Penlee House Gallery & Museum, Penzance, has built a considerable reputation in recent years for presenting exhibitions of work by individual artists of the Newlyn School, bringing previously obscure artists to public attention and earning them, at last, the praise they deserve. The latest in this series is the painter Frank Gascoigne Heath (1873-1936), whose work will be on show at the Gallery from 3rd April to 19th June 2004.
Heath may not be a household name, but Hugh Bedford’s excellent book, ‘Frank Gascoigne Heath and his Newlyn School friends at Lamorna’, has already been reprinted since its first publication five years ago, and greetings cards of Heath images fly out of the shops. Whether you have heard of him or not, the show – the first major exhibition of Heath’s work to be held in Cornwall – will be a visual treat. The exhibition will include many of Heath’s sumptuous images of the Cornish landscape, together with much-loved studies of his family and domestic surroundings, such as ‘The Little Maid’ (RA 1923).
Heath was born in Surrey, and studied art at the South Kensington Schools (now the Royal College of Art), London, going on to study in Antwerp and later at Herkomer’s School, Bushey, before coming to Newlyn in 1902 to study under Stanhope Forbes. In Newlyn he met his future wife, Jessica, who was also a student at the Forbes’ School of Painting. They married in 1910 and settled in nearby Lamorna in 1913, having had a house, ‘Menwinnion’, built at the top of the valley.
The Heaths were key figures in the Lamorna group in the heyday of the colony, when resident artists included Munnings and the Knights, Birch, Gardiner and the Napers, as well as visitors such as Augustus John. An exponent of ‘plein air’ realism, Heath’s early work bears all the hallmarks of the early Newlyn artists, while the influence of his fellow Lamorna artists brought a change of style to his painting with a use of a brighter palette and freer brushwork. Many of Heath’s paintings were exhibited at the Royal Academy in London, the Salon in Paris, the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool and the Newlyn Art Gallery between 1903 and 1935.
Alongside around fifty examples of Heath’s work, the exhibition includes a selection of works by his friends and contemporaries, including Laura Knight’s superb ‘The Cornish Coast’, on loan from the National Museums and Galleries of Wales.
