Newlyn Artists Fly off the Walls at Bonhams in London
Stunning works by Forbes and Harvey increasingly in demand.
A number of charming paintings by renowned Newlyn artists Stanhope Alexander Forbes RA (1857 – 1947) and Harold Harvey (1874 – 1941) sold for far beyond their estimates prices at Bonhams’ Sale of Victorian Paintings at 101 New Bond Street today (21 June 2007).
Harold Harvey’s Unloading the Boats, Newlyn Harbour, fetched £62,400 (estimate £30,000 – 50,000); and Snared by Stanhope Alexander Forbed made £43,200.Figures on a Country Road, by the same artist, sold for £26,400 against the expected £10,000 – 15,000.
This is not the first time Bonhams has secured high prices for the Newlyn School. An important watercolour by Forbes fetched double its estimate at Bonhams earlier this year. ‘The Quarry Team,’ which was reputedly attacked by suffragettes when it was on display at the Royal Academy in 1894, fetched an impressive £132,000 at Bonhams in March against its estimate of £50,000 – £70,000.
Harold Harvey was an artist whose career straddled the first two generations of Newlyn School painters. Born in Penzance, Harvey spent his entire life based in Cornwall, and he would have grown up witnessing the growth of an artistic community in the tiny fishing village of Newlyn invigorated with the principle of living among their subjects, and painting them in a natural setting.
Stanhope Forbes held a central place in the artistic life of Newlyn. By 1910, Forbes had been elected a full Academician, and his work of the 1900s and 1910s is widely considered his best. By this time, Forbes had been at Newlyn for nearly twenty years, had married there, and established his own school of painting in 1889. He was enjoying commercial success and was a popular figure within the local community and among the other artists, who had been such a feature of the life of the Cornish fishing village since Walter Langley and Edwin Harris first settled there in the early 1880s.
Forbes had always drawn his subject matter from the life of the village, but from 1905 he was beginning to move away from scenes of the harbour and fisherfolk to concentrate more on local farming and trade life. A fascination with the effects of light had always been a theme of his work, whether it was the shimmering of the water on the sand or the warm glow of the light from inside the cottage reflected in the face of the characters.
Related posts:
