Open-air Art with a Spot of Realism

Newlyn is the only working fishing port in England associated with artists since 1880.

Although not the first artist to work in Newlyn, Stanhope Forbes is the most well-known and was called the “Farther of the Newlyn School”. It was he who said, ‘The Newlyners are followers of no one – simply a body of artists who paint in the open air.’

But he was no accurate in saying so. The Newlyn School, in those years, followed the idea of open-air painting as practiced by the French artist Jules Lepage.

Painting in the open air was a phenomenon of the 19^th century. Its most celebrated exponent was Jean Francois Millet who pleasant life in Barbison. The Impressionists also painted directly from nature, but their approach to it was to analyze tone, light and colour as they affected surfaces rarther than to record reality. So it may be said that reality was ignored by open-air painting. Unfortunately, Lepage and his English follower George Clausen were only interested in landscape, painting the peasants as idyllic fixtures, the realty of rural poverty being rarely evident.

This is also true of the Newlyn School. True, there are many paintings of fishermen and women but the emphasis is on landscape and paintings of friends.

Romanticism combined with naturalism and a touch of realism made the Newlyn School successful later on, especially at the Royal Academy. However, there were exceptions. The Royal Academy rejected early Stanhope Forbes as representing a foreign influence, particularly his most famous painting “The Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach”.

But recently he has again been considered worthy of exhibition as a major British painter.

After becoming a Royal Academician in 1910 Forbes changed his emphasis from tone to colour and his figures became incidental to the landscape. Yet he still maintained his loyalty to painting from nature.

Apart from Forbes the most important Newlyn artist was a woman, Dod Proctor. Not because she recorded reality, which she did not, but for her handling of light and tone which gave her figures a solid three-dimensional reality.

Dame Laura Knight is also to be recommended. She moved to Newlyn from miners’ area, where she had painted some notable interiors of their homes. While being in the miners’ area she made her miner models, who were short of food and clothes.

The Newlyn School stood out due to its opposition to the idealized sentimentality of the Pre-Raphaelites, the leading school of painting in England in the 19^th century, which was dealing with a romantic medieval past that never was. At any rate the Newlyn School, though not dealing with the complexities of reality, did at least begin with an observation of the external world, wich may free the artist from their artistic seclusion and bring them closer to reality.

Words:

· accurate ['ækjəreit] – точный, достоверный

· exponent [eks'pəʋnent] – представитель

· approach [ə'prəʋtʃ] – подход

· open-air painting – живопись на пленэре, пленэрная живопись

· emphasis – акцент

· incidental – эпизодический, случайный

· handling of light and tone – владение светом и цветом

· three-dimensional – трехмерный

· seclusion – уединение, изоляция

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