This summer, Penlee House Gallery and Museum, Penzance, and Tate St. Ives are jointly mounting a ground-breaking exhibition entitled ‘Dawn of a Colony’ devoted to the early years of St Ives art.
Writing in 1908, the art critic Charles Marriott commented “Cornwall is becoming more and more emphatically the centre of English art, and this winter marks the highest point the development has yet reached.” Exactly one hundred years later, when the phenomenal international renown of the early art colony in St Ives has been all but forgotten, this exhibition aims to show what he meant.
1In the late C.19th, the St Ives art colony attracted an astonishing range of international artists of the highest calibre, which led to St Ives being much better known internationally at that time than the now more famous Newlyn School. Although St Ives has a reputation as being a centre for marine and landscape painting during this period, there was no ‘St Ives School’ – no one shared style and ethos – as individuality was prized above all else: accordingly, the exhibition showcases an impressive array of styles and subject matter.
Penlee House’s exhibition ‘Lyrical Light’ focuses primarily on the major British artists who established the reputation of St Ives both at the Royal Academy and internationally. These include Adrian Stokes RA, Sir John Arnesby Brown RA, Sir Alfred East RA, Julius Olsson RA, Algernon Talmage RA, and William Titcomb. Hundreds of artists of all nationalities were involved with the colony in its early years, however, and many of these painters went on to make huge names for themselves in their home countries: artists such as Austrian Marianne Stokes; Australians Will Osborn and Richard Hayley Lever; New Zealander Herbert Babbage; German Franz Muller-Gossen, and Americans Elmer Schofield and Sydney Mortimer Laurence, all of whom will be represented in the show.
This major exhibition will include around 60 works, incorporating many vast and impressive canvasses borrowed from national and regional collections across the UK, several of which have been restored specially for this exhibition and will therefore be seen in their full glory for the first time for many decades.
Sponsored by Messum’s Gallery of Bond Street, London, the exhibition has been curated by David Tovey (who also curated the hugely popular 2003 exhibition Creating A Splash – The St Ives Society of Artists 1927-1952) and will be accompanied by his major reference book on the St Ives art colony at this period, Pioneers of St Ives Art at Home and Abroad.
The artists’ names may not all be familiar and the scope of the show is truly ground-breaking, but we nevertheless guarantee visitors an absolute treat: a feast of sumptuous masterpieces from a forgotten golden age of St Ives art.
