English Gallery

Madonna and Child, Rogier van der Weyden (1399-1464)

Oil on panel, Dutch School, 15th century. Dutch artist Rogier van der Weyden was one of the most profound and influential painters of the 15th century. He was internationally famed for the naturalism of his detail and his expressive pathos. He created a range of types, for portraits and for religious subjects, which were repeated throughout the Netherlands, the Iberian peninsula, and even Italy, until the mid 16th century. He was apprenticed to Robert Campin in Tournai from March 1427 to August 1432 but he soon equalled his master and was later to influence Campin's own work. In 1435 he was made painter to the city of Brussels. In 1450 he may have travelled to Rome. He worked for Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, and for foreign princes, as well as for the city and church. Rogier van der Weyden was highly successful and internationally famous in his lifetime. By the latter half of the 15th century, he had eclipsed Jan van Eyck in popularity. However, his fame lasted only until the 17th century, and largely due to changing taste, he was almost totally forgotten by the mid 18th century. His reputation was slowly rebuilt during the following 200 years and today he is known, with Campin and van Eyck, as the third (by birth date) of the three great Early Flemish artists, and widely as the most influential Northern painter of the 15th century. The Madonna and Child was a traditional subject for Renaissance artists, commissioned both by the Church and by private individuals. The use of oil paint on wooden panel, rather than egg tempera which was the dominant medium in Italy during this period, is a particularly Northern European development which gradually spread south to Italy through the 15th century

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St Just Tin Miners, Harold Harvey (1874-1941)

Oil on canvas, Newlyn School, 1935. Harold Harvey was one of the few successful artists of the period who was born and raised in Cornwall. He grew up surrounded by the industry he would later paint and counted many of the working people he depicted as friends. He originally studied under Norman Garstin, but also visited Paris as a young man where he was greatly influenced by the Post-Impressionist movement. His earlier work was very much influenced by Stanhope Forbes, though it changed as he grew older, his brushwork becoming less thick and his forms more simple. Some of his later work shows a period stylisation but without the Picasso influences of his contemporaries Ernest and Dod Procter. Harvey continued to work right up to his death in 1941. The painting is, in essence, a portrait of two miners, Nicholas Grenfell and Sydney Angove, who were lifelong friends of the artist. They had both worked at Botallack and Geevor mines before each retired due to ill health. They are posed in Harvey's studio in front of a backdrop of a scene from a Malayan tin mine. In the late 1920s cheaper tin from Malaya undercut the price of Cornish tin and many miners emigrated in search of work. The painting, therefore, could be seen as much a comment on the decline of the tin mining industry in Cornwall as it is a celebration of the Cornish diaspora

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Courtyard in Newlyn leading through to Myrtle Cottage, Fred Millard (1857-1937)

Oil on panel, Newlyn School, around 1890. This painting depicts the courtyard of Myrtle Cottage, where the female students of Stanhope Forbes painting school lodged before the First World War. In 1918, it became the home of Alec and Kay Walker, the founders of Crysede Silk. Fred Millard was born in London and studied in Paris under Jean-Paul Laurens in 1882, where he was a contemporary of Falmouth artist Henry Scott Tuke. A genre painter, he exhibited mainly at the Society of British Artists and at the Royal Academy. Millard was among the original first wave of Newlyn School artists and appears in the group photographs of 1884. By 1894 he had left Newlyn and moved to Hampstead. In 1896 he lived in Boreham Wood, where Tuke frequently visited him by bicycle. Tuke also mentions in his diary that Millard had a dock studio in Falmouth in 1902. It is clear he maintained a home in Falmouth while living primarily in the London area for a number of years. Later he returned, with his wife, to live on Cliff Road at Falmouth, though he continued to exhibit in London, primarily with the Royal Society of British Artists. He died in London aged 80 on 13th October 1937

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