Opened in style by town mayor Jan Ruhrmund, who reckoned Newlyn School artist Norman Garstin and his family should be called "multi-talented" rather than simply "talented", The Talented Garstins exhibition being held in Penzance attracted the glitterati of the art world, including Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota.
The first time a substantial number of either Norman Garstin's or his daughter Alethea's paintings have been seen for a long while – the last occasion was a touring exhibition at St Ives in 1978 – and the first time ever that an exhibition has been devoted to whole Garstin family, it is a cracker.
Although Norman Garstin is renowned for his celebrated impression of Penzance promenade in The Rain It Raineth Every Day, painted in 1889 and given by him to the town – a painting which was kept out of sight for many years as the powers-to-be felt it was harmful to the town's image – he has never received the acclaim he deserves.
Multi-talented, he was an engineer, architect and diamond prospector prior to studying in Paris and Antwerp as an artist. Aside from The Rain It Raineth Every Day, large works on show include The Last Furrow, Place St Michel Quimperle and Among The Pots, plus smaller scale delights like Mount's Bay, Tolcarne From Trewidden Farm Footpath, with Alethea And Her Mother and There Was An Old Man Of St Ives.
Norman deserves to be in the front rank of the Newlyn School of Artists. Like her father, Alethea, his youngest child born in 1894, has also long been underrated. An artist who died at the age of 84 in her home at Zennor, it should be remembered that she was also a caring person and one of those who paid regular visits to St Ives primitive artist Alfred Wallis during his last years in Madron Workhouse.
From her portraits of her father, made in 1926, and of her mother Dochie made a little later when in mourning for her husband, to a study of Wellington Terrace in Penzance and the charming Girl Among Hydrangeas, her pictures should now gain Alethea Garstin her rightful place in the story of Cornish art.
Both of her brothers were to die long before Alethea. Following an adventurous life as a horse breaker, thresher, lumber sawyer and cattle ranch manager in various parts of the world and as a soldier during the First World War, Crosbie became a successful author. One of the many artefacts in the splendid display of archive material at Penlee House Gallery and Museum is a design for the book jacket of The West Wind, one of the books in his Penhale trilogy. His life was to end in 1930, when he was but 43, as the result of a boating accident. His widow Lillian Garstin would later become a well-known and well-loved mayor of Penzance.
Norman Garstin's second son Denis survived such First World War battles as Ypres and Loos, but was killed in action in the same year – 1918 – that The Shilling Soldiers, his account of life in the trenches, was published.
Altogether an impressive tribute to a highly-talented family.
article copyright THE CORNISHMAN