Читать книгу Great Book of Spoon Carving Patterns - Joseph Fullman - Страница 24

These days art is one of the West Country’s biggest draws, with thousands coming each year to visit the galleries of Newlyn and St Ives on the North Cornwall coast, which in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were home to thriving and highly influential artists’ communities. The first painters arrived in Newlyn in the early 1880s attracted by the inspiring coastal landscapes, simple rural life and clean pure light. Trained in the Impressionist schools of France, the artists saw in Cornwall something reminiscent of the coastal villages of Brittany, or at least felt able to project the vision taught to them in Brittany on to the Cornish coast. However, it was the arrival on the scene of the Irish painter, Stanhope Forbes, that really set in motion the creation of a specific ‘Newlyn School’. His paintings captured the rural customs and hardy lifestyles of the locals, particularly the fishermen, with whom he became increasingly fascinated. These sometimes rather sentimental portrayals of fishing life gained great favour, following exhibitions at the Royal Academy in London, and other artists soon followed in his wake, including Norman Garstin, who seemed to specialize in portraits of bedraggled people walking in the rain, most famously in The Rain it Raineth Everyday, and Henry Scott Tuke, whose almost obsessive outdoor studies of young nude males have seen him dubbed as a pioneer of gay culture and homoerotic art. Incidentally, most of the subjects in his portraits are not locals but models brought in from London. Cornish fishermen were having no truck with that sort of thing.

Above all, what these artists shared in common was a desire to move painting out of the studio (and indeed out of the city) into the open air, en plein air as the French put it, to paint people going about their everyday lives in pure, natural light. The Newlyn scene continued into the 20th century when a second wave of artists arrived in town, including Forbes’ wife, Elizabeth, but its reputation was soon superseded by that of St Ives, just down the road, the new cool kid on the artistic block.

Artists and craftsmen had been settling and painting in St Ives for decades, but it was the establishment of a studio by the potters Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada in the 1920s that brought the wider world’s attention to the work going on here. The St Ives Pottery was almost singlehandedly responsible for the creation of Britain’s studio pottery movement of the next few decades, a movement characterized by the creation of simple, plain pottery in a small studio, with all the processes controlled by a single potter. Leach’s philosophy – largely derived from the mingei folk movement of Japan where he had spent much time studying – was that pots should be first and foremost utilitarian objects, not pieces of art, and that function must always dictate form.

The St Ives fine art scene began in the late 1920s with Ben Nicholson’s discovery and promotion of a local retired fisherman and amateur artist, Alfred Wallis, who had taken up painting just a few years earlier after the death of his wife (‘for company’). Wallis’ naive depictions of local fishing life, often painted on pieces of driftwood or bits of cardboard packaging, attracted a great deal of appreciation from artists both in St Ives and in London, although unfortunately not with the wider art-buying public. Despite Nicholson’s earnest championing, Wallis was never able to make a steady living out of his art and died in penury in 1942.

His mentor fared considerably better. Nicholson became the figurehead of the St Ives School, which, though similarly inspired by the rugged, natural beauty of the area as its Newlyn predecessor, leaned more towards a non-figurative, semi-abstract approach to art, as highlighted by Nicholson’s own work and that of his second wife, the sculptor, Barbara Hepworth, who was profoundly inspired by the contours of the Cornish landscape.

The couple split in the 1950s, with Nicholson moving to Switzerland, while Hepworth continued to live and work in St Ives, overseeing the rise of a new group of artists in the 1950s and 60s – including people such as Peter Lanyon, Bryan Wynter, John Wells, Roger Hilton and Terry Frost – and watching the movement undergo a split between those who still wanted to take a semi-realistic approach to their paintings and those, of whom Hepworth was one, who favoured abstraction (and who would form their own splinter group, the Penwith Society). Hepworth kept busy until her death in a fire in 1975. Her house and garden are today a museum dedicated to her work and influence (see here). In 1993 the importance of St Ives’ artistic legacy was given further acknowledgement with the opening of the Tate St Ives, an outpost of the great London gallery dedicated to British art (see here).

Newlyn also boasts its own grand collection, the Newlyn Art Gallery (see here) , one of the finest for contemporary art outside of London. Other notable galleries in the Southwest include: the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery (see here), which contains works by both Nicholson and Hepworth, a gallery of Pre-Raphaelite paintings and a whole gallery devoted to works by the Bristol School, a group of Romantic artists who practised in the city in the early 19th century; Bath’s Victoria Art Gallery (see here), whose collection features works by some of the numerous caricaturists who came to the city in the 18th and early 19th centuries to capture and satirize society life, including John Nixon and James Gillray; and the Plymouth Museum & Art Gallery (see here), which has a wall dedicated to the city’s most famous artistic resident and chronicler of pub life, Beryl Cook (see here), plus a gallery devoted to works by artists of ‘St Ives and the Southwest’.

Bristol’s streets and houses also provide an al fresco gallery for the protest graffiti and whimsical stencilling of local anonymous self-styled ‘guerrilla artist’, Banksy. If they haven’t been painted over yet, works to look out for include a stencil of Charon, the ferryman for the dead, on the side of town’s club boat Thekla, and the Love triangle, which shows a naked fleeing man hanging from a window at which his mistress and her husband stand (painted appropriately enough on the wall of sexual health clinic).