180528 Art Talk 28th May: The Newlyn School

Date:  28th May 2018 10:30

Location: Salón de Actos, Espai la Senieta, Moraira (next to the large free car park)

Subject: The Newlyn School

Lecturer: Cheda Panajotovic

 

In 1830 some French ‘Romantic Painters’, hungry for ‘realism’ moved south of Paris to the village of Barbizon. The most prominent features of the Barbizon group are their tonal qualities, colour, loose brushwork, and softness of form. Their choice of painting ‘The Ordinary’ was seen as shocking.

 

When the Great Western Railway extended to Penzance in West Cornwall in 1877, the Cornish fishing town of Newlyn began to attract artists, drawn by the beauty of the scenery, quality of light, simplicity of life and drama of the sea. The artists settling in Newlyn in the early 1880s became known as the Newlyn School.  Newlyn painting combined the impressionist derived doctrine of the Barbizon by working directly from the subject, and where appropriate in the open air, with subject matter drawn from rural life, particularly the life of the fishermen.

The Newlyn painters are hardly mentioned by the Art Buffs of today. There is not one book in print today that encompasses these brave artists although they have produced some of the best paintings that British art has produced – ever!