West Cornwall and Scilly Photography
This is a featured article for the topic local history and photography.
c.1880-c.1960 The Isles of Scilly and the westernmost tip of Cornwall, with the towns of Penzance and St Ives, and fishing villages like Sennen, Mousehole, and Newlyn, have a rich photographic heritage linked, in this period, with the development of a regional tourist industry; the establishment of artists' colonies at Newlyn and St Ives; two world wars; and the growth of amateur photography. Local photograph collections exist today at the Cornish Studies Centre in Redruth, the Penlee Gallery and Morrab Library in Penzance, and the museums at St Ives and St Mary's. For historical reasons, however, many more images are held at national institutions such as the National Maritime Museum (c.20,000 photographs by the marine photographer Francis Mortimer (1875-1944) ); the Imperial War Museum (Newlyn's First World War seaplane base); the Royal Archives, Windsor (royal visits to the duchy of Cornwall), and the National Archives (pictures registered under the Fine Art Copyright Act, 1862). The photographs of Vanessa and Virginia Stephen (later, respectively, Bell and Woolf), who spent their childhood summers at St Ives, are in the Tate Gallery archives and various American collections. Cornwall's spectacular scenery attracted commercial firms like Wilson, Valentine, Frith, and even Oxford-based Henry Taunt. Gibson of Scilly holds an archive dating back to the 1870s. Other photographers whose work survives include John Charles Burrow (1850-1914) of Camborne, who pioneered underground photography in Cornish mines c.1892, and the Austrian oceanographer Count Larisch-Moennich, who took dramatic storm pictures at Hell Bay, Bryher, and St Ives just before the First World War.
Although gradually, tourism offset the depression following the mid-19th-century collapse of Cornish mining, and the later decline of the fishing industry. The completion of Brunel's Tamar railway bridge in 1859 and the inauguration of the Great Western Railway's (GWR) seven-hour Cornish Riviera express from Paddington to Penzance in 1904 facilitated its growth, and GWR played a major role in marketing the beauties of the ‘far West’ to visitors. Over the years, tourism's structure changed considerably. Until 1914 the emphasis was on upper-middle-class families who ‘took’ houses for 2-3 months in the summer: at Sennen, for example, the headmaster of Cheltenham College and a bevy of senior clergy, and at St Ives the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, Leslie Stephen, who bought the lease of Talland House in 1881 and holidayed there with his family and literary guests until 1895. Tourism diversified after the First World War, with the spread of paid holidays and boarding houses, and again after the Second World War, with the proliferation of chalets and caravan sites and an influx, finally, of retired ‘permanent tourists’.
Photography both recorded and influenced these developments. By the late 19th century the number of commercial firms in the region had greatly increased, including Trevorrow and Studio St Ives in St Ives, Preston, Poole and Richards in Penzance. The Gibsons began c.1870 and eventually established themselves on both Scilly and the mainland. Their business was portraiture, local views and genre scenes (Newlyn's legendary fishwives), and news events, especially shipwrecks. Competition was keen, between local firms for wreck pictures, and against the big national companies in the lucrative view market. As communications improved and tourism increased, firms like Wilson and Frith extended their picture-making and distribution networks nationwide, and surviving albums often contain a mixture of work by them and local operators. Both together shaped the image of Cornwall as perilous, wild, and exotic.
Both local and visiting amateurs proliferated. The former included John Branwell at Penlee House, Penzance, who recorded events in and around his mansion and park. At St Ives, Herbert Lanyon and Landor Elvin Comley produced fine views and nautical images. Their vision was clearly influenced by contemporary pictorialism, and by notions of the ‘maritime picturesque’ evolving since the days of Hill and Adamson. However, Comley's pictures especially, of the crowded harbour and fish market, and bathing tents beside net ‘blowsers’ on the beaches, also document social and economic change. For the Stephens, photography was an absorbing holiday pastime. In 1892, for example, Virginia noted that her two elder half-siblings ‘keep a visitor's list by photographing everyone who comes to the palatial residence [Talland House]’; views, beach games, corners of the garden, and the likenesses of servants and local characters were all assiduously recorded. Their albums anticipate the efforts of more numerous middle-and lower-middle-class visitors after the First World War.
The two art colonies emerged in the early 1880s, influenced by the contemporary plein-airisme of Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848-84). While the Newlyners concentrated on fishing and rural genre, often of a melodramatic kind, their St Ives colleagues preferred seascapes; but overlaps were frequent. More remains to be discovered about links between painting and photography in both places, but they were numerous. In the first place, like their French counterparts (e.g. Alexis Muenier), the British painters probably used the camera in the production process, to create studies and economize on models. Secondly, firms like Gibson would not only have photographed paintings before they were dispatched to Birmingham, London, or Paris, but were clearly influenced in their own genre production by the artists' work. Thirdly, painters like Percy Craft recorded artists' varied social activities, from cricket matches to charades and fishing parties. This tradition, especially at St Ives, continued into the era of Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth in the 1940s and 1950s.
Notable finally was the career of the press photographer Harry Penhaul (1914-57). He used glass plates even on the most perilous assignments and, a popular figure, spent most of his time photographing local ‘diary’ events, and much-loved characters on their retirement. However, extreme weather or a maritime tragedy could propel his work overnight into the global media arena.
