Walter Langley and the Newlyn School

Today I'm featuring the work of Walter Langley (1852-1922) of the Newlyn School of painters.

As you'll know from previous blogposts, I'm originally from Cornwall and it's there that you'll find my artistic roots. It was impossible to grow up in places like Penzance and Helston with an artistic dad and passionate art teachers and not be aware of the Newlyn and St Ives schools. Well, maybe 'schools' is too strong a word as there was no real physical grouping of individuals. Rather, they were like-minded artists who formed colonies at around the same time. We use the term 'schools' because what they did wasn't as grand a movement as Cubism or Modernism. What they did was demonstrate how different artists could be inspired by a place and represent the same subject matter in a myriad different ways. 

The St Ives School, which featured the likes of sculptor Dame Barbara Hepworth, potters Bernard Leach and Shoji Amada, painters Alfred Wallis, Peter Lanyon, Patrick Heron and many others came to notice in the late 1930s and achieved great success in the 1950s and 60s. Much of their work is now on display in Hepworth's house (see here) and at the stunning purpose-built Tate Gallery St Ives. It has been said that they helped to change the direction of art. It has also been said that, at one time, the St Ives school was producing more exciting work than New York, Paris or London. 

Meanwhile, over near Penzance, the Newlyn school (and the nearby Lamorna group that included Dame Laura Knight, 'Lamorna' Birch and Alfred Munnings) had been working steadily since the 1880s with a stream of artists all drawn to the area for the quality of the natural light. Among their numbers you'll find such people as Stanhope and Elizabeth Forbes, Harold Harvey, Norman Garstin and the wonderfully named Albert Chevallier Tayler. 

They also had Walter Langley and he produced work like this:

That's a watercolour painting - a fact that staggers me. If you've ever worked with the stuff, you'll know how quick drying and unforgiving it is and how difficult it is to get depth of tone and colour. But Langley could do with watercolours what he could do equally well in oils.

Langley was born in Birmingham and at 15 was apprenticed to a lithographer. At 21 he won a scholarship to South Kensington College and he studied design there for two years. He then returned to Birmingham and took up painting full time, and in 1881 was elected an Associate of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists. In the same year he was offered £500 for a year's work by a Mr Thrupp (a Birmingham photographer). With this money he and his family moved to Newlyn where he was one of the first artists to settle. 

Politically left wing for his era, Langley was noted for his social realist portrayals of working class figures. Many of his paintings reflect his sympathy with the fishermen and their families that he lived among. One of the best known is his 1883 For Men Must Work and Women Must Weep (see next picture) based on Charles Kingsley's poem The Three Fishers (1851).

Although one of the first to settle in the Newlyn artists' colony, Langley initially benefited little from its growing fame, partly because of his working class origins and partly because, until 1892, he painted largely in watercolour rather than the more prestigious medium of oils. 

Later in his career his reputation grew. One of Langley's paintings was singled out as 'a beautiful and true work of art' by Leo Tolstoy in his book What is Art? while, in 1895, Langley was invited by the Uffizi Gallery in Florence to contribute a self portrait to hang alongside those of Raphael, Rubens and Rembrandt in their collection. Today his work is considered vital to the image of the Newlyn School and, alongside Stanhope Forbes, is the most consistent in style and substantial in output. 

There are several reasons why I love Walter Langley's work so much. 

Firstly, it's watercolour for the most part. I could never get the hang of oils as a kid - I'm only just coming to grips with them now - but I could use watercolour. What Langley showed me was that watercolours weren't all wishy-washy pastel shades and indistinct outlines. His paintings, while muted in colour due to the transparency of the paint, are nonetheless superbly detailed and beautiful. 

The second reason I love his work is that I used to see it every day. I lived in Penzance for a few years and the walk from my house to my best friend's house took me through Penlee Park where you'll find Penlee House Gallery & Museum and many of his, and other Newlyn artists', work is on display there. It was free and I popped in there all the time. There was, and still is, another gallery in Newlyn itself and that was just a short bicycle ride away.

Thirdly, and most importantly, I suppose, the people in his paintings are just so damned real. Yes, there is a degree of romanticising in all paintings but Langley's work doesn't lay it on with a trowel. The people he painted look completely grounded in the visceral realities of life in a working class fishing village. They're so real that I can almost hear them and the locations are all very familiar to me; Langley painted the towns and villages in which I grew up. 

If he were alive today, he'd still have plenty of powerful characters to paint - fishing is still the toughest of jobs and, in terms of fatalities, one of the most dangerous. It breeds strong men and resilient women. 

I have two excellent books about Langley. One is The Shining Sands by Tom Cross which looks at both the Newlyn and St Ives schools in detail. The other - my favourite - is Walter Langley: Pioneer of the Newlyn Art Colony by Walter's grandson, Roger. 

It's an excellent introduction to this brilliant artist and his work.