’s most famous work is ‘The Rain it Raineth Every Day’, 1889, showing Penzance promenade on a rainy day. The composition of this painting demonstrates Garstin’s admiration for Japanese art, which was influencing so many artists at this time, including Whistler, whose work Garstin also admired. The title is taken from Shakespeare, where it is found both in ‘Twelfth Night’ and ‘King Lear’. The painting was sent to the Royal Academy in 1889 but was not hung. It is believed that the committee thought the painting too ‘French’ in style.

Throughout here life, Dame Laura Knight was popular with fellow artists and the public alike and she remains one of Britain’s favourite painters to this day. Her achievements included being the first woman ever elected as an RA and being selected as a War Artist, famously documenting the Nuremburg Trials.

Born in Penzance, Harold Harvey was the only Cornishman to play a significant role in both the Newlyn School and the Lamorna group. He and his wife, Gertrude, were close friends with many of the second generation artists, including Dod and Ernest Procter and Laura and Harold Knight.