Post on 14-Apr-2020
Cornwall has always appealed to the creative type; a land of mists and megaliths, it
combines a wide variety of landscape, from perfectly sanded coves to dramatic cliffs and
breakers; bleak, haunted moors to lush vegetal valleys. There are picturesque harbours
and grand country houses set in vast acreages. There are impressive landmarks from the
past such as Tintagel Castle,
St Michael’s Mount and more standing stones and Neolithic sites than you can shake a stick
at. They exist happily alongside the present day futuristic domes of Eden, the stately grey
bulk of Tate St Ives, old Mine chimneys (sensibly bestowed with World Heritage status)
and the spoil heaps of the clay pits near St Austell.
Marianne Stokes, née Priendlsberger 1855 - 1927Lantern Light, 1888Oil on canvas, 82.5 x 102 cmPenlee House Gallery & MuseumPurchased by private treaty from Mr & Mrs Allan Amey with assistance from The Art Fund, The MLA/V&A Purchase Grant Fund and the Friends of Penlee
A brief and incomplete history of ...
art and artists in Cornwall By Andrea Breton
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However there is more to Cornwall’s appeal than
landmarks. It is the geographical distance to the rest of
England; the quirk of geology which makes Cornwall
somewhat longer than it is wide. Surrounded by the sea,
it gives the county an all enveloping bright light, allegedly
a couple of lux higher than the mainland. A sub-tropical
climate, which generates almost as much rain as Swansea
(the rain capital of the country) results in palm trees and
succulents and magnificent rainbows.
A BEGINNING
Today Cornwall may have more artists than anywhere
outside of London, but it wasn’t always so. Time was,
the journey to the Duchy was long and uncomfortable; involving
wagons, turnpike roads and rough tracks – an excursion from London
to Plymouth took nearly 24 hours, and from Plymouth to Penzance
a further three days. A painter was not likely to traverse the country
so uncomfortably, only to be faced with the resident Cornish. Before
their transformation into the doughty, indomitable heroic
mariners of many Victorian canvases, they had a dubious
reputation based on lurid stories of ship wrecking, or
dangerous, grimy mining.
Before the introduction of the railway from the mid
1800s, Cornwall was travelled by those with more business
than beauty on their minds and there was a tremendous
amount of business to be conducted. Fish were plentiful and
the pilchard industry was booming. Tin and copper were
being mined and exported around the world. Thanks to
William Cookworthy’s discovery of china clay near St Austell,
millions of tonnes were
dug to supply kaolin
to both the paper and ceramic
industry. The Cornish were a nation
of manufacturers and exporters
and the rest of the world was
eager to buy.
Did all this enterprise produce
artists of national standing? Well
not many. In the late eighteenth
century there was the historical
and portrait painter John Opie.
A man of enquiring mind and
keen intellect, he escaped the
dependable drudgery of his
carpentry apprenticeship due to the
recognition of his talent by a local
doctor. Opie was born at Trevellas,
St Agnes, a beautiful spot near Truro, moving to London with his mentor
to progress his career. There, many of the great men and women of his
day, most notably in the artistic and literary professions, were waiting
to have their likenesses taken. He was known as ‘the Cornish Wonder’,
and Opie certainly did paint a tremendous amount of portraits. Painted
originally for the grand county families, you can see his work in places
such as the Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro; look out for Sir David
Wilkie painted in 1805, where the sitter unusually covers his mouth
with his hand.
THE TURN OF TURNER
For Cornwall the wheel of fortune forever turns, and the successes
of all Cornwall’s industries faltered in the nineteenth century. The
Napoleonic wars affected the pilchard fishing with England’s trade
embargos to France and Spain, the main importers. Cheap tin imported
from far off climes helped put a dent in the South West’s monopoly.
It was clear that luck
was needed. Fortunately, the
Victorian age was coming
and with it the age of steam
powered travel and the artists’
colony. To help set the scene,
we must look to one of the
finest artists this country has
produced: Joseph Mallord
William Turner.
Turner was revolutionising
topography, from simply
capturing the local detail of an area, into a dynamic exploration of
place and people. William Bernard Cooke and his brother George,
were engravers turned publishers. Because of the wars, cost of
travel and discomfort, people didn’t travel very far from their homes.
The Cooke brothers wanted to exploit the public’s curiosity about
the landscape of their own
country, with a series of
topographical prints.
Picturesque Views on the
Southern Coast of England was
an ambitious undertaking, a
series of 48 engraved prints,
32 vignettes accompanied by
descriptive text. The Cooke
brothers wanted Turner who
was already well known.
He was happy to work in
the commercial sector, for a
suitable fee and took to the road the summer of 1811. The whole trip,
down from Dorset, along the coast to Land’s End and up to the Bristol
channel, took about eight weeks. He filled a great many sketchbooks,
and despite a most acrimonious falling out with the Cooke brothers
and abandoning the full series, produced not only watercolours and
sketches for that commission and others, but also oil paintings which
were displayed in his own gallery, such as St Mawes at the Pilchard
Season, 1812 now in Tate Britain, London.
THE VICTORIANS
Turner never returned to Cornwall, but where he led in muddy
boots others followed. In considerably more comfort. In 1859 the
railway bridge across the Tamar to Saltash was completed, part
of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Great Western Railway project. In
the years that followed more and more track was laid in Cornwall,
finishing off with a branch line to St Ives in 1877. This metal artery
opened up a whole new world for artists. They could now pack their
paints (watercolours mostly, much easier to manage with heavy
luggage) ride down, paint all summer then back up in autumn for
London and the Academy exhibitions.
Artists also had the benefit of two seminal publications, giving on
the one hand a fund of inspiration, and on the other practical advice.
Firstly Robert Hunt’s Popular Romances of the West of England (or
the Drolls, Traditions and Superstitions of Old Cornwall) published in
1865, gave splendid romantic narratives to those topographical views.
A Handbook for Travellers in Devon and Cornwall by John Murray,
first published in 1851 and updated when the railway came, was the
Lonely Planet Guide of it’s time and equally indispensable. Included
within was not just the usual fare of towns and hotels but also tips
for sketching locations. Trebarwith Strand, on the north Cornish coast
just a mile or so down from Tintagel, was mentioned as ‘deservedly
a favourite spot with artists; for not only is it intrinsically beautiful
John Opie 1761 – 1807Sir David Wilkie (1785 - 1841) c.1805with kind permission of the Royal Institution of Cornwall
George CookeEngraved from a drawing by JMW TurnerLands End, Cornwall 1814Tate
Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775 - 1851) St Mawes at the Pilchard Season, 1812 Tate
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as coast-scene, but it offers facilities for the study of the sea in its
greatest purity, the billows being unsullied by earthly particles held in
suspension.’
OF ROCKS AND SEA
In 1843, writer and art critic John Ruskin had written Modern
Painters, a hugely influential treatise which asked artists to paint
with a ‘truth to nature’. This meant rejecting the popular practice of
creating romantic compositions and relying instead on painstaking
observation of nature. Couple this with Charles Darwin’s The Origin
of Species of 1859 and artists began exploring an interest in rocks.
Cornwall has rocks and dramatic coastal areas in abundance.
Kynance Cove on the Lizard, was painted methodically, intricately
and with a geological intensity. The area is now owned by The
National Trust, go and see these giants of granite, the sea sucking
and moaning at their sandy feet, sheep grazing on their wind-tossed
tops. You will be in the company of artists such as William Holman
Hunt who painted Asparagus Island in 1860. But there were artists
who were looking further out to sea, intent on capturing life on the
wave. Of these marine painters one of the best known was the British
painter Charles Napier Hemy.
Although born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Hemy moved to Falmouth
in 1881 and remained until his death. He was a keen sailor, and
owned two boats which served as floating studios. From these he
would paint, including Along shore fishermen of 1890, painted off St
Anthony lighthouse. This work can be seen, along with several other
Hemy paintings, at Falmouth Art Gallery. Pilchards 1897 is one of
his most famous works, held in the Tate Collection in London. In it,
you can see the fishermen pull in the traditional Seine fishing nets,
heaving with fish. Although the painting took only 10 days to paint,
Hemy spent 14 years studying and sketching the fishermen.
Painters, along with poets and writers had done much to establish
the association of the coast with patriotism and defence of this
‘sceptered isle’. These artists painted national identity, pride, wealth
and politics. For Cornwall, this heralds the transformation of the Cornish
sailor from knave to knight of the sea.
THE FIRST ART COLONIES IN CORNWALL
Two art colonies sprang up which helped explore and promote
this idea: the small fishing port of Newlyn, and on the other side of
the peninsular in St Ives. The Newlyn School came into existence in
around about the 1880s, and lasted up until the 1940s. The artists here
stayed locally, united by a desire to paint outside ‘en plein air‘, in the
elements, in a naturalist style, and generally focused on the lives of the
villagers who were cheap and willing models. The artists themselves
were mostly British and linked to the London art scene. In 1882 Walter
Langley settled here, others following including Stanhope Forbes and
Norman Garstin.
William Holman Hunt (1827 - 1910)Asparagus Island 1860. Private Collection
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Garstin is best
remembered for
his well loved
work The Rain
it Raineth Every
Day 1889. This
painting can be
seen at Penlee
House Gallery &
Museum, Penzance,
who hold the largest collection of Newlyn School paintings in the country.
The large canvas is one of the finest depictions of a soggy day out you can
see and one that is largely unchanged. To this day Penzance promenade
(and the unwary dog walker) is regularly drenched with unruly waves.
Henry Scott Tuke was only associated with Newlyn for a few years,
but had close friendships with many in the colony, which lasted after
his move back to Falmouth. Tuke was an important maritime artist,
with works such as The Run Home 1902, although he is perhaps best
known for his portraits and his paintings of male nudes. The fresh
colours and ability to capture the feeling of natural light led to him
enjoying a considerable reputation.
In 1899,
Stanhope
Forbes and his
wife Elizabeth
founded a School
of Art in Newlyn,
and students
there included
Dod and Ernest
Procter. This
heralded
the second
generation of
Newlyn artists
including Alfred
Munnings,
Lamorna Birch and the continuously popular Laura Knight. They moved
slightly further out of Newlyn, to Lamorna, and their work there is often
referred to as the Lamorna group.
Over in St Ives it was a much more international bunch, who
came following the trend in Parisian studios (where they studied)
to discover rural retreats in Brittany. These artists were from all over
Europe and North America and sought remote, unspoilt destinations
providing complementary space, light and subject for plein air painting.
Here, British marine and landscape painters, including Edward Cooke,
(nephew to the Cooke who commissioned Turner at the beginning
of the century) James Clarke Hook and Louis Grier painted alongside
Scandinavian painters Anders Zorn, Helene Schjerfbeck and fleeting
visitors the Australian Mortimer Menpes, American born James Abbott
McNeill Whister and his then student Walter Sickert.
THE LEACH POTTERY, ST IVES
The nineteenth century saw
much change, but we move into the
turbulent waters of the twentieth
century. By the 1920s there had been
over half a century of academic and
plein air painters capturing shorelines,
fishermen and beguiling urchins in
large-scale, epic narratives or small
scale genre scenes.
However, in 1920 something rather
different to painting began. St Ives
does not have the natural resources
of clay or wood to supply a pottery.
Despite that, the artist and potter
Bernard Leach left Japan, his home of
11 years, to set up a studio pottery
with his friend Shoji Hamada.
A wealthy patron had offered an
invitation and financial assistance, as a
way of stimulating the local economy.
It is still a working pottery today,
having had decades of potters, apprentices and students from around
the world come and train in its modest premises, a tribute to
Leach‘s legacy.
It is one of the most
famous and influential studio
potteries in the UK and
beyond. The Leach Pottery
houses a museum, which
shows the original kilns, and
a display of work by Leach
and his circle. What made
Leach such an internationally
important figure for all the arts
was his vision of the artist-
craftsman. He revived the idea
of a handmade simplicity and
combined the traditions English
country slipware with oriental
ideas of craftsmanship. Leach made beautiful objects, but practical and
suited to modern needs.
Leach himself straddles the two worlds, one of the ’old guard’ of
St Ives artists, with their concern for plein air painting, and the new
Modernists, who chose a different way to engage and explore the
landscape they found themselves in.
Brenard Leach
Henry Scott Tuke (1858–1929)The Run Home 1902 with kind permission of the Royal Institution of Cornwall
Norman Garstin (1847-1926)The Rain it Raineth Every Day, 1889Penlee House Gallery & Museum, Penzance
Stanhope Forbes (1857 – 1947)Abbey Slip, 1921Oil on canvas, 76 x 102 cmPenlee House Gallery & Museum, Penzance© The Artist’s Estate / Bridgeman Art Library
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THE DISCOVERY OF ALFRED WALLIS
In 1926 a young and handsome artist Christopher Wood, British
but part of the glamorous Parisian art world, visited St Ives. He looked
to Picasso and Jean Cocteau in his art and showed no interest in the
English, academic tradition. He enjoyed the town however, and he
returned in 1928 with his friend, painter Ben Nicholson. That led to a
momentous, if accidental, meeting with the diminutive retired mariner
Alfred Wallis. Wallis had taken up painting when his wife died, keeping
his memories of the past alive in household paint and bits of board
and card. He painted St Ives and all that surrounded it, the sea, boats
and lighthouse. In The Blue Ship 1934, the ship dwarfs the rest of the
painting, squashing the pier and lighthouse to nubs, parts of the board
left unpainted.
The immediacy of his untutored paintings, labelled naïve or
primitive, struck a chord with a generation of artists who looked to get
back to the idea of translating life experiences into paint. In Wood and
Nicholson’s paintings, they had been experimenting with painting in a
‘handmade’, naïve style and subject matter. After meeting Wallis, they
adopted the motifs of the boats and lighthouses. In Christopher Wood’s
painting The Fisherman’s Farewell 1928 you can see both motifs behind
the fisherman, apparently based on Nicholson, his first wife Winifred
and their son Jake.
Modernism in its simplest form was a rejection of the past. If the
past wasn’t an appropriate model for the present, then new ways of
painting, with new forms needed to be created. Innovation, along
with a belief in progress and even in the idea of a social utopia was
the way forward. It had been developed in art, architecture and design
in Russia, Europe and America since the 1850s, but was rather more
circumspect in Britain. Only at the beginning of the twentieth century
did it start to create an impact. ‘Truth to materials’ became a rallying
cry for sculptors such as Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore who
were experimenting, allowing simplified forms to emerge rather than
impose a shape. In painting work was pared down, geometric and non-
figurative. Dismissed in some areas of the art world as ‘too intellectual’
the artists themselves were attempting to address a universal,
spiritual truth.
In the last years of the 1930s, two events took place, reflecting two
of the many facets of Modernism. In 1937, at Lambe Creek on the river
Fal, an extraordinary group of Surrealist artists came on holiday; whilst
in 1939 artists who were at the centre of British Modernism came from
Hampstead to Carbis Bay; painter Ben Nicholson and sculptor
Barbara Hepworth.
A SURREALIST SPREE
The surrealist holiday was a brief but engaging episode, bringing
some of the most original painters, sculptors, writers and photographers
of the twentieth century to the beautiful backwaters of Cornwall. Roland
Penrose was the artist generally credited with bringing surrealism to
Britain. Lambe Creek House on the river Fal was owned by Penrose’s
brother, and lent to him in June 1937.
He brought a few friends: surrealist painters Max Ernst his new lover,
painter Leonora Carrington, and artist Eileen Agar; photographers Lee
Miller and Man Ray; surrealist poets Édouard Mesens and Paul Éluard and
Joseph Bard the writer.
These dazzling exotics didn’t stay, leaving behind only photographs
of their summer spree, which delightfully you can see at Falmouth
Art Gallery. However this was not the only surrealism in Cornwall, the
idea of releasing the creative potential of the unconscious mind was
explored in the work of two artists; Ithell Colquhoun and John Tunnard.
Ithell Colquhoun had been associated with the fledgling surrealist
movement in London, and had exhibited jointly with Roland Penrose
before moving to Cornwall in the 1940s. Colquhoun must have been a
rather interesting and flamboyant
figure in the small villages in
West Cornwall where she lived,
first in Lamorna then Paul, near Penzance. She was fiercely passionate
about magic, and held a empathic (although presumably platonic)
relationship with the standing stones of Cornwall, which is particularly
rich in prehistoric sites, especially West Cornwall, where it is hard to go
for any sort of a walk around there without encounters with a stone
circle, standing stone or burial chamber. In her painting Landscape
with Antiquities (Lamorna) of 1950 you can see an entirely fictitious
arrangement of ancient and sacred sites in and around Lamorna. The
painting is held by the Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro.
John Tunnard was only loosely associated with the Surrealists,
however his paintings with strange, freeform shapes, cut with a
metallic edge, can be seen to echo with both the seashore, jazz and
natural history, all of which he was keenly interested in. He lived
Alfred Wallis (1855 - 1945) The Blue Ship circa 1934 Tate
Christopher Wood (1901 – 1930)The Fisherman’s Farewell 1928Tate
John TunnardTol Pedn 1942Tate © The Estate of John Tunnard
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and worked at Cadgwith Cove on the Lizard peninsula from 1930, and
served as a coastguard during the war. Tol-Pedn, is near to Tunnard’s
home, and the landmarks appear to have stimulated his abstraction of
the landscape.
MODERNISM AND ST IVES
But we must look to the seaside town of St Ives; with the breath of
the Second World War upon it, come the Modernists.
Ben Nicholson, his wife, the sculptor Barbara Hepworth and their
triplets left London on the eve of the Second World War, in 1939.
Originally they came to Carbis Bay, and stayed with their artist friends
Adrian Stokes and Margaret Mellis. They were joined by the Russian
sculptor Naum Gabo who worked in new, experimental materials such as
transparent plastic to constructivist ideas of pure form, clean lines, and
lack of ornament. Because of these artists, their aims and ideals, St Ives
became a centre for modern and abstract developments in British art.
Hepworth was initially unsure of coming to Cornwall, yet when she
arrived she immediately responded to the land, able to feel ’a figure in
the landscape’. After the war years spent without studio space, in 1949
she bought Trewyn studios, St Ives, now the Barbara Hepworth Museum
and Sculpture Garden. Hepworth lived here until her death in 1975, her
continuing belief in socialist ideas of community led her to stipulate her
studio be opened to the public. Her bronzes, positioned as she herself
placed them in the garden, are seen in the environment for which they
were created.
The war brought the modernists down to Cornwall, and the
established art community welcomed them. Although they were mostly
painters in the plein air tradition, amongst them Moffat Lindner, Borlase
Smart, John Park, Leonard Fuller and his wife Marjorie Mostyn, they
were sympathetic to the ideas of the newcomers, understanding the
interest in hidden forces in nature.
Leonard Fuller set up the St Ives School of Painting in 1938, and it
continues to this day - the longest running school for painting in the
country. As more artists arrived in the town, drawn to it by the presence
of Gabo, Hepworth and Nicholson, they would take part in some of the
classes, particularly life drawing.
After the war, more and more artists arrived who were interested
in exploring an abstraction based on nature, and their own ideas of
modernism. Artists such as: Terry Frost, Roger Hilton, Sven Berlin, Bryan
Wynter, Guido Morris and Karl Weschke.
These younger artists such as were not so much a ‘school’ as a
loose association of painters and sculptors who either lived in or were
associated with the town through friendships, connections and shared
preoccupations.
However, with so many artists in such a small town, there would
always be tensions, fights and falling out. The St Ives Society of Artists
had as members both the plein air and modernist artists, the old guard
and the young reactionaries. It wasn’t long before a split happened and
the Penwith Society of Arts in Cornwall was created.
LANDSCAPE TODAY
In the wake of modernity and changing taste and fortunes of art,
artists still continue to work. The lure of the landscape is just as strong
to today’s artists as it was to those painters in the nineteenth century,
although the approaches may differ hugely. In the 1970s John Miller
chose to celebrate the beauty of Cornwall in an impressionistic style,
before his palette changed to bright, clear colours and simplified motifs
of beach, sea and sky. His work was reproduced in cards, posters and
prints and was enormously successful commercially.
Peter Freeman is a light artist based in West Cornwall. For him the
sea and play of light between the sky and the water is a continuous
inspiration for his light sculptures and installations. He uses craft and
technology skills to transform and articulate public buildings and spaces
with neon, LED, and fibre-optics. His sculpture can be seen at junction
21 on the M5 motorway, where a 13 meter column of light welcomes
you into the South West. In Penzance, he created a light work that
illuminates the fifty-five-metre glass façade of the Exchange Gallery.
Inspired by the colours of the sea and sky, waves of soft diffused blues
and greens sinuously wind their way the length of the building.
Rather than the immediate landscape surrounding him, Tim
Shaw, a sculptor originally from Northern Ireland, explores the
inner landscape of the human condition. Drawn to Cornwall for its
feeling of independence and ‘otherness’ from the rest of England,
his monumental public sculpture Drummer Boy can be seen at the
Eden Project. This symbolic work is a celebration of the spirit of a land
and its people. His interest in mythology, and reinterpreting it to find
contemporary meaning, can be clearly seen in his installation The Rites
of Dionysus on permanent display in the Mediterranean Biodome at the
Eden project. THE FUTURE
What of the future of art in Cornwall? Artists are the product of their
time, and there are progressive artists thinking about environmental
change and actively seeking creative methods through which art can
have an impact on our current environment. Just as in the Victorian era
artists were inspired by new discoveries about the natural world, there
are artists drawing together knowledge from the arts and the sciences,
to offer their own, unique view on nature.
Cornwall first attracted the art world as being an attractive
venue for artists to come to, be inspired, create and then leave,
their work scattered around the world. Now the county is host to
creative organisations such as Urbanomic. Determinedly rooted to
the county, they promote research activities that address crucial
issues in contemporary philosophy and science and their relation to
contemporary art practice. Instead of using the academies and galleries
of London to show people visions of Cornwall, artists are calling to the
world to come and see what happens next.
PLACES TO VISIT
We are extremely fortunate to have in Cornwall several institutions
including Penlee House, Falmouth Art Gallery and Royal Cornwall
Museum (contact details in the list of galleries) who have collections
of art from many of the artists listed above. If you are interested in
visiting, please remember it is a good idea to contact the organisations
concerned first as works may not be on show.
Some of the galleries, including Tate St Ives, do not hold permanent
collections, but do offer a wide-range of changing exhibitions featuring
work from some of the artists mentioned. There are numerous galleries
situated around the county where you can see the work of the many
excellent artists working in Cornwall today.
Barbara HepworthTwo Forms (Divided Circle) 1969Tate© BownessPhoto: © Tate
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