Introduction

This virtual exhibition will take you back to the mid-19th century when a group of artists gathered in Newlyn, Cornwall, in the South West of England, inspired by the sea, landscape and people there.

Displayed will be images of a selection of plein air paintings featuring landscapes and real people at work and play painted by these artists from the ‘Newlyn School’.

We will delve into the lives of some of the artists and their choices of subject matter, and explore the way the Newlyn School artists who descended upon Cornwall were received by the residents.

The Newlyn School

The Newlyn School consisted of a group of artists based in and around Newlyn, on the south coast of Cornwall, from the mid-19th until the early 20th century.

In 1877 there was an extension to the Great Western Railway to West Cornwall, which attracted artists to the Cornish towns of St Ives and Newlyn.

These small fishing towns were attractive due to their beautiful scenery, as well as the quality and simplicity of life.

Once the initial group of artists settled, it began to draw more artists to the area, and this created a vibrant artistic community in Newlyn. The work of the Newlyn School artists is still well-regarded today, and is held in public art collections worldwide.

The school was similar to the Barbizon School in France, where artists painted from life in outdoor settings, known as painting ‘en plein air’. The artists of Newlyn would not only paint outdoor landscapes from life, using the natural light to enhance their work, but also portray local people, especially the fishermen and their families.

Harold Harvey

Harold Harvey was born in Penzance, Cornwall in 1874. He studied at the Penzance school of arts and also received tuition from Norman Garstin, an established Newlyn painter, academies in France such as the Académie Julian in Paris between 1894 and 1896.

Once he had completed training in Paris, Harvey moved back to Penzance where he pursued his artistic career as a painter in oils. Harvey's career kickstarted experimentation with social realism as well as impressionism. He became an associate member of the Royal Cambrian Academy of Art in Conwy, Wales in 1909. By 1910 he had also become a member of the South Wales Art Society.

Harvey was part of the Newlyn School from around 1910 until the beginning of the 1930s. His main subject matter was scenes of the working class in Cornwall, such as fishermen, miners, and farmers, as well as scenes of Cornish landscapes. As time went on, he broadened his choice of subject matter and painted portraits, and paintings referencing religious themes and landscapes.

Harvey married Gertrude Bodinnar in Newlyn in 1911; they met when she was hired to pose for one of his paintings. Bodinnar became a painter herself in later years. Harold Harvey passed away in 1941.

Three Boys

__Harold Harvey __ __1914 __
Oil on canvas
University of Exeter Fine Art Collection

In 1914 Harold Harvey completed Three Boys. The painting has an impressionist style and depicts three young children sitting on the grass on a warm summer’s day. Art historian Catherine Wallace explains that the image wouldn't have been depicting anyone in particular – the figures would have been local children paid by the Newlyn artists to pose as models. The identities of the sitters were unimportant – the artist was more interested in the subject and style the painting conveyed.

Harvey has used very vibrant colours and a combination of blended and dynamic brushstrokes. There is a sense of warmth to the painting and the way in which the boy in the foreground is positioned with his feet close to the viewer, draws us into the painting and almost makes it feel as if we could reach out and touch him. By taking a closer look we can see that Harvey has completed his feet with an immense amount of detail, each toe has been carefully and precisely painted, contrasting with the blurred background. The boy to the right of the painting in the background is wearing a red hat which is strongly complemented by the bright green of the grass.

The Mangolds

Harold Harvey
__1904 __
__Oil on canvas __ University of Exeter Fine Art Collection

The 1904 oil painting, The Mangolds, features two figures loading beets onto the back of a wooden cart. The two boys depicted in the painting would have been local farm workers. The cart is being horse-drawn, which demonstrates the age at which the painting was completed, and displays how physically demanding farming methods were.

Harvey uses autumnal colours of oranges and reds to represent the time of year in which it was painted, he also includes a sense of movement in the piece to show the speed at which the young boys were working. The fact that the boy on the foreground is seen to be moving, the viewer can visualise the way in which he is throwing the mangold and imagine what would happen next in the scene.

The Newlyn School and Impressionism

The french artist Pierre Bonnard once said, “Colour does not add a pleasant quality to design - it reinforces it.”

For the French Impressionists, colour and form were ways of expressing emotion. For Bonnard in particular, colour was vitally important. He believed that it had to be carefully curated to express the narrative that the artist wished to portray.

As a movement, impressionist work was revolutionary in its self-expression and preference of ‘energetic feeling’ over form and we can see evidence of how the Newlyn artists may have been inspired by this in Exeter’s collection, the work of Harold Harvey being a perfect example.

Like the Newlyn artists, many of the French Impressionists had social ties from studying together that lasted well into their careers, although it must be said that the Impressionist group is a wider classification of work, and they did not share the same close living environment that the Newlyn artists did. They were dedicated to creating a new kind of modern art and saw their work as re-energising the modern artistic movement and did so with varying levels of independence; coming together to collaborate on exhibitions.

A principle shared by the French Impressionists and their Newlyn counterparts was a fascination with the effects of the weather and how people existed with nature. In France, Monet painted a series of pieces to capture fleeting moments of the day where light changed. Famously he is reported to have changed canvases every few minutes when painting his Rouen Cathedral series to record slight alterations in the light at sunrise and sunset.

In the Newyln School works displayed in this online exhibition, Lamorna Birch shares this interest in recording the different states of the weather in the coves and villages around Cornwall and the two Alfred Munnings pieces below show the same scene painted in different tones on the same day.

Alfred Munnings

Alfred Munnings was an English painter from 1879-1959 paint, known for his paintings of English country life, particularly horses and landscape scenes.

Munnings was known to be an art critic, outspoken about the changes in art towards modernism and was the president of the Royal Academy between 1944-49.

He was born in Mendham, Suffolk but first came to Newlyn in 1910.

According to a study by the Taylor Gallery, London, Munnings was “Immediately accepted by the artist’s community, he became the centre of social activities, free to express his naturally exuberant nature to paint the fresh and inspiring scenery of life on the end of the Cornish peninsular.”

Withypool, 1942

__Alfred Munnings __
__Oil on canvas __
University of Exeter Fine Art Collection
Photograph reproduced with the kind permission of the Estate of Alfred Munnings, Dedham, Essex.

The images above show two oil painting studies of ‘Building Hayricks Withypool’ in 1942, painted as a double-sided piece. Munnings depicts farm labourers at work, showing the same scene at different times on the same day. Both paintings have an impressionistic style, and Munnings has used loose brush strokes which evoke a sense of fluidity and haziness within the atmosphere. Munnings has chosen to use pale, more muted tones which create a sense of depth and recession within the paintings, and invite the viewer to focus on the light of the clouds in the sky.

A recent exhibition was created for the work of Munnings, and a critic stated that his work, “feels like a modern, reinvented Turner, almost impressionistic.” and that Munnings is able to, “capture the rural, the agricultural and the social, along with the joys of nature in the unique light of Newlyn and its surroundings.”

Even though these paintings were executed at a time after the main period of the Newlyn School movement, the inspiration can still be seen through the choice of subject matter as well as a strong influence from impressionism and French art of the late 19th century. This is exemplified by the dusky and pale haystacks, a signature style of the Impressionists, indicating this was painted en plein air. Allowing Munnings to explore his compositions and tones used in both of these paintings.

Munnings resided in Withypool in Somerset during World War II, at a hunting lodge owned by his wife, when their principal residence in Dedham was requisitioned by the military.

Interaction between Cornish residents and the Newly School artists

Regardless of the clear affection Langley had towards Newlyn and all he gained from his time in Newlyn, it is debatable to say how much the locals of the town gained from the artist’s presence.

Many of the Newlyn School artists used the locals as their models and paid them modestly, but never credited them by name. Many of the town’s workers would visit private shows of the Newlyn School paintings, to see themselves depicted in the artworks. The local Cornish people would have been used to seeing black and white prints, not these rich and vibrant pieces.

Local residents did benefit from renting homes and studio spaces for the artists to use whilst they were there.

An assumption can be made about the possible tension between the two groups. Once the artists had captured what there was to take from Newlyn, they moved on to new subject matter (such as historic scenes, as depicted in Aboard the Revenge by Frank Wright Bourdillon,below), which meant that the artists had exploited the town for their own personal gain. Once they left, many of the businesses may have experienced a loss of steady income they had received from the artists. Although there may not have been any animosity, there was a clear class divide between the locals and the artists, such as education, financial position and lifestyle. This being said, the Newlyn artists had captured images of the lives of the locals and the beauty of the Cornish landscapes. In sharing their artworks with others, they may have encouraged art viewers to come and experience the town's beauty in person and encouraged tourism.

Aboard the Revenge

Frank Wright Bourdillon
Oil on canvas
University of Exeter Fine Art Collection

This painting by Frank Wright Bourdillon represents a 'moving on' by some of the Newlyn School artists from plein air painting to depicting historical themes. It is inspired by a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson, entitled The Revenge: The Ballad of the Fleet and depicts Sir Richard Grenville rescuing men from Bideford injured in battles with the Spanish in Elizabehan times.

Walter Langley (1852-1922)

Unlike many of the other artists of the Newlyn school, Walter Langley began his career not as an artist but as a lithographer at Birmingham company AH Biermann. He had been sponsored through evening classes at the Birmingham School of Design (which later became known as the Birmingham School of Art) by W. Wade who had recognised the young boy’s talent during his time at Hurst Street Unitarian Mission School. His artistic connections took off in 1873 when Langley was awarded a two-year scholarship to the South Kensington Schools to study design.

His background was vastly different from many of the Newlyn school, and this had a direct influence on his art, which his grandson, Roger Langley, described as ‘social realism'. He constantly depicted working locals which highlighted a working culture that defined Newlyn’s economy, which at the time, was dominated by fishing. Unusually for the Victorian era, Walter Langley had a strong social conscience which he showed through his art, depicting the gender inequalities of rural life and the emotional hardships that many fishwives endured.

Another difference between Langley and many of the other Newlyn artists was his choice of medium. He painted with watercolours rather than oil paints which were highly regarded as the medium of fine art. This more ‘down to earth’ choice was semblant of the themes of his work and because he was trained as a graphic artist and watercolour lent itself to his clean and precise way of drawing.

Langley is still considered today to be one of the finest of realist watercolour painters. His accolades included his election to the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colour in 1883, having solo exhibitions (including a one-man-show at the Fine Art Society in 1893) and winning a Gold Medal for watercolours at World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. These, as well as many other prestigious awards and honours resulted in his reputation being cemented as a prominent artist of the Newlyn legacy.

Walter Langley took residence in Newlyn in late March 1892 and his home overlooked Newlyn’s harbour. He is credited as being the earliest ‘pioneer’ of the Newlyn colony of artists. He also stood out amongst the other artists due to his dedication to the watercolour medium, which went against the more prestigious mediums such as oils.

Throughout his career he moved around due to his work but would always return to Newlyn, which provides an idea of the relationship he began to grow with Newlyn during his time there. Langley had his own hardships and grew up in a working-class background, for these reasons he may have had a higher regard for the hardworking people in the town, his pieces reflect the sympathy he had for the locals he lived amongst. Walter Langley's pieces captured raw moments such as the loss of loved ones and the difficult manual labour that the workers went through. Today his work would be defined as ‘social realism’.

River Scene Low Sun

Walter Langley
__Watercolour on paper __
University of Exeter Fine Art Collection

Langley's painting, River Scene with Low Sun strays slightly from his usual subject matter as it focuses on a peaceful river and a sun resting on the horizon which takes up two thirds of the canvas. Despite the contrasting subject matter, it is clear that the local workers are a theme Langley constantly falls back to as a fishing boat features in the left corner.

The piece consists of a muted palette and more simplistic brushwork compared to his other artworks. Little is known about the origins of this piece, but it evokes a feeling of tranquillity which falls in line with the same appreciation Langley felt towards Newlyn.

Social historical context of Newlyn

During the Mid-19th century, a new culture developed in many coastal towns around Britain, with the emergence of industrialised trawler fishing which created far more efficient fleets and the emergence of new ports which were overtly more capitalist in outlook.

Cornwall, however, was unaffected by the rise of trawler fleets, fishermen instead used drift net methods, known as the ‘poor-man's fishery’ which perhaps to the artists appeared simpler, more egalitarian, and ‘traditional’ than the merchant dominated Seine fisheries of the other ports. Cornish fishing communities also shared in the expansion of the fishing industry in the 19th century and many local fishermen began to sail further in search of fish stocks.

Fishermen from Newlyn even extended their drift fishing to the North Sea and Ireland. The Cornish fishing industry continued to grow, even when the mining industry was faltering.

Newlyn was the largest of the Cornish fishing ports in th 19th century but by 1900 Cornwall had experienced, ‘the most pervasive decay of an entire regional fishery in Britain’.

Due to the remoteness of its location Cornwall has often been seen ‘on the margins of England and Englishness’ and therefore a romantic place. In the 19th century it was seen as a primitive counterpoint to the modernity that was so rapidly developing across Britain during the industrial revolution. And Much like the Pont-Aven artists’ colony in Brittany, the artists were drawn to Cornwall by the perceived primitiveness of the locals and picturesque landscape, in which they found a sense of nostalgia and charm, as well as the mild climate which allowed the painters to paint ‘en plein air’, rather than in the studio, and in the good light.

Many of the artists in the Newlyn school had been to study art in Paris, and had experienced the Pont-Aven Colony, including Stanhope Forbes, ‘the father of the Newlyn school’, and once they had completed their studies in France, they sought to create an English equivalent.

However, in another sense, the artists were also seeking certain aspects of modern society. Through the gradual modernisation of the Cornish fishing industry, full-time deep-sea fishing had created gendered divisions of Labour which were much more marked than in the part time fishery. Their paintings often depict these divisions of Labour with women fish sellers ashore selling the fish which the men had caught at sea. Another common theme in their paintings was women anxiously waiting for the return of the men. With their men away from home for a proportion of the year and the women left ashore passively waiting for the men’s return, it was a relationship which the consumer in the late nineteenth century would be familiar and played to the view of the ‘natural’ gender divisions of the time.

The locals and the artists were however divided into two communities by their class and culture.

Art historian Marion Whybrow wrote that Cornwall provided, ‘romance and reality to a hypnotic degree for people who could observe from the safe divide of class and culture’.

Most of the artists came from middle-class professional families. These class differences were reinforced by a gradual move of the artists’ houses up the hill from the bay, with some even living in the nearby Penzance.

Another area of cultural importance which divided the groups was religion. The locals were strict non-conformists whilst the artists were largely agnostic. The artists however accepted the importance of Sunday observance to the locals and, therefore, accepted an informal ban on Sunday painting.

The local middle classes put more value on the economic benefits which the artists brought to the Newlyn area, which had experienced an economic downturn as a result failing fishing, farming and mining industries. The school helped to bring an economic resurgence to the area by encouraging individuals to holiday in the area and study and practise art as well creating an extra source of income for the locals whom they employed as their models. At the laying of the foundation stone of the Newlyn Art Gallery in 1895, the Cornish benefactor Passmore Edwards noted that the artists were ‘interpreting… and … adding to the wealth of Cornwall’. The Newlyn school therefore assimilated with the local middle and landed classes, finding their niche in the local class structure, institutionalising the differences between the artists and the working-class fishing community.

However, despite the various divides between the groups there seems to have been little friction and although the artists perhaps never fully integrated into the community, artists like Stanhope Forbes remained in Newlyn until his death in 1947.

The Mail Cart is a watercolour of an unknown date, depicting a cart crossing a bridge. Although the location of the bridge depicted is unknown, it bears a strong resemblance to the bridge that crosses the River Barle, at Withypool in Somerset. The artist was known to be friends with another Newlyn School artist, Alfred Munnings, who had spent the war years in Withypool when his home in Dedham, Essex, was requisitioned by the Army.

On the left you can see the painting by Lamorna Birch and on the right a photograph of Withypool Bridge.

Study for The Ivory Gate and the Golden

__Henry Meynell Rheam __ Watercolour on paper
University of Exeter Fine Art Collection

Originally thought to be a study for the painting Alleluia by Thomas Cooper Gotch, recent research into this watercolour seems conclusive that it is actually a study for the painting The Ivory Gate and Golden by Henry Meynell Rheam.

Rheam moved to Newlyn in 1890, and was an active part of the Newlyn school. He often painted in watercolour and was inspired by the Pre-Raphaelite movement. The composition of this watercolour and ‘The Ivory Gate and Golden’ is reminiscent of the Pre-Raphaelite style, featuring a red-haired girl wearing medieval dress edged with golden embroidery.

The title of the work could refer to the reference in Greek classical literature of the Ivory Gate representing false dreams. The girl in the painting holds the curtain back, to reveal a door with a key, and gazes directly at the viewer, inviting them to open the door.

Below you can see the study for The Ivory and the Golden by Henry Meynell Rheam from the University of Exeter Fine Art Collection. On the right is an image of the final picture for which we believe the study was made (Image courtesy Christie's Images / Bridgeman Images). The finished painting is held in a private collection.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank both Sabrina Rahman and Daniel Fountain for helping us and creating a space for us to develop this project. We would also like to give a special thanks to Naome Glanville for her time, and to Catherine Wallace for helping us and supplying us with so much information.

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