Elizabeth Adela Forbes

Self-portrait (around 1900)

Elizabeth Forbes (born Armstrong , * 29. December 1859 in Kingston , Ontario ; † 16th March 1912 in Newlyn , Cornwall ) was a Canadian painter of the late Impressionism and important representative of the Newlyn School , an artists' colony in the late 19th and early 20th Century. She worked with opaque water colors , pastel and oil colors , but also created etchings .

life and work

Elizabeth Adela Armstrong was the only daughter and youngest child of a Canadian government official. Her parents encouraged her early on in her artistic inclinations and gave her drawing lessons. They later decided that Elizabeth would benefit from an artistic training in England. So she and her mother moved to London , where she lived with an uncle on Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, not far from William Michael Rossetti , and attended the South Kensington Art Schools . She did not see her father again as he died of a stroke a few months later.

Elizabeth Armstrong returned to Canada with her mother around 1878 and, during a stay in New York City, came into contact with artists from the circle of the Art Students League , from whom she was taught for three years. She gained an insight into the work of European artists and got to know open-air painting. In particular, William Merritt Chase taught her to admire the work of Jean-François Millet and Jules Bastien-Lepage and persuaded her to continue her education in Munich, since he believed Munich to be superior to Paris as an art center. In 1881/1882, however, she only spent five months at Frank Duveneck's academy in the Munich area, because she felt that she was not taken seriously and that she was rejected.

In 1882 Elizabeth Armstrong, accompanied by her mother, traveled to Pont-Aven in Brittany and took rooms at the Hotel des Voyageurs. Her fellow students from the Art Students League in New York had encouraged her to visit this city and its artists' colony . Here she began using the local population as models and sent her works to the Royal Institute of Oil Painters in London, where they were all sold on the opening day. Her future husband Stanhope Forbes was painting in Brittany at the same time and lived in Quimperlé .

The Zandvoort Fishergirl (1884)

In 1883 she came back to London and in 1884 went to Zandvoort in Holland , where she created one of her best paintings, The Zandvoort Fishergirl . After the summer of 1884 she returned to London, where she by Walter Sickert and James Abbott McNeill Whistler , the drypoint learned. She became a member of the Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers and has exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery and the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colors .

Elizabeth Armstrong had heard of a growing Cornish artist colony known as the Newlyn School and first visited it in 1885. There she met Stanhope Forbes , met him again the following year and finally settled with him in Newlyn. In August 1889 the couple married at St Peter's Church in Newlyn. That year her oil painting School Is Out was exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts , which is now one of her best-known works. In 1891 she won a medal at the International Exhibition in Paris and was made a member of the Grosvenor Gallery Pastel Society . In 1893 their only child was born, Alec, who lost his life in the First World War .

After some artists left Newlyn in the late 19th century, Elizabeth Adela Forbes and her husband founded the Newlyn School of Painting in 1899 , where they taught students and friends. This has drawn a new generation of artists to the Newlyn area. In 1900 the artist was elected a member of the Royal Watercolor Society . In 1904 she wrote a book called King Arthur's Wood and illustrated it with fairytale scenes in the style of Pre-Raphaelism . From 1907 she participated in the design of Paperchase , a magazine published by artists from the Newlyn School. In addition, she was involved as a member of the Newlyn Artists' Dramatic Society , which was headed by Percy Robert Craft , and otherwise participated intensively in the artistic life in Newlyn.

The artist died in 1912 at the age of 52. In her short life she had exhibited more paintings than her husband Stanhope Forbes and was named the Queen of Newlyn in her obituary . A selection of her work is on display at Penlee House in Penzance , where a representative collection of works by Newlyn School artists is on view.

gallery

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  Ring A Ring O'Roses (1880)

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  The School Is Out (1889)

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  The Leaf (1897/1898)

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  On A Fine Day (1903)

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  The Blackberry Gathering (1912)

Web links

Commons : Elizabeth Adela Forbes  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Penleehouse. uk: Elizabeth Forbes , accessed March 18, 2016
• Canadian Women Artists History Initiative: Forbes, Elizabeth Armstrong , accessed March 18, 2016
• Cornwall Artists Index: Elizabeth Adela Forbes , accessed March 18, 2016