page_title: Cornish people
section_title: Performing and visual arts
hierarchical_section_title: Cornish people / Culture / Performing and visual arts
caption_attribution_description: English: The red 'obby 'oss capturing a passing maiden during the Padstow Mayday festival.
context_page_description: The Cornish people or Cornish are a Celtic ethnic group and nation native to, or associated with Cornwall and a recognised national minority in the United Kingdom, which can trace its roots to the ancient Britons who inhabited southern and central Great Britain before the Roman conquest. Many in Cornwall today continue to assert a distinct identity separate from or in addition to English or British identities. Cornish identity has been adopted by migrants into Cornwall, as well as by emigrant and descendant communities from Cornwall, the latter sometimes referred to as the Cornish diaspora. Although not included as an explicit option in the UK census, the numbers of those claiming Cornish ethnic and national identity are officially recognised and recorded.
  Throughout classical antiquity, the ancient Britons formed a series of tribes, cultures and identities in Great Britain; the Dumnonii and Cornovii were the Celtic tribes who inhabited what was to become Cornwall during the Iron Age, Roman and post-Roman periods. The name Cornwall and its demonym Cornish are derived from the Celtic Cornovii tribe.
context_section_description: Celtic crosses, many dating from between the 7th and 15th centuries, are found in Cornwall and have been used as inspiration in modern and contemporary Cornish visual arts.  In the 1780s, John Opie was the first Cornish-born painter to gain widespread attention; his work was exhibited at the Royal Academy and he was described by Joshua Reynolds as "like Caravaggio and Velázquez in one". Artists who appreciated the quality of Cornwall's natural light, such as J. M. W. Turner, began to visit, with more following after the opening of the Great Western Railway, including Whistler and Sickert. Stanhope Forbes and Frank Bramley settled in Cornwall in the 1880s, establishing the Newlyn School of painting en plein air. By the 1920s, the ceramicist Bernard Leach was established at St Ives, and the St Ives School for abstract artists formed there, influenced by naive painters such as Alfred Wallis, and involving the work of Ben Nicholson, his wife Barbara Hepworth, Naum Gabo and Patrick Heron.
caption: The 'Obby 'Oss festival is a Cornish May Day festival celebrated in Padstow.
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