The following is a transcript of notes that Michael Canney made for a talk in 1983 (adapted, where possible, for readability), focusing on the transition from “traditional” art to “modern”.

Although much of it takes the form of lists, it is given here in the hope that it might be a useful snapshot for anyone researching art in West Penwith, particularly St Ives, during the mid-20th century.

Tourism latterly priced artists out of St Ives, with the result that they moved to surrounding areas and Newlyn.

The old St Ives Society at the Porthmeor Gallery had the air of a French atelier. The Mariner’s Chapel was Church of England, but the fishermen were mostly Methodists, so had little use for it. As a result, it was available for use as a gallery. Borlase Smart and Lamorna Birch were sympathetic to the “moderns”, and a corner in the gallery was given over to them, Hepworth and Nicholson. Hotels and cafés in St Ives used to be full of paintings. There was a large mural in the teashop in the main street (still there?). When the moderns came in, old artists thought St Ives was finished as a colony. The moderns supported Alfred Wallis and this was thought to be a pose on their part and an indication of their wrong thinking. The general opinion of the old guard was that Cézanne (who was God to the moderns) could not draw and had defective eyesight.

Early artists studied in ateliers, and brought this camaraderie and friendly spirit of the atelier to St Ives and Newlyn. The moderns were more individualistic and tended to keep themselves to themselves much more. The open studio was not so common. Old artists did not look much beyond the Royal Societies and the Royal Academy. Moderns looked to the international scene.

Show days, on March 6th annually, were an open house which revealed the mystery of the artist’s studio to the public. The moderns’ mystery lay in their art. At old St Ives Arts Club, the social gatherings were very different from the more self-conscious and intense meetings of a later generation.

A vital change from the old days to later was from a publicly demonstrated art – artist with easel and paints in the streets or on the coast – to the abstract artist in his studio, a private preoccupation. As a result, there was less rapport with the locals, and less appreciation and respect for the work done and for those who did it. This did not mean that the moderns did not have a good relationship with some of the locals, but the general appreciation had to be less. Castle Inn was favoured, as opposed to the old bohemian Sloop: at the Sloop, paintings on the walls were supposed to have been given to settle debts, or were caricatures of locals. Castle Inn pictures, by contrast, were exhibition pictures – polemical in nature.

Original art had been sunny, nostalgic, picturesque, of idealised days on the beach, views, old fishermen, stormy seas, basically holiday art, holiday souvenirs, escapist,  of the sub-Impressionist Manet-cum-Barbizon School. It was atmospheric painting, essentially – a particular time of day in particular weather. The modern works, on the other hand, used local colour, and were concerned with the construction of the picture, structure in nature and in art, the essential West Penwith. They were, curiously enough, more like the place as it really was.

Charles Simpson [a noted painter of animals and birds] had a school of painting in St Ives, 1921-25.

Borlase Smart’s book on Marine Painting was very well received. Smart painted seas, Lamorna Birch, running water!

[John Singer] Sargent was a strong influence in local water-colours.

Annie Walke  (wife of clergyman Bernard Walke) painted at St Hilary. She exhibited always at St Ives.

Marlow Moss left Cornwall in 1926 to work on the Continent; she returned to Lamorna in 1941 and died in Penzance in 1958. She did not exhibit locally.

Cornish-born artists

John Barnicoat

Michael Canney

Peter Ellery

Dick Gilbert

Jeremy Le Grice

Gert Harvey

Harold Harvey

Marion Grace Hocken

Mary Jewels

Lamorna Kerr

Denis Lane.

Andrew Lanyon

Peter Lanyon

Margo Maeckelberghe

Joan Manning-Saunders

Bill Marshall

Scott Marshall

Brian Pearce

Jack Pender

Terry Pope

Michael Praed

Robin Welch

John Wells

Child prodigy

Joan Manning-Saunders, exhibited at the Royal Academy in the 1930s.

Art schools

Falmouth

Penzance

Redruth (with evening classes at Camborne School of Mines)

Truro

Private schools

Charles Breaker and Eric Hiller’s Sketching Group.

Gulval-Trevaylor Summer School

Leonard Fuller’s St Ives School of Painting

Porthleven Summer School

St Peter’s Loft, St Ives

Stanhope and Maude Forbes’ Newlyn School

Principal

At Redruth and Camborne – Arthur C Hambly, RWA, trained at West of England College of Art, Bristol.

Students

At local schools included:

Sven Berlin

Michael Canney

Peter Ellery

Terry Frost

Jeremy Le Grice (at St Peter’s Loft)

Marion Hocken

Peter Lanyon

Terry Pope

Michael Praed

Robin Welch

Nancy Wynne-Jones (at St Peter’s Loft)

Teachers

Bernard Leach and John Tunnard both taught at Penzance Art School, Denis Mitchell at Redruth and Pool Technical College.

Galleries

Cheviock Gallery, North Cornwall

Fore Street Gallery, St Ives

Orion Gallery, Penzance

Passmore Edwards Art Gallery, Newlyn

Penwith Gallery

Polytechnic Gallery, Falmouth

Porthleven Gallery

Royal Institution of Cornwall Gallery, Truro

Sail Loft Gallery (Elena Gaputyte)

St Ives Society of Artists

Artists

(signifies small or large collections of artists)

Falmouth

Newlyn

Lamorna

Lizard peninsula.

Looe

Mevagissey

Mousehole

Paul

Polperro

Porthleven

Sennen

St Agnes

St Ives

Outsiders

Robert Adams/St Ives

Francis Bacon/St Ives

Sandra Blow/Zennor

Merlyn Evans/St Ives

Charles Ginner/Porthleven.

Adrian Heath/Newlyn/St Ives

Frances Hodgkins/Newlyn and elsewhere

Kokoschka/Polperro

Peter Potworowski/Sancreed

William Scott/Sennen/Mousehole/Sancreed

Jack Smith/Sancreed

Matthew Smith/St Columb

Christopher Wood/St Ives/Mousehole/Hayle/Charlestown 

Artists showing at Newlyn

(Many of the following could be seen regularly at Newlyn 1956-64. There were also six one-man shows in the lower gallery annually.)

Stuart Amfield

Shearer Armstrong

Giles Auty

Garlick Barnes

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham

Dorothy Bayley

Frank Beanland

Trevor Bell

Anthony Benjamin

Peter Blakely

S J Bland

Dorothy Bordass

Bob Bourne

Vister Bramley

Charles Breaker

Robert Brennan

Angus Brent

Edna Bridge

Michael Broido

Midge Bruford

Michael Canney

Breon O’Casey

Brenda Chamberlayn

Helen Clark

Ithell Colquhoun

Roy Conn

Fred Cook

Bob Crossley

Pat Dolan

Agnes Drey

Mary Duncan

Tom Early

Patty Elwood

Raymond Exworth

Bill Featherstone

June Feiler

Paul Feiler

Michael Finn

Clifford Fishwick

Pat Fishwick

Jane Furness

Elena Gaputyte,

Alethea Garstin

Dick Gilbert

Joan Gilchrist

Sybil Mullen Glover

Arthur Goodwin

Derek Guthrie

Geoffrey Harris

Patrick Hayman

Van Hear

Michael Heard

Isobel Heath

Francis Hewlett

Eric Hiller

Roger Hilton

Rose Hilton

Marion Hocken

John Hoskin

Bouverie Hoyton

Inez Hoyton

Liz Hunter

Mary Jewels

Ewart Johns

Eddie Kalma

Jo Keene

Lamorna Kerr

George Lambourn

Denis Lane

Peter Lanyon

Bob Law

Denys Law

Bernard Leach

Janet Leach

Jeremy Le Grice

Mary Le Grice

Roger Leigh

Keith Leonard

Alexander Mackenzie

Margo Maeckelberghe

Tony O’Malley

Mynert Marks

Bill Marshall

Jeanne du Maurier

Jack Merriott

John Miller

John Milne

Lionel Miskin

Denis Mitchell

Alice Moore

Marjorie Mort

Kate Nicholson

Patrick Oliver

John Peace

Brian Pearce

Misome Peile

Jack Pender

Biddy Picard

Peter Potworowski

Dod Procter, RA

Quixley

Peter Rainsford

Bill Redgrave

Albert Reuss

Adrian Ryan

Ann Sefton

Segal

Tony Shiels

Charles Simpson

Michael Snow

Ken Symonds

Bruce Taylor

Joe Tilson

G Tomlin

Barbara Tribe

John Tunnard

Rosemary Tunstall-Behrens

Brian Wall

Billie Waters

Gillian Watkiss

Reg Watkiss

Robin Welch

John Wells

Karl Weschke

Alan Wood

Guy Worsdell

Nancy Wynn-Jones

Passmore Edwards Art Gallery

Curators prior to 1956: Miss Chevalier Taylor, Wallace Nicholls (poet and writer), Eileen Hunt. The last named introduced a number of modern artists for the first time. Michael Canney extended this policy, refurbished the gallery, opened up the lower gallery and installed a spiral staircase to it from the main gallery, and started a successful film society, Christmas exhibitions of low-priced works (£10 and under) and obtained an Arts Council grant for the Society in 1956. The gallery was visited regularly by the Directors of Art of the Arts Council, Philip James and Gabriel White, and by the Regional Officers of the Arts Council, including Alan Bowness. Mark Rothko visited the gallery.

Newlyn

Compared to St Ives, Newlyn represented a quiet scene, less frenetic or active. During the period 1956-65, artists in Newlyn were:

Giles Auty

Sydney Josephine Bland

Charles Breaker

Edna Bridge

Michael Canney

June Feiler

Paul Feiler

Derek Guthrie

Gert Harvey

Eric Hiller

Roger Hilton

Bouverie Hoyton,

Inez Hoyton

Mary Jewels

Alexander Mackenzie

Marjorie Mort

Dod Procter, RA

Hassel Smith

Barbara Tribe

Gillian Watkiss

Reg Watkiss

John Wells

Earlier Newlyn artists had included:

Frank Dobson (pupil at Stanhope Forbes’s school)

Harold Harvey

Frances Hodgkins (pupil at Stanhope Forbes’s school)

Harold Knight

Laura Knight (she had a studio, subsequently bought by John Tunnard, at Lamorna)

Algernon Newton (father of film actor Robert Newton)

Cedric Morris

Lamorna Birch resided at Lamorna. All of these artists were preceded by the early Newlyn School of Forbes, Bramley, etc, although Birch could be said to represent a link between old and new artists.

The latest influx of artists to Newlyn has included Terry Frost, Denis Mitchell, Michael Broido, and Breon O’Casey at Paul.

Artists at Paul included Midge Bruford, Ithell Colquhoun (still there), and I think Mary Duncan, Paul Feiler at Kerris, and June Feiler.

Artists at Mousehole

Joan Gilchrist

George Lambour (who had a school and a gallery)

Jack Pender

Albert Reuss (who had a gallery too)

Adrian Ryan

William Scott (in the 1950s)

-- Seeley

Hassel Smith

Arnesby Brown painted around Camborne.

At St Ives, immediately pre-war  and after:

Shearer Armstrong

Garlick Barnes

Barry

Dorothy Bayley

Fred Bottomley

C. F. Bradshaw

Agnes Drey

Leonard Fuller

Isobel Heath

Moffat Lindner

Maidment

Marjorie Mostyn

Bernard Ninnes

Julius Ollson

John Park

Misome Peile

Leonard Richmond

Harry Rowntree

Ann Sefton

Dorothea Sharp

Borlase Smart

L. E. Walsh

Billie Waters

Terrick Williams

Frank Brangwyn showed with the St Ives Society

At Lamorna:

Lamorna Birch

Lamorna Kerr (Birch’s daughter)

Denys Law

Marlow Moss (Mondrian’s main disciple and founder member of Abstraction-Creation in France, friend of Herbin, Max Bill, and leading European abstractionists)

John Tunnard

Artists in Penzance:

Robert Brennan

Alethea Garstin

Margo Maeckelberghe

Charles Simpson (a pupil of Stanhope Forbes, he lived at St Ives as well as Penzance)

Artists at St Just:

Jeremy Le Grice

Mary Le Grice

David Haughton

Paul Mount

Reg Watkiss

Gillian Watkiss

Karl Weschke