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LAMORNA COLONY PIONEERS
Penlee Gallery, Penzance. 3rd May 2023 to 30th
September 2023
LAMORNA : AN ARTISTIC, SOCIAL AND LITERARY HISTORY. VOLUME ONE –
PRE-1920
By David Tovey
Wilson Books. 248 pages. ISBN 978-0-9955710-0-6
LAMORNA : AN ARTISTIC, SOCIAL AND LITERARY HISTORY. VOLUME TWO
- POST-1920
By David Tovey Wilson Books.184 pages. ISBN 978-0-9955710-4-4 Reviewed by Jim Burns
“The Lamorna Valley, through which runs the Lamorna stream, which
exits into Mount’s Bay at Lamorna Cove, a few miles south of
Mousehole, developed as an arts centre several decades after Newlyn,
St Ives and Falmouth, because for much of the second half of the
nineteenth century, Lamorna was an industrial zone, dominated by
granite quarrying, taking place on both the east and west of the
Cove”.
I’ve taken those words from the first volume of David Tovey’s
fascinating survey of how an artistic community developed in
Lamorna. Without going into too much detail, the area – described by
Tovey as “not a place to tarry long” when the quarries were active –
only really started to attract painters and others when the
quarrying declined. It was in 1902 that the newly-married John Birch
decided to settle in Lamorna. Another artist, Arthur Tanner, was
already there, and Elizabeth Forbes had painted in the Valley from
around 1895, and later established a studio where she could work on
her own canvases and teach. The point is that an artists’ colony
doesn’t suddenly come into existence. It develops over time, and
it’s never really possible to give an exact date for its formation.
But, as Tovey makes clear, John Birch, soon to become known as
Lamorna Birch, was a dominant figure in the Lamorna community, so
1902 may well be the best date to use for documentary purposes.
Having said that, I should add that Tovey acknowledges that Austin
Wormleighton, who wrote a biography of Birch, was inclined to favour
1912 as a likelier date for the foundation of a colony, as opposed
to a number of individual artists living in an area. And Tovey
acknowledged that “the years 1912 to 1914 were transformational, for
that period saw Laura and Harold Knight and Alfred Munnings making
Lamorna their principal base and the construction of new homes in
the Valley by Robert and Eleanor Hughes, Frank and Jessica Heath,
Charles and Ella Naper, Bengy and Bell Leader, Algernon and Marjorie
Newton and Kate Westrup”.
The exhibition at Penlee House naturally and deservedly focuses a
fair amount of attention on paintings by Lamorna Birch. What is
impressive about them is that he managed to make so much of the
landscape, including the coastline in its various forms, the clay
pits, the streams, trees, barns, and much else of his surroundings.
All that, and without seeming to simply repeat himself and always
with skill and a sound sense of colour. It’s easy to see why his
paintings were and are popular. They are good to look at, surely a
key factor when considering the worth of a painting?
It would be wrong to claim
that Birch was an innovator in any way. Like many of the artists who
either lived in Lamorna or visited for a month or two, he had
certainly picked up on the ideas developed in nineteenth century
Paris by the Impressionists, though he was probably less-influenced
by most of what came after them. Birch,
like many British artists had studied in Paris.
He had absorbed some of
Impressionist practices, particularly in relation to colour, but not
slavishly so. He remained what might be called a conventional artist
in terms of overall composition and his intentions to paint scenes
largely as he saw them. It would be interesting to know if Roger
Fry’s promotion of Post-Impressionism through various exhibiti0ns in
Britain between 1910 and 1913 had an influence on any of the artists
active in Lamorna during this period?
I don’t intend to single out individual pictures in the exhibition,
though I have to admit to a liking for a large painting by Richard
Weatherby of the artist Stanley Gardiner at work. It captures some
of the energy and character of the man. There are paintings by
Munnings, Stanhope Forbes, Laura Knight, Charles Naper, Charles
Simpson (who appears to have had a penchant for picturing ducks),
Ann Halthea Hills, whose slightly ominous paintings have a feeling
of autumn about them, Frank Heath, and many others, either on the
walls of the gallery or in Tovey’s books.
It should be borne in mind that these were artists concerned to
create pictures that the Royal Academy would approve of and people
would want to buy. There is nothing wrong with that, and saying it
doesn’t indicate that they were less than skilled in their
application of paint to canvas. They weren’t out to break new ground
or establish a new movement. Heath’s pictures of little girls at
play in a garden were clearly meant to have popular appeal. No-one
is about to claim that they were creating masterpieces. In general
there was a fair amount of competent but forgettable work produced,
along with some excellent paintings.
I’m reminded of a passage in a minor, but entertaining novel,
A Breath of Fresh Air, by
John Branfield (he’s also written books about some of the Lamorna
painters) where the narrator, a collector of paintings by Cornish
artists, admits that there’s a lot of routine work from the period
when Newlyn, Lamorna, and St Ives flourished: “they only managed a
uniform dullness, shipping in rough seas, sunsets at Land’s End,
vases of flowers. How did they keep going?” That standards could
vary isn’t surprising considering how many painters must have passed
through Cornwall at one time or another.
Mentioning Branfield’s novel reminds me that Tovey devotes some
attention to writers who were in Lamorna
when the artists were
active. He particularly focuses on Cecily Sidgwick, a long-time
resident of Lamorna, whose 1915 novel,
In Other Days, has
fictional portraits of many of the artists and their wives. It
doesn’t appear to have had a wide circulation at the time, the war
atmosphere probably not being favourable to an account of bohemian
comings and goings, and was never reprinted. It’s certainly not
easily available now. Tovey also mentions a much later novel about
Lamorna, Jonathan Smith’s
Summer in February, which came out in 1995 and concerned the
tragic story of Edith Florence Carter-Wood, who married Alfred
Munnings and, perhaps because of a pregnancy resulting from an
affair with another man, committed suicide. It was an event that
shocked the Lamorna community. A film of the same name appeared in
2013 and attempted to recreate the communal atmosphere in Lamorna in
the pre-1914 period.
Lamorna’s relevance as an artistic centre probably went into decline
as the 1930s progressed, though some of those who were there tended
to be of an avant-garde inclination, a factor which didn’t please
Lamorna Birch. He, like his contemporary Alfred Munnings, became
something of an old fogey, speaking out in a dismissive manner about
“modern” art and new-fangled ideas. But the somewhat eccentric Gluck
(Hannah Gluckstein) was quite an orthodox painter in many ways.
Marlow Moss, on the other hand, was an admirer of the Dutch artist
Piet Mondrian and worked in his geometric abstraction style. Ithell
Colquhoun inclined towards surrealism, as did John Armstrong and
John Tunnard.
It may be that the stimulating exhibition and Tovey’s books will
help to give Lamorna more of an identity of its own. Too often in
the past its artists have tended to be lumped in with those active
in Newlyn. The catalogues for the 1979
Artists of the Newlyn School
(1880-1900) and the 1985
Painting in Newlyn 1880-1930 exhibitions show that Lamorna
Birch, Laura and Harold Knight, Alfred Munnings, Charles Naper,
Stanley Gardiner, and others who
are in either the Penzance exhibition or David Tovey’s books,
sit easily alongside artists associated with Newlyn. Did anyone mark
a definite difference at the time, or did the painters not specify
too much about where they lived? Tovey does suggest that “there were
strong rivalries between the distinct Lamorna and Newlyn
contingents”. It may be a generalisation, but the Newlyn artists did
seem to want to portray the working people of the locality in their
canvases. Few of them can be found in Lamorna paintings.
Newlyn clearly had a longer
lifespan as an artistic centre, but in the end both it and Lamorna
drifted into insignificance other than in historical terms. St Ives
became the main focus of attention after the Second World War when
Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson were prominent in the artistic
life of the town, and a new group of painters, including Peter
Lanyon, Patrick Heron and Bryan Wynter, created abstract art
canvases that brought them national and international fame.
It could be of relevance, in the context of artists in Cornwall, to
point the interested viewer of the fine selection of paintings at
Penlee in the direction of the St Ives Museum where
Discovering St Ives; An
Exhibition of Work by Early Visiting Artists 1830-1890 is well
worth an inspection. It offers paintings by a range of artists, many
of them perhaps not too well-known but interesting, nonetheless.
Several Americans came over from France, including Howard Russell
Butler, William Trost Richards, and Edward Emerson Simmons. The
latter is described as “the leading artist in the Concarneau
colony”. He’s an intriguing figure and the 1885 novel,
Guenn: A Wave on the Breton
Coast by Blanche Willis Howard has at its centre an American
artist reputedly based on Simmons. His autobiography,
From Seven to Seventy,
published in 1922, contains comments about visiting St Ives. The St
Ives exhibition continues until October 2023.
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