The St Ives School refers to a group of artists living and working in the Cornish town of St Ives. [1] The term is often used to refer to the 20th century groups which sprung up after the First World War around such artists as Borlase Smart, however there was considerable artistic activity there from the late 19th Century onwards.
The town became a magnet for artists following the extension to west Cornwall of the Great Western Railway in 1877. Painter James McNeill Whistler and his pupils, Walter Sickert and Mortimer Mempes, arrived in 1884, and spent the winter in the town. [2] The Sloop Inn in St Ives, located on the wharf, was the favourite haunt of Victorian artists including Louis Grier. Many of his paintings hung there in earlier years. [3]
Albert Julius Olsson and Louis Grier opened the town's first art school in 1888, and were later joined by Algernon Talmage. [2] Talmage lived and worked in his studio (then called 'The Cabin', located on Westcotts Quay, St Ives). [4] John Noble Barlow settled in St Ives in 1892, although later, he had a studio in the Lamorna Valley, Cornwall. Thomas Millie Dow moved with his family to St Ives in 1894, where Dow joined his friends and fellow painters Louis Grier and Lowell Dyer as members of the St Ives Art Club. [5]
American Impressionist painters Edward Emerson Simmons and Howard Russell Butler came to St Ives in 1886, and founded a studio at Porthmeor. [6] Butler stayed for two summers, [7] but Simmons and his wife, artist Vesta Simmons, lived and painted in the area until 1891. [8] Swedish artist Anders Zorn painted in St Ives, 1887–88, and his Fish Market, St Ives won a gold medal at the 1889 Paris Salon. [9] American painters Sydney Laurence and Alexandrina Dupre honeymooned in St Ives in Summer 1889, and their stay in the fishing village and art colony eventually extended for nearly fifteen years. [10] Canadian painter Emily Carr came to St Ives in 1899, and studied under Olsson and Talmage. [11] Australian painter Hayley Lever first came to St Ives in 1900, married a local woman, Aida Gale, in 1905, and painted there until their 1914 emigration to the United States, [12] while another Australian E. Phillips Fox met his wife-to-be, artist Ethel Carrick, there in 1903. [13] American painter Walter Elmer Schofield and his wife made St Ives their residence from 1903 to 1907, [14] lived in Perranporth after World War I, and retired to Breage in 1937. [15] Schofield recommended the area to fellow American painters George Oberteuffer, Frank Shill and Frederick Judd Waugh. [15]
In 1920 Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada set up a pottery in St Ives, creating a further international art connection for the town.
In 1928 Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood visited St Ives where they were impressed by the work of local artist Alfred Wallis. This started another strand in the development of the Cornish fishing port as an artists' colony.
The St Ives School of Painting was established in the historic Porthmeor studios at the centre of St Ives' artists' quarter in 1938 by Borlase Smart and Leonard Fuller. [16]
With the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, Ben Nicholson and his then wife the sculptor Barbara Hepworth settled in St Ives, establishing an outpost for the abstract avant-garde movement in west Cornwall. They were soon joined by the prominent Russian Constructivist sculptor Naum Gabo.
After the war ended, a new and younger generation of artists emerged, led by Hepworth and Nicholson (Gabo departed in 1946). From about 1950 a group of younger artists gathered in St Ives who included Peter Lanyon, John Wells, Roger Hilton, Rose Hilton, Bryan Wynter, Patrick Heron, Terry Frost, Alexander Mackenzie, Harry Ousey, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Stass Paraskos, Paul Feiler, and Karl Weschke together with the pioneer modern potter, Bernard Leach (Nicholson departed in 1958), and including, for a while, Sven Berlin. It is with this group, together with Hepworth and Nicholson, that the term 'St Ives School' is particularly associated. [1]
A 2010 ninety-minute BBC 4 film, "The Art of Cornwall", presented by James Fox [17] [18] explored in some detail the lives and works of many of the key figures and the contributions they made in establishing St Ives as a major centre of British art from the 1920s onwards. Helen Hoyle's review of this programme [19] is also very informative.
The heyday of the St Ives School was in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1993, the Tate St Ives, a new, purpose-built art gallery overlooking Porthmeor Beach, was opened which exhibits the Tate collection of St Ives School art.
St Ives is a seaside town, civil parish and port in Cornwall, England, United Kingdom. The town lies north of Penzance and west of Camborne on the coast of the Celtic Sea. In former times, it was commercially dependent on fishing. The decline in fishing, however, caused a shift in commercial emphasis, and the town is now primarily a popular seaside resort, notably achieving the title of Best UK Seaside Town from the British Travel Awards in both 2010 and 2011. St Ives was incorporated by Royal Charter in 1639. St Ives has become renowned for its number of artists. It was named best seaside town of 2007 by The Guardian newspaper.
Dame Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth was an English artist and sculptor. Her work exemplifies Modernism and in particular modern sculpture. Along with artists such as Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo, Hepworth was a leading figure in the colony of artists who resided in St Ives during the Second World War.
Tate St Ives is an art gallery in St Ives, Cornwall, England, exhibiting work by modern British artists with links to the St Ives area. The Tate also took over management of another museum in the town, the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden, in 1980.
Benjamin Lauder Nicholson, OM was an English painter of abstract compositions, landscapes, and still-life. He was one of the leading promoters of abstract art in his country.
Alfred Wallis was a British fisherman and artist known for his port landscapes and shipping scenes painted in a naïve style. Having no artistic training, he began painting at the age of 70, using household paint on scraps of cardboard. He achieved little commercial success, although his work was championed by progressive artists such as Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood.
Patrick Heron was a British abstract and figurative artist, critic, writer, and polemicist, who lived in Zennor, Cornwall.
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham CBE was one of the foremost British abstract artists, a member of the influential Penwith Society of Arts.
George Peter Lanyon was a British painter of landscapes leaning heavily towards abstraction. Lanyon was one of the most important artists to emerge in post-war Britain. Despite his early death at the age of forty-six he achieved a body of work that is amongst the most original and important reappraisals of modernism in painting to be found anywhere. Combining abstract values with radical ideas about landscape and the figure, Lanyon navigated a course from Constructivism through Abstract Expressionism to a style close to Pop. He also made constructions, pottery and collage.
Trevor Bell was an English Leeds-born artist and contemporary visual artist.
Sir Alan Bowness CBE was a British art historian, art critic, and museum director. He was the director of the Tate Gallery between 1980 and 1988.
The Penwith Society of Arts is an art group formed in St Ives, Cornwall, England, UK, in early 1949 by abstract artists who broke away from the more conservative St Ives School. It was originally led by Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, and included members of the Crypt Group of the St Ives Society, including Peter Lanyon and Sven Berlin. Other early members included: Leonard Fuller, Isobel Heath, Alexander Mackenzie, John Wells, Bryan Wynter, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, David Haughton, Denis Mitchell, and the printer Guido Morris. Herbert Read was invited to be the first president.
John Clayworth Spencer Wells was an artist and maker of relief constructions, associated with the St Ives group.
Thomas Millie Dow was a Scottish artist and member of the Glasgow Boys school. He was a member of The Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour and the New English Art Club.
Algernon Mayow Talmage was a British Impressionist painter.
Kate Nicholson was a British painter and the daughter of artist Ben Nicholson and his first wife, the artist Winifred Nicholson.
Partou Zia was a British-Iranian artist and writer. Born in Tehran, she emigrated to England in 1970, where she completed her secondary education at Whitefields school near Hendon, London (1972–78). Zia studied Art History at the University of Warwick (1977–80) and at the Slade School of Fine Art (1986–91). In 2001, she completed a Ph.D. at Falmouth College of Arts and the University of Plymouth. In 1993, she moved to Cornwall where she lived and worked with her husband, the painter Richard Cook, until her death from cancer, in March 2008. Tate St Ives honoured her parting by hanging one of her last completed canvases, Forty Nights and Forty Days as a memorial to her, for a month, at the gallery's entrance.
Sax Impey is a British artist. He currently lives and works in St Ives, Cornwall, England, occupying a Porthmeor studio and continuing in the tradition of Patrick Heron, Ben Nicholson, and other recognized artists.
Albert Julius Olsson was a British maritime artist and keen yachtsman. Olsson cruised with his yacht most summers, and The Studio commented: 'He knows the way from the Scillies to the Isle of Wight as most men know their way to the nearest railway station.'
Robert Borlase Smart RBA ROI RBC RWA SMA, generally known as Borlase Smart worked as an art editor and critic on the Western Morning News / Illustrated Western Weekly News from 1901 to 1913, but is principally known as an artist, in which capacity he became a founding member of the St Ives School during the years following his return from the First World War.
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