Amongst Heroes: the Artist in Working Cornwall: Hooked by Cornwall’s fishy past

‘A Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach’ by Stanhope A. Forbes, RA (1857 – 1947), oil on canvas, 1885 from the exhibition Amongst Heroes exhibition at Two Temple Place 
Photo: © Bridgeman Art Library

If anyone these days starts talking about Cornwall and the visual arts, the chances are that it will be Alfred Wallis, Tate St Ives and the modernism of Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson that come to mind. But a new exhibition opening on Saturday at Two Temple Place – the fabulous faux-Gothic palace originally built by the American magnate William Waldorf Astor alongside Victoria Embankment – reminds us of an older and unfairly neglected tradition associated with that intermittently bleak and beautiful county. Amongst Heroes: the Artist in Working Cornwall has been curated by the young art historian Roo Gunzi, in partnership with the Royal Cornwall Museum. It brings together paintings from artists’ colonies in Newlyn and St Ives, mostly executed between 1880 and 1920 and several of which have not been seen in public for more than a century.

"they aim to show not tragic victims of poverty and oppression, but the plain facts of honest toil"

What they characteristically depict – in a style influenced by masters of the naturalist Barbizon school such as Millet and Corot – is the daily life of peasants and fisherfolk, recorded with an absence of special pleading. The objectivity is significant, Gunzi emphasises. These aren’t sentimental or ideologically loaded paintings: almost all of them painted en plein air or directly from life, they aim to show not tragic victims of poverty and oppression, but the plain facts of honest toil.

The artists (only two of them native to the area) focused on something both picturesque and primitive – a combination very much to the late Victorian-early Edwardian taste. Around the end of the 19th century, Cornwall remained an undiscovered part of the country, largely untouched by industrialism and not a holiday destination or romanticised by Daphne du Maurier.

London art lovers were fascinated by this unfamiliar landscape. Painters such as Stanhope Forbes found great favour at the Royal Academy with scenic tableaux such as A Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach, while Charles Napier Hemy was admired for his spectacular depiction of the trawling of pilchards, painted on the sea from a neighbouring boat. Henry Scott Tuke’s portraits of grizzled seafarers also have great charm, but these painters were generally more interested in rural and maritime craft than in individuals, and as well as the skills and objects associated with boats, harbours and fishmongery, blacksmiths’ forges and claypit quarrying provided them with rich subject-matter.

The exhibition, which runs until April 14, will complement the pictures with relics such as pressing stones, netting needles, hand barrows and even an oyster dredger. Don’t go expecting to see masterpieces, but this is a rewarding examination of a little-known chapter in the history of British painting.

Story courtesy of the Arts section in the Daily Telegraph.