Edwin Harris

Edwin Harris ( * 1855 in Birmingham, West Midlands, † 1906) was an English landscape, genre and portrait painter of the late Impressionism and a representative of the Newlyn School, an artists colony in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Life and work

Edwin Harris visited in 1870 first the Birmingham School of Art early as 1877 he exhibited it for the first time at the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists. Later he went to Antwerp to take lessons at the Academy of Charles Verlat that Frank Bramley attended at the same time. 1880 Harris went back to Birmingham and took from 1881 trips in Brittany and Newlyn in Cornwall, where he finally settled in 1883. In the following years, several other artists settled in the area, including Frank Bramley, Thomas Cooper Gotch, Stanhope Forbes, Percy Robert Craft, Henry Scott Tuke and Norman Garstin. Walter Langley had already settled here in 1882. It formed an artists' colony, which was known as the Newlyn School. Their representatives usually operated open-air painting and kept it everyday scenes from village life permanently. 1895 Harris left Newlyn and moved up to his early death in 1906 at alternating locations in the south of England.

From 1882 to 1904 Harris presented a total of 13 paintings at the Royal Academy of Arts, and was elected a member of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists. His most famous paintings are large genre paintings, some of distress and loss of which act, which was also a central theme of the works of his friend Walter Langley. Although Harris has been very successful with this work, he showed his extraordinary skills but only in portrait painting. Some of his works are now in the Liverpool Walker Art Gallery, home to Manchester City Gallery of Art, Royal Hibernian Academy and the Royal Institute of Oil Painters.