Walter Langley, R.I. 1852-1922

A Cousin from Town depicts the yard of a Newlyn fisherman's cottage where a young visitor attempts to impress his more parochial relatives with his musical skills. An old sea-dog has paused from mending his nets, his pipe lit and looking on intently as the young boy struggles to master the banjo. The boy's two cousins and aunt take a break from peeling vegetables and playing with a toy boat to listen to the impromptu music. As the painter's grandfather Roger Langley has pointed out 'From the looks on their faces, it is clear his skills were of a modest order.' (Roger Langley, Walter Langley - Pioneer of the Newlyn Art Colony, 1997, p.109)

When the picture was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1898 a reviewer for the Athenaeum praised the depiction of the 'boy with a banjo whose demeanour and expression are greatly superior to what we usually find in art of this kind.' (The Athenaeum, 4 June 1898, p. 732) whilst the commentator for The Academy felt that the picture was among the best pictures of the year.

The painter Walter Langley proves with A Cousin From Town that his mastery of oil paint was as fine as his use of watercolour, for which he is perhaps better known. This large, accomplished painting was painted in the late 1890s when Langley was striving to gain official recognition and is among his most important works. The success of A Cousin From Town set a precedent for later works and he returned to the same courtyard and painted the same models in1905 for A Chip off the Old Block (Ferens Art Gallery, Kingston-Upon-Hull). A year earlier in 1904 the same woman and dark-haired boy appeared in The Greeting (present whereabouts unknown), the latter dressed in the same clothes and given that he appears to have grown no older since 1898, the 1904 picture was presumably based on sketches made at an earlier date. The courtyard which appears in A Cousin from Town and A Chip off the Old Block was not a contrivance of the artist, it was part of an actual fisherman's cottage and the same yard was painted from the same angle by Thomas Cooper Gotch in Hiding from Granny of 1883 A small sketch or version of A Cousin from Town is at the Victoria Art Gallery in Bath.

The subject of A Cousin from Town is particularly charming when viewed with other works by Langley which often have a rather melancholy or foreboding atmosphere. The lives of the Newlyn fishermen and their families were harsh and often tragic and Langley responded to this with works such as The Orphan of 1889 and Disaster! Scene in a  Cornish Village of the same year (Birmingham City Art Gallery) which appealed to a Victorian public and patrons who were more receptive to the melodrama and tragedy, than a modern audience. The present picture depicts a happier scene as the hard working people of Newlyn take a welcome break from their work. The subject of music adds a further element of harmony to the picture. Langley was an accomplished banjo player himself and often entertained his fellow artists with his music.

Walter Langley arrived in Cornwall 1882, married and settled at Pembroke Lodge in Newlyn. This was two years before Stanhope Forbes arrived in Cornwall but because of his preference for painting in watercolour Langley did not achieve the same status in Newlyn as Forbes. However Forbes was quick to see the great talent in Langley and initially disliked him for it. Although Langley attended many of the social events at Newlyn he was not accepted as part of the group at first. This may partly have been due to the age of the artist, he being older than most of the other Newlyn artists, but it may also have been due to the fact that he was from a different background, his father a humble tailor. Although his mother was illiterate it was she who had encouraged Langley to become an artist and apprenticed him to a local lithographer when he was fifteen which gave him a grounding which stood him in good stead for application to the South Kensington Schools. It was not until the 1880s that Langley discovered the subjects that he would paint for the rest of his life, the hard-working fishermen and their families and their humble cottages in Newlyn. He continued to paint scenes of great pathos with women awaiting the return of the fishing fleet and old mariners mending their nets, well into the twentieth century.