DOI issue:
No. 196 (July, 1909)
DOI article:Garstin, Norman: West Cornwall as a sketching ground
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.20967#0136
IVest Cornwall as a Sketching Ground
company have popularised it among people of
moderate means.
West Cornwall, or locally AVest Penwith, is
certainly not a country that can claim to be
unknown. It has been the studio of innumerable
artists for nearly a quarter of a century, and has
drawn to itself distinguished writers and poets not
a few, some to pass and some to stay.
Novels and tales have been woven out of the
homespun of the Cornish fisher’s life, and countless
pictures have been painted of him and his sur-
roundings, painted too with all the resources of
modern art. Impressionists have attacked it from
the point of view of light, the grey school have
seen it under a dull sky, the story-tellers have
grouped their models, and it would really seem as
if the last word must have been said long ago ; but
there is no last word—at least, not as long as human
personality goes to the making of each work of art.
Each hand shakes the kaleidoscope afresh, and
each eye sees in nature what it sets out to find.
The station of St. Erth seems to be at the
parting of the ways. On the right hand, travelling
west, there stretches a lagoon fed from the waters
of the Irish Channel. Hayle is set on its eastern
fringe, and on the west is the village of Lelant,
whose towans, overlooking the great curve of St.
Ives Bay, call aloud with the allurements of their
golf-links. All the three miles of coast round
whose sinuosities the train glides are full of beauty
to anyone who cares for the free wholesome sea
breaking in its many moods on sand and rock.
The little grey town of St. Ives it seems superfluous
to describe; hundreds of brushes have shown its
rocky peninsula, its fleets of brown-sailed fishing-
luggers, its tortuous streets, and the amphibious
life upon its busy sands. A whole generation of
artists have wrought at it, and if it were possible to
exhaust that duplex combination, the variety of
nature’s moods and the inventiveness of man, then
St. Ives would be a threadbare theme. St. Erth
is, as I say, at the parting of the ways, having the
landlocked lagoon on the right hand and on the
left a country of quite another character, but full
of possibilities for the landscape painter. Here is
a country of inland farms and villages, of moor-
land and marshland and of old mine workings
whose debris is being slowly reassumed and re-
“ ACROSS THE BAY, FALMOUTH” (WATER-COLOUR) BY S. J. LAMORNA BIRCH
{By permission of the Fine Art Society)
no
company have popularised it among people of
moderate means.
West Cornwall, or locally AVest Penwith, is
certainly not a country that can claim to be
unknown. It has been the studio of innumerable
artists for nearly a quarter of a century, and has
drawn to itself distinguished writers and poets not
a few, some to pass and some to stay.
Novels and tales have been woven out of the
homespun of the Cornish fisher’s life, and countless
pictures have been painted of him and his sur-
roundings, painted too with all the resources of
modern art. Impressionists have attacked it from
the point of view of light, the grey school have
seen it under a dull sky, the story-tellers have
grouped their models, and it would really seem as
if the last word must have been said long ago ; but
there is no last word—at least, not as long as human
personality goes to the making of each work of art.
Each hand shakes the kaleidoscope afresh, and
each eye sees in nature what it sets out to find.
The station of St. Erth seems to be at the
parting of the ways. On the right hand, travelling
west, there stretches a lagoon fed from the waters
of the Irish Channel. Hayle is set on its eastern
fringe, and on the west is the village of Lelant,
whose towans, overlooking the great curve of St.
Ives Bay, call aloud with the allurements of their
golf-links. All the three miles of coast round
whose sinuosities the train glides are full of beauty
to anyone who cares for the free wholesome sea
breaking in its many moods on sand and rock.
The little grey town of St. Ives it seems superfluous
to describe; hundreds of brushes have shown its
rocky peninsula, its fleets of brown-sailed fishing-
luggers, its tortuous streets, and the amphibious
life upon its busy sands. A whole generation of
artists have wrought at it, and if it were possible to
exhaust that duplex combination, the variety of
nature’s moods and the inventiveness of man, then
St. Ives would be a threadbare theme. St. Erth
is, as I say, at the parting of the ways, having the
landlocked lagoon on the right hand and on the
left a country of quite another character, but full
of possibilities for the landscape painter. Here is
a country of inland farms and villages, of moor-
land and marshland and of old mine workings
whose debris is being slowly reassumed and re-
“ ACROSS THE BAY, FALMOUTH” (WATER-COLOUR) BY S. J. LAMORNA BIRCH
{By permission of the Fine Art Society)
no