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Stanhope Alexander Forbes
Stanhope Alexander Forbes (1857-1947) was an Irish painter of late impressionism and an important representative of the Newlyn School, an artist colony of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His father was a manager at the Midland Great Western Railway, his mother Juliette de Guise was French, his uncle James Staats Forbes was a railway manager. Forbes began his academic art studies in London at the Lambeth School of Art, then attended the Royal Academy Schools in 1876. After his first year of study, Forbes returned to Ireland and took an extended leave to paint the landscape around Galway. In 1880 he went to Paris to study. In 1881, Forbes traveled to Bretagne, France, where he was introduced to the new open-air painting, which was to have a lasting impact on his style. A painting he had created there was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1882 and bought by the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool in the same year. This success was to be the turning point in his career. In 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 artists' colony in Newlyn was soon firmly established. His national reputation was cemented. As the number of artists in Newlyn was declining, Stanhope and his wife founded their own painting school, the Newlyn School of Painting, in 1899, which attracted a new generation of artists to the area. In 1901 Stanhope Forbes was described as being completely imbued with the present of life, driven neither by visions nor dreams, but rather filled with extraordinary clarity and simplicity. Forbes was an unsentimental painter, but his work appealed to the frankness of each individual. In 1910 Forbes became a member of the Royal Academy and continued painting until the ripe old age of almost 90.
December 16th 2024
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