The painting ‘The Rain it Raineth Every Day’ (Penlee House Gallery & Museum) is one of the best known and loved of all ‘Newlyn School’ paintings, yet its creator, Norman Garstin, has long been a shadowy figure, with little known about him or his wider output as a painter.
Garstin did not fare much better even in his lifetime. Despite its current popularity, ‘The Rain it Raineth Every Day’ (painted in 1889) was rejected by the Royal Academy because it was seen to be too influenced by the French style of painting. Garstin nevertheless felt it was a masterwork and decided to present it to Penzance, the town that inspired it, even here he received a less than enthusiastic response. The fact that the picture depicts the Queen’s Hotel and the promenade in a grey Penwith drizzle, compounded by the title’s implications about the prevalence of precipitation, caused the Councillors to fear that it would ruin tourism prospects, so it was tucked away in a basement out of public view.
Although modest in scale (confined to one gallery and to works from public and private collections in the South West), Penlee House’s ‘focus exhibition’, on show from 5 March to 16 April, seeks to widen knowledge and appreciation of Garstin’s work. Major works include ‘Overdue’ (private collection), dating from the same year as Garstin’s star painting, which shows the waiting room at Penzance station; ‘Her Signal’ (Royal Cornwall Museum), a dramatic depiction of a young woman making covert signals to her lover, and ‘Among the Pots’ (Plymouth City Art Gallery), one of many of Garstin’s works executed in France.
The exhibition coincides with the launch of a biography of the artist by Richard Pryke (Spire Books), which gives insight into the painter’s life. Born in Ireland, Garstin first set out to be an engineer, then an architect, and then sought his fortune prospecting for diamonds in South Africa in the company of Cecil Rhodes.
On return to Ireland, he decided on a career as an artist. He started by painting in his spare time, going on to study in both Paris and Antwerp in the late 1870s and early 1880s. In 1886 he settled in Newlyn. To supplement the sparse income from picture sales, he taught painting, his most notable students being Harold Harvey and his own daughter, Alethea.Pryke’s painstaking research has enabled him to chronicle this fascinating painter’s life, giving a glimpse of him both as an artist of his time and as a man with a colourful personal history. It is hoped that this biography will at last make Garstin the man as memorable as his famous painting and that it will enable people to know him as an artist with an oeuvre extending far beyond one work.
