Autumn 2025 Exhibitions

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 aged 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 to 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. Born in Derbyshire, Biddy Picard (1922 – 2019) initially trained at Chesterfield School of Art before going on to a classical art training at the Slade during the Second World War, at a time when it had been temporarily relocated to what is now the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. There she excelled in particular at life drawing, winning the top student prize in her second year.

Following this, Picard taught art at the prestigious Bristol-based Badminton School before becoming involved with a group of idealistic former conscientious objectors who had adopted a radically alternative lifestyle. After a short time living with them in North Wales, she famously first arrived in West Cornwall with one of their number aboard a French fishing boat shortly after the end of the Second World War.

After several years living in the Lamorna valley, Biddy subsequently moved to Mousehole where she and her new husband Bill Picard established a small pottery and craft shop. The pottery gave her the opportunity to work with ceramics, something she continued to explore after a move to a larger property in the nearby village of Sheffield [west Cornwall]. Throughout her time in Lamorna and Mousehole Picard drew and painted as much as possible, although this was far from easy given the dual constraints of tight financial circumstances and raising a family.

By the mid-1970s she was able to devote much more time to painting and became increasingly well-known and acclaimed, especially for her distinctive semi-naive harbour scenes. However, such work formed only part of her wide oeuvre which also included small classical life studies of family and friends, many domestic drawings and paintings and a large amount of semi-abstract and abstract work, often inspired by visits to the Isles of Scilly. In later years her sight progressively failed, necessitating a simplification of her work. 

Apart from very brief sketches and notes, Picard rarely worked outdoors. Rather, with a powerful visual memory, she was able to evoke the spirit and feeling of west Penwith in compositions that were only occasionally based on any particular place.

Also on show in the downstairs galleries will be a selection of Newlyn School works from Penlee House’s own collection.