Harold Harvey : painter of Cornwall (Revised edition)

Harold Harvey, a true ‘son of Cornwall’, has been one of the most under-rated and least written about members of the Newlyn ‘School’ of artists which flourished from 1880 to 1930.

The son of a bank manager, he grew up in Penance, and after studying under Norman Garstin and a spell in Paris, he settled to a quiet life in Newlyn with fellow-artist Gertrude, painting The Cornwall he knowS from the inside. In his introductory essay, Professor Kenneth McConkey sets Harvey in the context of the art moments of the time, and shows how his early ‘genre’ paintings of rustic and marine life, so characteristic of the early Newlyn artists, gradually gave way to more sophisticated subject matter – Harvey was noted for his sumptuous interiors – and a flatter and more decorative style of painting.

His early work might be compared with that of Stanhope Forbes, while his later paintings show clear affinities with those of fellow painters such as Laura Knight and Dod Procter. Professor McConkey’s essay complements the first significant ‘life’ of Harold Harvey, researched and written by Peter Risdon and Pauline Sheppard, which is in turn illuminated by Peter Risdon’s painstakingly compiled catalogue raisonne of over 600 paintings. Harvey’s painting output was prodigious, and this book includes approximately 100 illustrations of his favoured subjects: the Cornish at work, children at play, and intimate interior scenes and conversation pieces.

Many of his contemporaries in Newlyn were visiting ‘observers’, but for Harold Harvey, who rarely went outside the county even though a regular exhibitor at the Royal Academy, painting the Cornish world ‘because it was there’ was his whole life.