Exhibition Guide
This gallery contains sketches, studies and small-scale paintings by British and international artists who visited St Ives. Following Turner's tour to Cornwall in 1811, it highlights key artists such as Emile-Louis Vernier, who also inspired artists to discover St Ives as a destination for painting.
With the completion of the Tamar railway bridge in 1859, Cornwall immediately became more accessible. Previously reserved for the mining and fishing industries, few British artists had ventured to explore its coastlines and villages. One exception was JMW Turner, who in 1811–14 toured Devon and Cornwall on commission from fine art engravers William and George Cooke. Already renowned for his observation of English topography, during this period Turner produced a significant body of drawings, watercolours and oil studies, from which the Cooke brothers evolved a series of collectable prints entitled Picturesque Views on the Southern Coast of England. These, along with Turner's immense studio paintings of the following years, brought the Cornish landscape to a new audience. An engraving of Turner's iconic viewpoint of Land’s End by George Cooke is on display in this room with a 'colour beginning' by Turner of the same subject.
In the showcase, Turner's sketchbook illustrates one small sketch of St Ives. His visit to St Ives was brief but, inspired by this commission, marine painter Edward Cooke RA, son of engraver George Cooke, visited the town whilst touring the South West in 1848. His prolonged visit led to The Pier and Bay of St Ives, Cornwall, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1853 (on show in Lower Gallery 2).
One of the first overseas artists to 'discover' the qualities of the light and landscape of St Ives and its Atlantic coastline was Frenchman Louis Emile Verniér. Working in Pont Aven and Concarneau with, amongst others, Henry Harewood Robinson, Adrian Stokes, Stanhope Forbes and Mortimer Menpes from England, his trips to the town in the early 1880s pre-empted the influx of these and many accompanying overseas artists.
The American artist JAM Whistler and his companions Walter Sickert and Mortimer Menpes were to visit the town in 1884, traveling down from London on the newly improved railway. Whistler's approach to the St Ives landscape, whilst inspired by the sea, was altogether more detached. Influenced by Japanese prints and progressive French painting, his typically small, muted, oil panels and watercolours of the 1880s made in coastal towns such as St Ives, Lyme Regis, Pourville in Normandy as well as Dieppe, favoured colour harmonies and compositional design over specific narrative. Sketchy and abstract, as in Cliffs and Breakers 1884, they provocatively challenged the establishment conventions of both size and style.