This month we take a closer look at an early 20th century painting by Cornish artist Harold Harvey (1874 – 1941), one of the Newlyn School painters.

About the painting

This artwork, painted in oil on canvas, portrays three young friends playing on the grass on a warm summer’s day. The viewer can almost sense the warmth of the sunlight dancing on the scene. The location of the painting seems to be on the edge of a cliff, with the sea behind. Although most certainly positioned by the artists, the impressionistic style of the work gives the sense of a moment in time, with the three boys at play, in their own world.

We do not know the names of the three boys – the painting is not intended to be a portrait; instead its purpose is to convey the feeling of a carefree Summer’s day by the sea, in Cornwall.

The painting is designed to draw the eye around it; the boys sit in a semi-circle on a diagonal patch of grass, between sea and the coast path. The viewer’s eye alights on the bare feet of the boy in the foreground and up the path to the second boy and then round all three characters, so that the whole scene is taken in.

About the artist

A Cornish native, Harold Harvey was born in Penzance. As a boy, he may have seen and been inspired to take up painting by artists from the Newlyn School at work with their portable easels and canvases.

The Newlyn School was colony of artists who had based themselves in the area between the 1880s and the 1920s. They specialised in painting ‘en plein air’ (outdoors), a fashion which had started in France earlier in the 19th century, in which subjects were painted outdoors using natural light. These artists, attracted by the special quality of light in Cornwall, were interested in depicting everyday people, particularly those connected with the sea. Perhaps one of the most famous and most evocative paintings of this genre is Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach painted by Stanhope Forbes in 1884-5.

Harvey came from a middle-class family and he began his artistic training at Penzance School of Art, travelling in 1894 to Paris to study further at the Academie Julien. In 1895 Harvey’s work was exhibited along with other Newlyn painters at an exhibition in a new purpose-built gallery, the Passmore Edwards Art Gallery, these days better known as The Newlyn Art Gallery.

In 1896 Harold Harvey returned from France and made Cornwall his home for the rest of his life. Throughout his career, he regularly exhibited work not only in Newlyn but at many other esteemed galleries, such as the Royal Academy in London, the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool and the Royal Society of Art in Birmingham, to name but a few.

His earlier work was influenced by the naturalist style of the older generation of Newlyn School painters, but in the early 1900s his style changed and became more impressionistic. The painting featured in this article is a good example of this development. However, it is still influenced by the Newlyn School, in that the painting captures an outdoor scene of everyday people.

Towards the 1920s, Harvey started to favour cleaner lines and his paintings took on a new look. The subject matter also evolved over his prolific career. Expanding his repertoire from the plein air painting of landscapes and people at work, he also started to paint people in interior domestic settings, clearly relishing the portrayal of the detail of everyday life. He continued painting until his death in 1941.

Find out more about Harold Harvey and see more examples of his work here.