The Staithes group or Staithes School was an art colony of over 30 19th and early 20th-century painters based or visiting the North Yorkshire fishing village of Staithes, near Whitby. [1] The Staithes Art Club held exhibitions in the village, and later Whitby, from 1901 to 1904 and for this period and a few years afterwards there is a formal membership to the group, unlike many such "colonies". Before and after this many of the artists exhibited with the larger Yorkshire Union of Artists (founded in 1887), whose exhibitions toured to various towns.
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The group often worked in plein air, in oil or watercolour. Their subjects concentrated on the local landscape and coast, and the harsh working lives of the locals. Their styles were in the Realist but loosely handled manner found in the Newlyn school, Manchester School of Painters, and further afield and earlier the Hague School, Barbizon School and many other artists of these years. Today such styles tend to be grouped under French Impressionism, which probably had a a very limited and indirect influence on most of the Staithes painters.
The group contained well-known artists such as Laura Knight, who lived and kept a studio in the village with her husband and fellow painter Harold Knight between 1898 and 1907, Frederick W. Jackson, Edward E. Anderson, Joseph R. Bagshawe, Thomas Barrett and James W. Booth. Others lived in the general region, or visited in the summer to paint.
