page_title: Stanhope Forbes
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Stanhope Forbes / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Ladies at work at the Newlyn Art School under the direction of Mrs Stanhope Forbes, from Every Woman's Encyclopaedia, 1910
context_page_description: Stanhope Alexander Forbes RA was a British artist and a founding member of the influential Newlyn school of painters. He was often called 'the father of the Newlyn School'.
context_section_description: Having completed his studies in France, Forbes returned to London and showed works he made in Brittany at the 1883 Royal Academy and Royal Hibernian Academy shows. In 1884 he moved to Newlyn in Cornwall, and soon became a leading figure in the growing colony of artists. Of this place, Forbes said:
  I had come from France and, wandering down into Cornwall, came one spring morning along that dusty road by which Newlyn is approached from Penzance. Little did I think that the cluster of grey-roofed houses which I saw before me against the hillside would be my home for many years. What lode-some of artistic metal the place contains I know not; but its effects were strongly felt in the studios of Paris and Antwerp particularly, by a number of young English painters studying there, who just about then, by some common impulse, seemed drawn towards this corner of their native land... There are plenty of names amongst them which are still, and I hope will long by, associated with Newlyn, and the beauty of this fair district, which charmed us from the first, has not lost its power, and holds us still.
  The Slip was Forbes' first painting made in Newlyn. The artist colony received national attention with the Royal Academy exhibition of Forbes works in 1885. Henry Tate bought The Health of the Bride, which is now at the Tate Gallery in London. The exhibition of A Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach also brought notoriety to Forbes and the artist colony. He was one of the founders of the New English Art Club (NEAC) in 1886.
  In 1892 Forbes became an Associate of the Royal Academy. Forbes was the founding chairman and trustee of the Newlyn Art Gallery beginning in 1895.
  Forbes and his wife founded the Newlyn Art School in 1899. It attracted students such as Ernest and Doris "Dod" Shaw, Frank Gascoigne Heath and Jill and Geoffrey Garnier. The Newlyn area had experienced an economic downturn as the result of failing fishing, mining and farming industries. The school helped to bring an economic resurgence to the area by encouraging individuals to vacation in the area and study and practise art.
  His friends included Henry Herbert La Thangue, Blandford Fletcher and Charles E. Hannaford, who had also been a student. In Newlyn, Forbes tutored the landscape watercolourist Mabel Mary Spanton.
  For a 1909 publish date, Forbes illustrated Mary Russell Mitford's Sketches of English Life and Character. Some of the illustrations were Old Cronies, Bringing Home the Milk, and  February Sunshine.
  In 1910 Forbes was elected a Royal Academician. Forbes became a member of the St Ives Society of Artists in 1928. In 1933 he was made a Senior Royal Academician.
caption: Ladies at work at the Newlyn Art School under the direction of Mrs Stanhope Forbes, from "Every Woman's Encyclopaedia", 1910
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