"Every Corner Was a Picture" .......
So wrote Stanhope Forbes of the small Cornish fishing town of Newlyn which he made his home in 1884 and the current picture 'The Village Shop' seems to illustrate this comment perfectly.
The scene depicts a local farmer offloading his produce at the Village Shop, on one of the many steep lanes running down to the harbour. The location has been tentatively identified as Trewarvaneth Street. The railings which can be seen beyond the main scene are still in existence today, surrounding a building which was then the village school, further emphasised by the group of children passing by.
Such a scene would not have been unusual, revealing an unchanging view of life in Newlyn at a time when rural activities and traditional ways of life were gradually disappearing in other parts of the country.
Stanhope Forbes was drawn to Newlyn in 1884 by the mild climate, the quality of the local light and the generally picturesque environment of the Cornish fishing village. It was not unlike similar villages in Brittany, where he was painting only a few years before. In Newlyn, he found a harbour full of bright and shimmering reflections, an abundance of boats, ropes, sails, nets, fish and a quay crowded with men and women wearing the traditional clothing of a fishing community. He immediately began to paint genre scenes set amidst the narrow, precipitous streets above Newlyn harbour, and the extraordinary natural atmosphere and the singular character of Newlyners inspired him towards developing tone, narrative and the “square” brushwork he had learned in Brittany into what soon became recognized as a definitive ‘school’ of painting.
When Forbes arrived in Newlyn in 1883/4 he found a small but committed circle of social realist artists established by Birmingham-born painter Walter Langley. Within a year, Forbes had actively woven himself into the fabric of the Newlyn community. In 1885, when his picture 'A Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach' was exhibited at the Royal Academy, it projected Newlyn into the national headlines, and made Forbes himself a household name.
Moreover, Forbes had a galvanising effect on his fellow painters, not only because of his exceptional talent, but also because of his unwavering belief in the validity, even necessity, of painting en plein air. As the school acquired a public presence in London exhibitions, Forbes came to be regarded as its leader, something he protested, saying: ‘Newlyners are followers of no-one – simply a body of artists who paint in the open air.’
Forbes’s subsequent triumphs with The Village Harmonic (1888, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery) and The Health of the Bride (1889, Tate Britain), sealed his reputation as the ‘father of the Newlyn School’.
For the next forty years Forbes recorded every aspect of Newlyn life and landscape.
In 1889 Forbes married the Canadian born painter Elizabeth Adela Armstrong who worked in St. Ives as well as Newlyn. Together they opened a school of painting in Newlyn in 1899. After Elizabeth Forbes died in 1912 and their only child Alec was killed four years later in WWI, Stanhope Forbes lived on in the village until his death in 1947. Well into the 1930s, he could still be seen painting en plein air, often surrounded by curious local children.
To learn more about 'The Village Inn' by Alexander Stanhope Forbes and other Newlyn School paintings, please visit www.messums.com
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