This summer’s exhibition at Penlee House Gallery & Museum, Penzance, is set to engender a wave of nostalgia for all those whose early youth was spent living or holidaying in Cornwall. Cheekily taking its title from A. L. Rowse’s best-selling autobiography, the exhibition A Cornish Childhood looks at the lives and pastimes of children in the county from the late Victorian era and into the early 20th century, through the eyes of some of the leading painters of the day.
As usual with Penlee House’s exhibitions, the show includes a host of sumptuous paintings by leading figures of the Newlyn School and Lamorna group, including Stanhope and Elizabeth Forbes, Walter Langley, Harold Harvey, Laura Knight, Frank Heath, Dod Procter and Dorothea Sharp. Some – like Chadding in Mount’s Bay by Stanhope Forbes – are famous favourites, borrowed and displayed at Penlee before, but there will also be some previously unseen works from public and private collections all over the UK.
We are immensely lucky, here in west Cornwall, that the daily lives of our forebears were depicted by many of the leading artists of their day. This means that the exhibition is not only a treat for the eyes, it also takes the form of a sociological survey of the lives of children from the area’s fishing and farming communities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The selected works are intended to give an overview of how Cornish children spent their days, whether at school, work or play.
Children’s involvement in the religious life of the community is recalled in paintings such as A May Procession by Harold Harvey (Paisnel Gallery, London) and A Mariner’s Sunday School by WHY Titcomb (Doncaster Museum and Art Gallery), while idle leisure hours are depicted in works such as August Blue by Henry Scott Tuke (Tate) and The Daisy Chain by Frank Gascoigne Heath (private collection).
Preparation for working life is represented by Walter Langley’s A Fisherman’s Son (private collection) and A Chip Off the Old Block (Ferens Art Gallery, Hull), and formal and informal education is shown in favourites from our own collection School is Out by Elizabeth Forbes and The Lesson by Edwin Harris. Images of childhood entertainment range from fairs – All the Fun of the Fair by Ernest Procter (Worthing Museum and Art Gallery) – to crab racing – Sport on the Shore by Harold Harvey (Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery), and there are delightful representations of children in all stages of life from babyhood to adolescence.
The social history content of the paintings makes the exhibition ideal for use by schools studying life in the Victorian era. Because of this, Penlee House are launching the show rather earlier than is usual for their summer exhibitions, opening on 29 May, to enable schools to visit before the end of term.Curated by Katie Herbert and Alison Bevan, A Cornish Childhood is not touring to any other venues, so the Penlee House showing offers a unique chance to see this collection of beautiful and fascinating paintings all together: don’t miss it!
