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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