Audio description: 
GurnardŐs Head no. 2 by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham
Penlee House Gallery & Museum

This is a painting by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham called GurnardŐs Head no. 2, painted in 1947. It is a gouache painting with a landscape orientation, 36cm high by 51 cm wide, or 14 inches by 20 inches. It has a simplistic style that uses blocks of colour wash and limited details. GurnardŐs Head is a headland situated on the wild West Penwith coast in Cornwall and is also the name of a pub that was popular with the St Ives artists. 

Gurnards Head no. 2 is a winter scene of a collection of houses situated on the coast. It is painted in muted shades of greys and muddy browns. The top third of the painting consists of a grey wash sky and the horizon line which sits on a silvery sea. Looming above the sea in the middle ground are two earthy brown cliffs. One stretches from the left to about the centre of the painting. The other is a sloping hill situated to the right of the painting. This hill is topped with a dark grey ruin of a mine engine house, which has the remains of a chimney on the left and two rectangular windows. Flying in the sky to the left of the engine house are three birds, represented as basic swooping lines. 

In the foreground of the painting, from the left to three quarters of the way across, there is a cluster of Cornish cottages and farm buildings which are painted in light shades of grey, blue, and off white. They are outlined with a very fine dark grey line and painted with very few details. 

There are two buildings at the front of the cluster Đ both cottages. The building on the left is half off the composition, facing forwards. You can see one chimney on the roof and two windows, one above the other. Each window has a mantle above it and no windowpanes. The second cottage is in the centre of the painting and is slightly turned towards the right. It has five windows, also painted as rectangular shapes with no windowpanes. There is a door between the ground floor windows. The cottage has two chimneys, one at each end of the roof. 

In between and slightly behind the cottages is a small group of farm outbuildings. In front of these buildings, and in the middle of the two cottages, is a bare shrub-like tree, the weathered branches black and sweeping in the direction of the wind Đ typical of the trees on the Cornish coast. 

To the right of the buildings is a thin, black tree trunk with bare branches. It stretches taller than the houses and the top of it is in line with the mining engine house in the distance. 

In front of the buildings and trees is an uneven granite wall which stretches across the foreground almost all the way across the painting. It is painted in slightly darker greys, blues, and off whites than the houses and fine lines suggest the granite blocks. In the very foreground of the painting at the bottom is a dark grey strip, which looks like a road. The artist has signed the painting on the bottom righthand corner of the work. 

Barns-Graham was born in Fife in Scotland but moved to St Ives in 1940, becoming a leading member of the post-war St Ives group of artists. 

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