Elizabeth Forbes (artist)
Elizabeth Adela Forbes (nee Armstrong, born December 29, 1859 in Kingston, Ontario, † March 16 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, pastels and oil paints, but also created etchings.
Life and work
Elizabeth Armstrong was the only daughter and youngest child of a Canadian government officials. Her parents encouraged her early in her artistic inclinations and could give her drawing lessons. Later, they decided that it would be advantageous for Elizabeth, if given an artistic education in England. Therefore, she and her mother moved to London, where they all lived with an uncle at Cheyne Walk in Chelsea near William Michael Rossetti and the South Kensington Art Schools visited. She has not seen her father again because he died several months later of a stroke.
About 1878 Elizabeth Armstrong returned with her mother to Canada and came back with a stay in New York City in contact with artists from the perimeter of the Art Students League, of which she was informed three years. They won insight into the work of European artists and learned the plein know. In particular, William Merritt Chase taught them the work of Jean -François Millet and Jules Bastien -Lepage admire and persuaded them to continue their education in Munich because he believed superior to Munich as an art center in Paris. She spent 1881/1882, however, only five months at the Academy of Frank Duveneck in Munich area because they felt rejected and not taken to seriously.
1882 traveled Elizabeth Armstrong, accompanied by her mother, in the Brittany to Pont- Aven and took rooms at the Hotel des Voyageurs. Your fellow students from the Art Students League in New York, she had, in fact encouraged to visit this city and its artist's colony. Here she began to use local people as models, and sent their work to the Royal Institute of Oil Painters in London, where they were all sold on the opening day. Your future husband Stanhope Forbes painted at this time also in Brittany and dwelt in Quimperlé.
1883 she returned to London in 1884 and went to Zandvoort in Holland, where she created one of her best paintings with The Zandvoort Fisher Girl. After the summer of 1884 she returned to London, where she learned the drypoint etching by Walter Sickert and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. She was a member of the Society of Painter - Etchers and Engravers and placed in the Grosvenor Gallery and the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours from.
Elizabeth Armstrong had heard of a growing artists' colony in Cornwall, which was known as the Newlyn School, and was looking for this first time in 1885 on. There she met Stanhope Forbes know, hit him again the following year and eventually settled with him in Newlyn. In August 1889 the couple married at St Peter 's Church in Newlyn. This year, her oil paintings School Is Out was exhibited in 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 appointed a member of the Grosvenor Gallery Pastel Society. In 1893 came the only child of her son Alec to the world, who lost his life in the First World War.
After the end of the 19th century had left Newlyn some artists who founded Elizabeth Adela Forbes and her husband in 1899, the Newlyn School of Painting, where she taught students and friends. This creates a new generation of artists in the area could be drawn to Newlyn. 1900 the artist was elected a member of the Royal Watercolour Society. In 1904 she wrote a book called King Arthur 's Wood and illustrated it with fairy tale scenes in the style of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. As of 1907, she participated in the design of Paperchase, a statement issued by artists of the Newlyn School magazine. In addition, she was active as a member of the Newlyn artists ' Dramatic Society, which was headed by Percy Robert Craft, and also took otherwise intensively on the artist's life in Newlyn part.
1912 the artist died at the age of 52 years. In her short life she had more paintings on display as her husband Stanhope Forbes and was named in her obituary as Queen of Newlyn. A selection of her work is in the Penlee House in Penzance, where a representative collection of works by artists of the Newlyn School is seen.