Seal’s Colony: Weatherby and his fellow Lamorna Artists at gracious Penlee House Gallery, Penzance, is more than an exhibition. It is a celebration of artistic endeavour and friendship.
Richard Copeland Weatherby – “Seal” to his friends – was a man of independent means and therefore never depended on earning a living from his paintings. Yet he exhibited 40 times at the Royal Academy in an era when that was distinction.
It is a celebration too of the horse, some beautiful equine studies gracing the wall. Seal’s wife Karenza with her horse Ben on Trengwainton Common; Cheese Nut aka The Merry Widow, a lovely chestnut mare the artist gave to his friend Ann Tupper, and Jimmy Tregear, a groom, leading out the noble Ben are just three of them.
Here is the classic old school countryside pinned to canvas: the scent of saddle, the sheen on the horse’s coat, colours in the terrain and that brilliant Cornish light.
Art characterised by vigorous brushwork, his work is often likened to that of his good friend Sir Alfred Munnings, who also had a Lamorna chapter. The Weatherby family business was horse racing, bankers and administrators for the Jockey Club since 1770.
Seal Weatherby had studied art in Paris before coming to Newlyn in about 1913 where Newlyn’s leader Stanhope Forbes became his tutor. A versatile artist, painter of horses, portraitist and caricaturist, Seal though gregarious and “a favourite with the ladies” was essentially a private man.
Touring these Penlee rooms, looking at his 59 exhibits you realise the fact that he does not have the fame of some of his contemporaries has nothing to do with quality. It is all to do with his lifestyle – a desire to keep away from publicity. He died in 1953 and his wife came back to Cornwall to live in a cottage on the Trengwainton Estate near Madron. In their Penzance days they had resided at Alverton Manor.
Especially impressive is a portrait of fellow painter Stanley Gardiner, a powerful oil with thick layers in shades of green and cream, blue and purple. Pipe clenched in his teeth, the artist at work, Lamorna Quay in the 1940s.
The show also includes paintings by Stanhope Forbes, Alfred Munnings, Lamorna Birch, Harold and Laura Knight, Harold Harvey, Frank Heath, Stanley Gardiner and Midge Bruford.
How splendid to see a brace of Munnings in this glorious setting. They are two lady riders under a crimson Penwith sky and a thoughtful Phyllis Crocker, in a black beret, at Lamorna. Phyllis Crocker, who also modelled for Laura Knight, later developed into an artist and craftswoman.
