Stanhope Forbes

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Stanhope Forbes around 1890
Stanhope Forbes around 1890

Stanhope Alexander Forbes (born November 18, 1857 in Dublin , Ireland ; died March 2, 1947 in Newlyn , Cornwall ) was a late Impressionist Irish painter and a major exponent of the Newlyn School , an artist colony of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

life and work

His father was the manager of the Midland Great Western Railway , his mother Juliette de Guise was French, his uncle James Staats Forbes was a railroad manager and created a well-known collection of contemporary paintings. Forbes began his academic art studies first in London at the Lambeth School of Art , then in 1876 attended the Royal Academy Schools . After his first year of college, Forbes returned to Ireland and took an extended vacation to paint the landscape around Galway . In 1880 he went to Paris to study in Léon Bonnat's studio .

In 1881 Forbes traveled to Cancale in Brittany with fellow painter Henry Herbert La Thangue , whom he had met at Dulwich College . This stay in France brought him into contact with the new open-air painting , which was to have a lasting impact on his style. A Street in Brittany , a painting he created on site, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1882 and purchased by Walker Art Gallery of Liverpool that same year . This success was to be the turning point in his career. In 1883 he returned to Brittany, this time to Quimperlé , where he stayed in the same hotel as Ralph Todd . During his visits he also met Norman Garstin , Nathaniel Hill , Walter Osborne , Joseph Malachy Kavanagh (1856-1918) and other Irish artists. In 1884, pictures from this period were exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy .

In January 1884 Stanhope Forbes went to Cornwall and became one of the leading figures of the Newlyn School . Because of his many successes at the Royal Academy, the artist colony in Newlyn was soon firmly established. His national reputation was consolidated with the acceptance by the Royal Academy of his 1885 painting Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach , now on display at the Plymouth City Art Gallery, and the purchase of Henry Tate's 1889 painting The Health of the Bride , now on view at the Tate Gallery in London. Forbes also participated in the resistance against the conservative understanding of art of the Royal Academy of Arts and founded the New English Art Club in 1885 together with Thomas Cooper Gotch , John Singer Sargent , Frank Bramley and other artists .

In 1885 Forbes met Elizabeth Armstrong in Newlyn , a young artist who resembled him in subject and painting style and whom he married in 1889. In 1893 their only child was their son Alec, who died in the First World War . With the number of artists in Newlyn declining, Stanhope and Elizabeth Forbes founded their own painting school, the Newlyn School of Painting , in 1899, which attracted a new generation of artists to the area. In 1901, Norman Garstin described Stanhope Forbes as completely imbued with the presence of life, driven neither by visions nor by dreams, but rather filled with extraordinary clarity and simplicity. Forbes is an unsentimental painter, but his work appeals to the sincerity of each individual. In 1910 Forbes became a member of the Royal Academy and continued his painting work well into the old age of almost 90. His wife Elizabeth, however, died in 1912.

gallery

  • A Street in Brittany (1881)

  • A Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach (1885)

  • The Health of the Bride (1889)

  • The Munitions Girls (1918)

literature

Web links

Commons : Stanhope Forbes  - collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Forbes, Stanhope
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Forbes, Stanhope Alexander (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Irish late impressionist painter
DATE OF BIRTH November 18, 1857
PLACE OF BIRTH Dublin , Ireland
DATE OF DEATH March 2, 1947
Place of death Newlyn , Cornwall