Newlyn School

Many of the artists who began visiting Newlyn, Cornwall in the early 1880’s had trained and worked with the artists' colonies of France. Much influenced by the plein air approach of the Impressionists, they were attracted by the similarity of light and landscape of the Cornish peninsula to that of Brittany. Among the first to settle in Newlyn were Walter Langley and Edwin Harris, who arrived there in 1882. They were followed by Stanhope Forbes in 1884, and it was the success of his painting "A Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach" at the RA Summer Exhibition of 1885 that first established Newlyn as an artists' colony. Over the next five years the group was augmented by a number of other artists who showed regularly with the NEAC and the RA – such as Elizabeth Armstrong, Fred Hall, and Henry Scott Tuke – and by the end of the 1880’s the colony was established as the 'Newlyn School'.

It soon became recognized for its figure compositions portraying the life of the Cornish fishing villages and modelled from the local population. The Newlyn Society of Artists was formed and Stanhope Forbes remained the leading force of the colony for many years. In 1899 he married Elizabeth Armstrong, and together they opened the Stanhope Forbes School of Painting, which introduced much new talent to the area. Dod and Ernest Procter were among the school's early students and, among the second generation of artists to settle in the colony were Harold and Laura Knight, Harold and Gertrude Harvey, Lamorna Birch and Alfred Munnings. Several of the artists who came to Newlyn spent the greater part of their working lives there, and the region has remained popular with artists throughout the twentieth century. With the art boom of the 1980’s and the advent of the Modern British art category, many of the early Newlyn artists were 'rediscovered' and the value of their works have escalated in the salerooms.