Biddy Picard: Timeless Penwith

This autumn, Penlee House Gallery & Museum, Penzance, is staging two exhibitions. The first, ‘Biddy Picard: Timeless Penwith’, features around 30 paintings in a one-room show, giving an overview of an artist known both locally and nationally for her highly distinctive evocations of West Cornwall.

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.

The second exhibition ‘Lamorna Birch: A Painter Laureate’ showcases one of the most well-known and prolific artists working in Cornwall in the early twentieth century. A painter of pure landscape, self-taught and self-made, Samuel John ‘Lamorna’ Birch RA (1869 – 1955) was the founder and father figure of the Lamorna colony of artists and writers in West Cornwall. Birch had a lifelong association with Lamorna, from where he took his name (to distinguish himself from the Newlyn School artist, Lionel Birch).

A Painter Laureate refers to the title of Austin Wormleighton’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 of Austin’s own collection of paintings by Birch is being staged to celebrate a second edition of the book, updated by Austin and published posthumously.