Elizabeth Adela Stanhope Forbes

Mr. and Mrs. George McCulloch, 1891

London, Royal Academy, 1891, no. 444
Glasgow, Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts, 1892, no. 64
Nottingham, Castle Museum, Special Exhibition of Cornish Pictures of Newlyn, St. Ives, Falmouth etc., 1894, no. 156, illustrated
London, The Fine Arts Society, Channel Packet, 1969, no. 41, illustrated
Penzance, Newlyn Art Gallery, Plymouth and Bristol Art Galleries, Artists of the Newlyn School, 1979, no. 75, illustrated
London, Barbican Art Gallery, Painting in Newlyn 1880-1930, 1985, no. 51, illustrated
Rochdale Art Gallery, Painting Women, 1987

Royal Academy Pictures 1891, p. 106, illustrated
Henry Blackburn, Academy Notes, 1891, p. 86, illustrated
"The Royal Academy," Pall Mall Gazette, May 2, 1891, p. 3
"Here and Now," Dundee Evening Telegraph, May 5, 1891, p. 2
"Purchase of Royal Academy Pictures," Birmingham Daily Post, May 5, 1891, p. 7
"Afternoon Chat," Manchester Times, May 8, 1891, p. 6
The Scotsman, 2 February 2, 1892
"Fine Art Institute," Glasgow Herald, February 15, 1892, p. 13
"The Cornish Painters Exhibition in Nottingham," Nottinghamshire Guardian, October 6, 1894, p. 3
Mrs. Lionel Birch, Stanhope Forbes ARA, and Mrs Elizabeth Stanhope Forbes, ARWS, 1906 (Cassell & Co), p. 69
Austin Chester, "The Art of Mrs Stanhope Forbes," Windsor Magazine, vol. xxviii, 1908, p. 628
"Artists of the Newlyn School (1880-1900): Newlyn, Plymouth and Bristol," The Burlington Magazine, vol. 121, no. 917 (August 1979), pp. 542-543
Caroline Fox, Stanhope Forbes and the Newlyn School, Devon, 1993, p. 47, illustrated
Judith Cook, Melissa Hardie and Christiana Payne, Singing from the Walls, The Life and Art of Elizabeth Forbes, Bristol, 2000, pp. 14, 93-4, 101 and 181, illustrated in reverse
Melissa Hardie, ed., Artists in Newlyn and West Cornwall, 1880-1940, Penzance, 2009, p. 53
David Tovey and Sarah Skinner, Cornish Light, The Nottingham 1894 Exhibition Revisited, Bristol, 2015, pp. 67-8, illustrated

This painting is in original, unlined condition, showing minor frame abrasion around the perimeter and a small painted scrape at the extreme left, at center. It would benefit from a cleaning; Under UV, restoration fluoresces to address frame abrasion, and in fine dots and dashes in the three figures to the left of the composition, and in the lower foreground.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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At the opening of the Royal Academy exhibition in 1891 the "Australian Midas", George McCulloch rushed to acquire Elizabeth Stanhope Forbes’s A Game of Old Maid and within a few days the news was out. The Scotsman who had established silver mines in Australia, had returned to Britain in the previous year to commission a grand residence in Princes Gate, Kensington, and was set upon acquiring a large art collection that would include works by Whistler, Bastien-Lepage, Sargent, Leighton, Lavery, Clausen and many others. Such was its prestige that a special winter exhibition of some of the Princes Gate collection was arranged at the Royal Academy in the winter of 1909.

Forbes’s painting was one of his and his wife’s first acquisitions. Approved by critics, it was lent to the Glasgow Institute in 1892 as one of a select group of Newlyn School paintings and two years later, it was chosen as one of the two pictures to represent the artist at the celebrated ‘Cornish Pictures’ exhibition in Nottingham. The press on these occasions reached for words such as "charming" and "attractive" to describe the picture, while the Nottinghamshire Guardian concluded that both Forbes’s exhibits were "delicate in feeling, and delightful in colour … and painted with technical power of a high order."

The writer may well have been aware of the young artist’s varied background, for Elizabeth Adela Stanhope Forbes, née Armstrong, was Canadian (fig 1). Her early precocity in draughtsmanship brought her first to London, to the Government Art Training School, and then in 1878, to New York and the Art Students’ League, where she trained under William Merritt Chase. She returned to Europe in the early 1880s, working at Pont Aven in 1882 and at Zandvoort in Holland in 1884, before settling in London to study etching under Whistler. It is likely that from Whistler she obtained her supreme sensitivity to colour, evident in the present work. However in 1885, she was apparently so deeply impressed by the work of Stanhope Forbes – probably his Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach shown at the Royal Academy – that she determined to spend the autumn in Cornwall, painting at the fishing port of Newlyn. A tug-of-war ensued in the next few years, when Forbes wrested her away from the Chelsea studios. They were married in 1889, by which time she was securing her own reputation within the burgeoning Newlyn School. 

Her most important early work, Zandvoort Fisher Girl, (fig 2), established what became her essential subject matter – children painted en plein air, or in naturally lit interiors, and throughout the later eighties these became more complex, working up to the multi-figure School is Out, (Penlee House Museum and Art Gallery) shown at the Academy in 1889. Less dramatic, but more carefully studied, the present work shows two girls playing ‘Old Maid’, a game in which the players have cast their unused pairs on the floor. A younger sibling looks on, while an older brother chalks a caricature on a school slate – a motif Forbes had used before in Critics c. 1885 (Private Collection). 

However, as in the early Dutch painting, the figures are seen in contre jour and the soft pearly light that surrounds them produces delicate harmonies of pink, pale yellow and mauve. Observed at close quarters, Forbes’s handling is supremely sensitive and her paint is often thinly applied, with what we might term, Whistlerian decorum. Stanhope Forbes may well have won his bride, but the artist in Elizabeth retained a cosmopolitan outlook. In later years she would illustrate fairy tales and clothe her models in fancy costume, but in the present picture, one of her most important Newlyn canvases, naturalistic truth is successfully wedded to aesthetic purpose.

This catalogue entry was written by Professor Kenneth McConkey.