Stanhope Forbes

Stanhope Alexander Forbes (1857–1947) was the leading painter of the Newlyn School, the Cornish artists' colony that brought French plein-air realism to British painting in the 1880s. His breakthrough A Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach (1885) presented Newlyn fishermen and their families with the unidealized observational accuracy he had learned in Brittany. He co-founded the New English Art Club and the Forbes School of Painting at Newlyn, training a generation of British outdoor realists.

Forbes painted in a French-influenced plein-air realist manner with broad, square-brush handling, cool gray Cornish light, and unposed working-class subjects. His palette is restrained and tonally unified.

Forbes founded the most influential British plein-air colony of the late nineteenth century, importing French naturalism into the British tradition and training many of its finest practitioners.