|
Researching Elisabeth Forbes-Armstrong |
|
|
|
Thursday, 17 August 2006 |
Q. I am searching for some details about Elisabeth Forbes-Armstrong (may be a monography?). She lived and worked in Newlyn as an artist painter and member of Newlyn School. She died in 1912/1913. In 1884 she visited Zandvoort, Holland.
Elizabeth Adela Armstrong was born in Ottawa in 1859, the only daughter and yougest child of a Canadian government official who died when she was young. Her father encouraged her artistic interests and arranged for her to have drawing lessons. She was to become one of the most talented of the Newlyn artists, a group who were particularly active in the 1880s and 1890s.
Following the death of her father she came with her mother to England and stayed with an uncle in Chelsea, next door to Rossetti whose work she greatly admired although she never met him. For a short time she studied at the South Kensington Schools and then, in about 1878, returned with her mother to Canada. While visiting friends in New York she joined the Arts Students League and continued to study there for about three years, taught by artists who had studied on the Continent and discovered the work of Millet and of Bastien Lepage, it was here that she became aware of new ideas, such as painting en plein air.
She then went to study in Munich but was not happy there and persuaded her mother to accompany her to Pont Aven in Brittany where there was a lively group of artists, while here she started exhibiting. In 1884 she went to Zandvoort, near Haarlem, to join a group of students there. She did some fine work here, both paintings and drawings which she later etched in dry point in London. The paintings included one which features among her best known work 'A Zandvoort Fisher Girl'.
Mrs Armstrong and Elizabeth settled in Newlyn in the autumn of 1885 and it was here that she met her future husband, Stanhope Forbes, whom she married in August 1889 at St. Peter's Church, Newlyn. In that year one of the paintings she submitted to the Royal Academy was the oil painting for which she is perjhaps best known today 'School is Out'.
She had a particular aptitude for painting children. In 1893 her son, Alec, was born. Elizabeth Forbes took an active part in the life of the artist community in Newlyn, taking part in the dramatic society and editing a magazine produced by the Newlyn artists in 1907, called The Paperchase. She wtrote poetry and articles and she and her husband entertained many of their friends and students at their home in Newlyn.
During the whole of this time she exhibited widely and continued to do this until her death in 1912 at the comparatively early age of 53 years. A selection of her work, including the two paintings mentioned above, can be found at the Penlee House Art Gallery in Penzance which has a fine representative collection of tjhe work of artists of the Newlyn School.
 |
|
Current visitors on this site ...
We have 3 guests online
|
