Artists began to settle in the small fishing village of Newlyn in the early 1880s and by 1885 a fully-fledged artists’ colony had formed with a total of 27 artists. Although many of these artists achieved great success while working in Newlyn, towards the end of the 19th Century the number of artists in the colony began to dwindle. Indeed, by 1890, only Stanhope Forbes, Thomas Cooper-Gotch, Norman Garstin, and Walter Langley remained of the original Newlyn group.
New arrivals
"An ebullient vitality made me want to paint the whole world and say how glorious it was to be young and strong and able to splash with paint on canvas any old thing one saw, without stint of materials or oneself, the result of a year or two of vigour and enjoyment."- Dame Laura Knight in Newlyn
Perhaps in an attempt to draw more artists into the area, Forbes and his wife Elizabeth founded the Newlyn School of Painting in 1899. The school was successful and soon the likes of Ernest and Dod Procter, Frank Heath, and Eleanor and Robert Morson Hughes enrolled in his classes. The school continued the legacy of the original Newlyn group, promoting the study of figure painting and the principles of ‘plein-air’ painting, emphasising the necessity of working directly from the subject. In 1907, the artists Laura and Harold Knight, Harold and Gertrude Harvey, Lamorna Birch and Alfred Munnings, also came to Newlyn. Along with students at Forbes’ painting school, these artists came to represent the second generation of the Newlyn colony.
Laura Knight, with her husband Harold Knight, had previously spent time working in Staithes, another small coastal village but this time on the Northeast coast of England. It was in Staithes that Laura's paintings began to show the strong influence of Harold whose work had matured greatly, particularly his use of rather scenographic compositions, following his return from studying at a Paris atelier since 1896. Laura utilised a warmer palette and strong contours, imbuing her pictures with nuanced influences of colour theory – a favourite tool of the French Pointillists in Paris in which Laura had shown much interest. Even with her move to London
following the First World War, a period in which Knight focused on capturing the complex figurative movement of performers with the theatre, circus and ballet, and during which her style moved away from rural naturalism towards more radical and modern compositions, Knight’s intimate treatment of her models remains a key aspect of her work. This more figurative and modern style is demonstrated in her drawing, Les Sylphides. Knight made a series of these kinds of drawings in 1919 after being granted permission from Serge Diaghilev (1872-1929) to paint backstage at the Alhambra Theatre, London. Here, Knight worked to capture the commotion of dancers, dressers and stagehands from the Ballets Russes.
It was also in London that Laura and Harold Knight met Eileen Mayo. Eileen, an artist, illustrator and printmaker in her own right, began a career as an artist’s model by a chance meeting with Laura Knight. Laura was immediately taken by Eileen’s striking looks, describing her as ‘the loveliest of girls, with bright yellow hair as fine as gold and big dark grey eyes’ and asked Eileen to
model for her. They soon developed a close working relationship, and Eileen began modelling for Harold Knight, as well as posing numerous times for their close friends and fellow Newlyn artists, Ernest and Dod Procter. In the below portrait of Eileen by Harold Knight, her striking looks are elegantly paralleled against the rhythmic folds of the curtain behind. With her hair tied back in a chignon of pure gold, it is an intimate image which works to demonstrate the considerable allure and power Eileen exerted as both model and muse. Here her features are superbly rendered to accentuate her natural attractive qualities: her Grecian nose and pale classic features provide the painting with a post-deco classicism which is almost sculptural.
The presence of these artists in Newlyn, bringing with them new artistic styles and influences, meant that inevitably, the older Newlyn style slowly but surely began to change. The later Newlyn School artists did much to rehabilitate the image of the colony by injecting abstract elements into their representational work more associated with European avant-garde artists and the return to realisms following the first world war. A clear example of this transformation can be seen in the paintings of Harold Harvey.
A native of Penzance, born not far up the coast from Newlyn in 1874, Harvey was one of the few Newlyn school artists who could truly claim to call Cornwall ‘Home’. A Trial of Strength numbers amongst his pre-war paintings, many of which detail the activities of the children of the area and are his most successful and intimate compositions. This picture is an example of Harvey’s feathery and impressionistic approach to the sympathetic social realism of Stanhope Forbes and Thomas Cooper Gotch, and their French predecessors. His carefully observed paintings focus on recording with a gentle, tender eye the daily life around him.
However, Harvey’s mature work after the First World War became more modern in style, joining Laura and Harold Knight in their adoption of what was to become known as Modern Realism in British painting. In In the Kitchen, Maen Cottage, we see a stark stylistic change has taken place. The work is more direct and stylised, with tighter brushstrokes, a brighter palette and a simplification of form. His later work is less idealistic and innocent, instead focusing more on the industrial landscape of Cornwall, religious themes, portraits and sophisticated interiors.
In 1920, Harvey and his close friend Ernest Procter established the Harvey-Procter School in Newlyn. One of the school’s star pupils was Phyllis Mary Waters (1896-1979), otherwise known as Billy Waters, who also worked as an apprentice to Procter. Procter and his wife, Dod Procter, had by this point developed a highly finished neoclassical style which was becoming a popular element within the growing British Realist movement during the interwar period.
Under his tutelage, Waters began to develop her own distinctive decorative style, adopting flowers and animals as her principal motifs. Working primarily in oils throughout her career, her paintings have an unusual, slightly matt appearance akin to tempura due to the particular way in which she primed her canvases. Such a technique is beautifully displayed in her painting Still Life of Flowers and Shells (1927). This work marks a further evolution of the Newlyn style, which developed from generation to generation. Each time, ideas and techniques, new and old, were passed on from teacher to student, who in turn became teachers themselves.
A fully illustrated catalogue for our summer exhibition of British Impressionism is available to buy online and from our gallery in St. James's
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