Stanhope Forbes School of Painting

Towards the end of the 19th Century the number of artists in the local artists colony known as the Newlyn School began to dwindle. In 1896, three years before he opened his eponymous School, Forbes was one of the main protagonists of the Newlyn Society of Artists in which he remained the leading force for many years. Stanhope Forbes and his Canadian born wife Elizabeth Forbes founded their School of Painting in 1899 a decade after they had married. It has been speculated that Forbes opened to school in order to attract a new generation of artists to the area. He was successful and the likes of Ernest Procter and his future wife Dod Shaw, Frank Heath, Eleanor and Robert Morson Hughes enrolled in his classes. The School (formally known as the Newlyn School of Painting) promoted the study of figure painting and was dedicated in particular to ‘plein-air’ principles and the necessity of working directly from the subject. The demise of the school was c. 1940 by which time Forbes had stopped his activities as a plein-air painter and the St. Ives School of Painting had opened.