Exhibition Guide

This gallery focuses on a number of significant British artists whose major works evolved from the Cornish and Breton landscapes. It highlights the connection between Brittany and St Ives which ultimately led to many established artists from abroad visiting the town.

A pioneer of the coastal scene, James Clarke Hook RA, spent several weeks in St Ives in 1860 producing three major works, including Compassed by the Inviolate Sea for an exhibition at the Royal Academy the following year. Using 'locals' to model, he captured the experience of daily life in remote fishing communities, set against the changing moods of the sea.

Other important Academicians active in St Ives and Cornwall in the 1870s and 80s included the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Brett and marine painter Henry Moore. Brett's immense canvases of the 1880s such as A North-West Gale off Longships Light House 1883 — one of Turner's famous viewpoints — had begun to focus on the atmospheric effects of the coast. He made numerous studies and large-scale paintings in Cornwall, including a number in St Ives (on display in the Studio).

Henry Moore, famed for his coastal and marine subjects, often painted at sea to capture the power and majesty of the 'boundless deep'. Moore was elected Associate Royal Academician in 1885 after his painting of the same year Catspaws off the Land* was purchased by the Chantrey Trust. Importantly he was cited as a major influence on artists Julius Olsson RA and Louis Grier, who set up the internationally-influential School of Landscape and Marine Painting at Porthmeor Studios in St Ives in 1895. Henry Harewood Robinson's painting View of Corncarneau 1884 was made during the time he and his wife Maria Dorethea Webb were staying, like many British and international artists, in Brittany. On leaving France, the Robinsons, along with American Edward Simmons, were the first to actually settle in the town in 1885. Others followed such as Stanhope Forbes with his Canadian fiancée Elizabeth Armstrong, who were to become leading figures of the Newlyn School. By 1887 the colony had expanded again to include Adrian Stokes RA and his Austrian wife Marianne Preindlsberger, alongside Finn Helene Schjerfbeck and the acclaimed Swede, Anders Zorn.

Until the end of the decade St Ives was still very much in the shadow of the Newlyn Colony, which had been established a few years before. The purchase of Adrian Stoke's monumental Uplands and Sky in 1888 by the Chantrey Trustees, however, was not only a great accolade for the artist but also raised St Ives' national profile. Marking a new departure in British landscape painting, it prompted a new generation of landscape and marine painters such as Arnesby Brown, Algernon Talmage and Arthur Meade to come to the town — all of whom can be seen at Penlee House Gallery & Museum, Penzance in Dawn of a Colony: Lyrical Light, St Ives (1889–1914), which covers the next twenty five years.

* Catspaws off the Land will be on show at Tate St Ives from 10 June 2008