Stanhope Forbes
Stanhope Alexander Forbes ( born November 18, 1857 in Dublin, Ireland, † March 2, 1947 in Newlyn, Cornwall ) was an Irish painter of the late Impressionism and a major representative of the Newlyn School, an artists colony in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Life and work
His father was the manager at the Midland Great Western Railway, his mother, Juliette de Guise, was French, his uncle, James Forbes State, created a well- known collection of contemporary images. Forbes began his academic art studies, first in London at the Lambeth School of Art, then attended the Royal Academy Schools in 1876. After his first year, Forbes returned to Ireland and took an extended leave of absence to paint the landscape around Galway. In 1880 he went to Paris to study at the studio of Léon Bonnat.
1881, Forbes with fellow painter Henry Herbert La Thangue, whom he had met at Dulwich College, in the Brittany Cancale. This stay in France brought him in contact with the new open-air painting that was to characterize his style sustainable. A Street in Brittany, a painting that he had created on the spot, in 1882 exhibited at the Royal Academy and bought the same year by the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. This success should be the turning point in his career. In 1883 he came again to Brittany, this time to Quimperlé where he was staying at the same hotel as Ralph Todd. During his stay he met Norman Garstin, Nathaniel Hill, Walter Osborne, Joseph Malachy Kavanagh and other Irish artists know. 1884 images have already been issued from this time 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 its many successes at the Royal Academy, the artists' colony had soon established itself in Newlyn. His national reputation was strengthened with the adoption of his painting Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach by 1885 at the Royal Academy, now exhibited in the Plymouth City Art Gallery, and the purchase of the painting The Health of the Bride 1889 by Henry Tate to see now at the Tate Gallery in London. Forbes but also participated in the resistance against the conservative understanding of art at the Royal Academy of Arts, and founded in 1885 together with Thomas Cooper Gotch, John Singer Sargent, Frank Bramley and other artists of the New English Art Club.
1885 met Forbes in Newlyn on Elizabeth Armstrong, a young artist who closely resembled him in subject and style of painting and whom he married in 1889. In 1893 came the only child of her son Alec to the world, was killed in the First World War. Because the number of artists in Newlyn decreased founded Stanhope and Elizabeth Forbes in 1899 her own painting school, the Newlyn School of Painting, which attracted a new generation of artists in the area. Norman Garstin described in 1901 Stanhope Forbes as completely permeated by the presence of life, neither visions nor driven by dreams, but of exceptional clarity and simplicity fulfilled. Forbes was an unsentimental painter, but whose work appeals to the candor of each individual. 1910 Forbes was a member of the Royal Academy and continued his painting activity continued until old age of almost 90 years. His wife Elizabeth, however, already died in 1912.