A Pre-Raphaelite in Cornwall: John Brett (1831 – 1902)

Cornwall is famously associated with several major British art movements, most notably the ‘Newlyn School’ and the St Ives modernists.  Few associate the county with another of the great moments in British art history, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, yet Cornwall was a favoured painting ground for several key members, including William Holman Hunt and Arthur Hughes.

John Ruskin, the great champion of the Pre-Raphaelites, wrote of the particular beauty arising from a granite coast, which, he noted, gives rise to dramatic rock forms bordered by lustrous sands and sparklingly clear seas.  The Cornish coast boasts just such features, so it is perhaps unsurprising that leading Pre-Raphaelites were inspired to paint the county.

For one member of the Brotherhood, John Brett, Cornwall provided a lasting source of inspiration.  Perhaps best known for his picture ‘The Stone Breaker’ (The Walker, Liverpool), Brett spent time painting the landscape in various parts of Britain and Europe.  He first visited Cornwall on honeymoon in 1870, staying on the Lizard, and returned repeatedly, usually for several months at a time, over the next thirty years.  The legacy of these visits is an astonishing body of work, incorporating both well-known and unfamiliar views, depicting the county’s inexhaustible variety of spectacular coastal scenes.  

In all, he produced over two hundred paintings of Cornwall, ranging from large, superbly detailed Academy pieces such as ‘Golden Prospects’ (Castle Museum, Nottingham), to small-scale studies, executed and sometimes sold on the spot.  Over sixty of these paintings have been brought together from public and private collections throughout the UK especially for an exhibition at Penlee House Gallery & Museum, Penzance, offering a unique chance to see Brett’s brilliant paintings back in the county they depict.