Face to Face: Portraits from Penlee’s Collections

This spring Penlee House Gallery & Museum, Penzance, is staging two exhibitions. The first, ‘Face to Face: Portraits from Penlee’s Collections’ is an intriguing assortment of portraits of people associated with Cornwall, ranging from stiff formal likenesses of the great and the good to intimate studies of humble fisher-folk, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day.

Over the centuries, Cornwall has been blessed in playing host to a rich assortment of visiting and resident artists, so its inhabitants have been portrayed by some of the greatest painters of all time.  One such is the county’s first famous painter, ‘the Cornish Wonder’, John Opie (1761 – 1807), who was patronised by the Royal family and who so impressed Sir Joshua Reynolds, he described him as ‘like Caravaggio and Velasquez in one’.  The exhibition includes his acclaimed portrait of ‘The Old Jew of Penzance’.

Not least amongst the artists associated with Cornwall are the Newlyn School painters, of course, and the exhibition includes portraits by Stanhope Forbes, Elizabeth Forbes, Harold Harvey and Dod Procter.  Some of the most enchanting paintings are the delightful unnamed depictions of fishermen and their wives and families by artists such as Edwin Harris and Walter Langley.

The show will also include newly acquired works by Leonard Fuller, who ran the St Ives School of Painting from 1938 until his death in 1973, self-portraits by Midge Bruford (1902 – 1958) and Pat Algar (1939 – 2013), and busts by sculptor Barbara Tribe (1913 – 2000).