Cornish Childhoods at Penlee

Today we went to the lovely Penlee House Gallery in Penzance, where the current exhibition, just opened, is A Cornish Childhood: Paintings of Children 1880-1940. The exhibition blurb talks about the lives of children in the county having been recorded by some prominent artists, looking at children’s pastimes from playing on the beach to going to Sunday School. Paintings of children can be a little problematic because of the tendency towards idealization and nostalgia, and it’s true that there is plenty here to provoke nostalgia, but actually the sentimentality is kept to a minimum and there are some very interesting paintings here – both as works of art, and as a collection which documents children’s historical lives in Cornwall.

Laura Knight’s paintings are, of course, well-represented here, with paintings such as In the Sun, Newlyn (1910) (left) which has a wonderful holiday feel to it, and which contrasts interestingly with Dorothea Sharp’s more nostalgic and, dare I say it, slightly twee pictures. Knight’s images of children seem nicely un-posed and relaxed, as though she caught them unawares. Other pictures, such as Jessie Ada Titcomb’s When All the World Was Young, c 1895, are carefully constructed to provide shape to the canvas, with young girls in white dancing in a flower meadow in a rather aestheticised construction that, bizarrely, reminded me of The Dance by Matisse. Some pictures are a little Famous Five, particularly Frank Gascoigne Heath’s paintings of his family at Lamorna, though the children remain real children, not idealized or seeming overly posed or synthesized.

There are many paintings by Harold Harvey in the exhibition, including Wading Ashore (1909), which I like because the child wading looks sunburned and cross at having to carry her sibling, as if making no concession to the painter. Harvey’s remarkable sunlit scene in Apples (1912), the girl’s face screwed up against the bright light, is reminiscent of Ford Madox Brown’s The Pretty Baa Lambs. One of the most striking images of the exhibition, I thought, was Harvey’s The Gate (1919), which shows an almost naive landscape and children, a boy sitting on a gate playing a pipe to two girls. It’s so evocative one can almost hear the music drifting across the fields behind them in the sunlight – and all the more poignant for its date, just after the end of the Great War, when such innocence was to be treasured. There are, of course, pictures here that are less about innocence and more about the lives of Cornish children – collecting firewood, or carrying water; as apprentices, or leading horses. The sadder side of childhood seems apparent in Walter Langley’s paintings, which seem to specialize in wistful looking children, particularly in paintings such as A Fisherman’s Son (1884), in which a small boy sadly contemplates his toy boat, leading the viewer to suspect that he has lost his father to the sea, a theme also present in Memories (1885). This is a very full exhibition, with a wide range of themes relating to childhood, and one which will have a wide appeal, not just to the summer season of holiday-makers, but to those with all kinds of interests in art, too.

Ancient Cornwall

One of the many amazing things about Cornwall is the sheer number of really ancient stones and monuments that are literally just lying in fields, waiting for people to notice them. Once you’ve visited a few, you find yourself peering past every hedge looking for more. Every year we revisit a few favourites, and I always find them fascinating and inscrutable. The legends which often surround them are also fascinating. Probably my favourite is the Merry Maidens (left), near to Trewoofe and Porthcurno, which is the most complete stone circle in Cornwall – 19 granite stones, of similar sizes and perfectly evenly spaced. Legend has it that they were girls who danced on a Sunday, and were turned to stone for not observing the day of rest (this legend was probably put about by the early church to discourage pagan practices in Cornwall). Their pipers, who provided the music they danced to, are represented too, by two stones at either end of the field.

Another amazing place is Men-an-tol (right), which means “holed stone”, near Madron. There’s plenty of information about it here, but I must say that I am particularly amused by the legend that a person suffering from rheumatism or spinal problems should crawl through the hole nine times, facing the sun, in order to be cured. It’s not a very big hole, even for bronze-age adults, and I decided against trying to see if I would fit, but surely if you are in pain already this is the last thing you’d want to do! It’s a fascinating place, though, and there are spectacular views from Men-an-tol.

Another place not to be missed is Lanyon Quoit (below), an ancient dolmen also known as the Giant’s Table. Apparently, this used to be much taller than it now is, and until the eighteenth century, one could ride under it on horseback. Then, one of the supporting stones broke, and when it was repaired, it was much shorter. Now, you might be able to ride a small dog under it, but I couldn’t stand upright. It may have been a burial mound or a cenotaph, and it seems that some kind of pagan ceremonies were performed there. I imagine it’s popular with local druids and hippies.

There are loads more places – you could spend weeks wandering from one to another (and getting quite lost in the process – we were helped greatly by a recently purchased ordnance survey map). One of the places I haven’t yet been, but am keen to go, is Chysauster, an ancient village just outside Penzance now managed by English Heritage. You get a wonderful sense of how truly ancient Cornwall is, looking at these places and imagining what might have gone on there in the past.  There’s plenty more information on Cornwall’s Archaeological Heritage site, which is very helpful.

Wild Cornwall

Penlee House Gallery in Penzance always seems to have something interesting to offer whenever I visit (plus they do the best cakes in the cafe!) This time, it was Wild Cornwall, to celebrate Darwin’s 200^th birthday by showing artists’ impressions of “the flora and fauna of Cornwall”. Great idea, lovely exhibition with plenty of informative stuff, photos as well as paintings, stuffed animals and other exhibits; but I did feel it needed some more signposting to make it more relevant to Darwin. The links are there, I see that, but it just felt like an exhibition about the Cornish countryside. And that’s fine, because it did that very well.

Paintings by the Newlyn school in particular of St Michael’s Mount, Land’s End and other local places are displayed side by side with stuffed herons and photographs of crustaceans. And there are some real gems here: I was especially taken with Breakers (1895) by David James, an oil painting of waves so real one could almost taste the salt spray. The colour, the shape of the waves – this seems to me to be perfected realism. Not that that’s possible, but anyway….

Harold Harvey’s pastoral scenes, verdant and somehow reminiscent of Virgil with their figures in the verdant landscapes, also feature throughout. By contrast, Charles Naper’s Towards Land’s End shows the rock formations as almost cubist, gesturing towards a manmade structure, something that many paintings of rock formations do, I’ve noticed. Perhaps the painting that most took my fancy, purely for aesthetics, was Frank Gascoigne Heath’s Madonna Lilies (1930), which foregrounds the flowers against the Cornish landscape in a blaze of white which transfixed me.

The Magic of a Line

The Magic of a Line: Drawings and prints from the Newlyn School artists, Penlee Gallery, Penzance
After visiting the Laura Knight exhibition in Nottingham earlier this year, I’ve been looking forward to this – and it didn’t disappoint. The title of the exhibition is taken from the title of Laura Knight’s autobiography, and nicely suits the works included. Incidentally, this exhibition is part of the Campaign for Drawing’s annual “Big Draw”, to encourage everyone to pick up a pencil, and there was paper and pencils all around the exhibition for anyone who felt so inclined.
Many of the drawings in the early part of the exhibition were by the Birmingham-born Walter Langley, whose Newlyn School drawings display wonderful local flavour and attention to character. “Study for a Daydream” (1884), a portrait of a distracted young girl, had perfect, dreamy eyes, ignoring the viewer. The grainy effects of his lines are put to good use in images of local scenes, and characters such as elderly, weatherbeaten fishermen, whose relationship with the sea is etched in every line of their faces. Langley was clearly particularly interested in the local habitat, exploring the domestic side-effects of the local fishing trade such as wives left at home as their husbands were on the sea, widows and children portrayed inside the bare cottages. The tragedy of life in the area is particularly well-depicted in “Among the Missing”, where a woman, supported by an older woman, reads her husband’s name on the list of the dead. Other pictures such as “Alone” show the desolation after the death of a husband, while “Widowed” shows the young widow cared for by her mother.
The sea provides metaphors for other aspects of life, particularly death. In William Holt Yates Titcomb’s “Piloting her Home”, 1893, an old woman lies in bed, awaiting death with a radiance of divine love and peace on her face, while those around her raise their hands to God. Similarly, Langley’s Study for “The Seas are Quiet” shows an elderly lady lying on pillows, smiling, with the turbulence of her life past.
One of my favourite pictures here was Stanhope Alexander Forbes’s “The Cello Player” – one can almost hear the sonorous music in this dark and thoughtful study. I found this drawing to be more like his wife’s than many of his are: Elizabeth Adela Forbes’s drawings of “The Bakehouse” and “The Cornish Pasty” depict dark interiors, with only the figure in action lit for the viewer, suggested a theatricality in the ‘staging’ of the drawing. I’d not seen her illustrations for King Arthur’s Wood (1904) before, but was struck by their delightful medievalism – the wonderful texture of her other drawings is here used to evoke myth and enchantment. I was also interested in Thomas Cooper Gotch’s Pre-Raphaelite-esque cartoons for “A Mother Enthroned”, in which a mother of many daughters is clearly paralleled to the Virgin Mary. (see painting, left)
Harold Knight didn’t get much of a look-in here, with just a few portraits of almost photographic detail; but beside those of his wife Dame Laura they seem to lack conviction, while her portraits of young women – “Seated Girl Reading”, 1892, “Self Portrait”, etc, have so much life, feeling and movement even in repose. Knight seems to have a gift, in her portraits, for convincing the viewer of the character of the sitter with just a few lines. I was caught by “Madonna”, 1923 – very much of its time, this seems to be an early echo of the later theatrical works by Knight, despite the beatific expression on the Madonna’s face. Few of the works here are theatrical, though there is a wonderful sketch of “George Bernard Shaw Posing for his Bust”, but there are some amazing leaves from her sketchbook, which give an excellent insight into the clean lines she uses for movement and grace in the dancers she later painted – especially the ballerinas’ arms, so hard to capture correctly. I also rather liked “Country Girls” (1926) – especially appealing, I think: three girls seated together, side on; one looks anxiously – or is it slyly? – at the viewer, while the other two gaze unconcernedly into the distance. It’s stylised and of the period, yet still seems so natural.
Somehow I find going to an exhibition of drawings a very different experience to one with paintings – less colour, less large, dramatic paintings, more shadows and darkly intense, small pictures. And there are some perfect gems here.