Description
The Newlyn artist Elizabeth Forbes (1859-1912) for long suffered the fate of women artists of her generation, living in the shadow of her husband, Stanhope Forbes. This first major study of her life and work gives a more rounded view of this fine artist and moving spirit in the Newlyn artist colony around the end of the nineteenth century. In her most characteristic work, her studies of children and domestic interiors, she is clearly the match of her male colleagues painting their more grimly realistic depictions of life in the Cornish fishing community. The authors also reveal the wide range of her work and its strong imaginative and poetic element, as in the sumptuous illustrations in her book, King Arthur’s Wood. Elizabeth Forbes also emerges as an accomplished print-maker, encouraged by the flamboyant James McNeill Whistler and Walter Sickert. Her early dry points (she was to abandon the medium when she married) drew inspiration from Whistler’s etchings with their spare, elegant effects and consummate manipulation of technique, while many of her paintings could, like Whistler’s, be described as symphonies in colour. Elizabeth was central to the cultural and artistic life of the Newlyn community, running with her husband the celebrated Newlyn School of Painting. She died, at the height of her powers, in her early fifties. She was an enigmatic, appealing personality, whose story was a moving and ultimately a sad one.
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