Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Painting & Sculpture
The Early Years
Cornwall's role as artistic magnet arguably began when JMW Turner toured the southwest
in 1811 while painting watercolours for the engravings
Picturesque Views on the Southern
Coast of England
. Turner travelled widely, but it was under Cornwall's wide-open skies
that his passion for dreamy, ethereal landscapes found fullest expression. Many feel the
artist's West Country sojourn played an important part in his enduring fascination with
light, colour and form; the sketchbooks and canvases he produced there provide tantalising
glimpses of his later, quasi-abstract experiments.
For Turner, though, it wasn't all about views. An observer of contemporary society,
many of his paintings provide an insight into early-19th-century Cornish life.
St Mawes at
the Pilchard Season
(1812) depicts a chaotic harbour filled with pilchard boats and bustling
villagers, backed by a St Mawes Castle bathed in Turneresque sunlight. It's a moody con-
trast of social realism and romantic scenery and is intriguing both in terms of Turner's own
work and the next major artistic movement to develop in Cornwall.
Impressionism
The Great Western Railway edging west of the Tamar in 1877 really put Cornwall on the
artistic map. Now painters had relatively easy access to the county's landscapes, and they
arrived in ever-increasing numbers as the century progressed.
The Impressionist movement had developed in Normandy and Brittany as Monet, Pis-
sarro, Dégas and Eugène Boudin perfected painting
en plein air
(on location, rather than
working from sketches in a studio), a technique designed to capture the immediacy of a
scene. It encouraged others to travel to the southwest, among them the German-born artist
Walter Sickert and the American James McNeill Whistler.
The Newlyn School
While some artists dabbled with the colours and forms of Impressionism, others took a
markedly more figurative approach. In the early 1880s, a group of artists settled around the
fishing port of Newlyn, spearheaded by Birmingham-born Walter Langley, Dubliner Stan-
hope Forbes and the Lincolnshire artist Frank Bramley. Following in the footsteps of the
