From 6th November, Penlee House Gallery & Museum, Penzance, will be showing a special exhibition of work by Thomas Cooper Gotch (1854 – 1931), a key member of the Newlyn artists’ colony. The show has been curated by the Alfred East Gallery in Kettering (where Gotch was born), to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the artist’s birth.
Gotch trained at the Slade, where he became a close friend of the painter Henry Scott Tuke; here he also met his future wife, fellow artist Caroline Burland Yates, and together they spent time studying in Paris before settling in Newlyn. Gotch was to spend most of his painting life in the village, leaving only for occasional spells in the Home Counties or to travel abroad, touring Italy and visiting the artists’ colony at Skagen in Denmark, acting as a delegate for the Royal British Colonial Society of Artists in South Africa and spending many months, in later life, in the South of France.
‘Tom’ and ‘Carrie’ Gotch were popular members of the Newlyn art colony, active in the artists’ theatricals and social gatherings; Gotch also occasionally modelled for his artist friends, including for Elizabeth Forbes, who depicted him as King Arthur in her illustrated book King Arthur’s Wood. They, in turn, modelled for him: The Flag, for example, depicts Lamorna Birch’s daughter, Mornie.
At first, Gotch shared the Newlyn School’s ‘rural realist’ style although he always claimed that he looked beneath the obvious to find something deeper. This led, from the mid-1890s, to him developing his realism into a form of ‘imaginative symbolism’, painting elaborate, intensely detailed and yet dream-like paintings which one critic likened to a blend of Pre-Raphaelitism and the Italian Renaissance.
The exhibition coincides with the launch of a book on the artist, written by Newlyn-based author, Pamela Lomax. This engaging biography is the first full-length study of this remarkable painter of great vision who was arguably the most individualistic of the Newlyn artists. Both exhibition and book bear testament to his individuality and idiosyncratic genius through the glowingly textured portraits of children and young women, which many consider his finest work.Despite changing fashions, Gotch’s paintings received the highest public acclaim until the very end of his life and continue to ‘wow’ viewers today.
