Harold Harvey

Henry B. Briggs, Plymouth;
Torquay, Bearnes & Waycotts, 5 September 1984, no. 247;
London, Pyms Gallery, Rural and Urban Images 1984, no. 30
Private collection

Plymouth Art Gallery, 1913;
Pyms Gallery, 1984, no. 30;
Penzance, Penlee House Gallery and Newport Art Gallery and Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Harold Harvey, Painter of Cornwall, 2001-2002, no.163

Kenneth McConkey, Peter Risdon and Pauline Sheppard, Harold Harvey, Painter of Cornwall, 2001, no. 163, p. 142

STRUCTURE This picture is unlined and in very good condition with strong colours and rich impasto. The picture may benefit from a light clean. There are areas of fine craquelure in the sky. UNDER ULTRAVIOLET LIGHT There are very minor flecked retouchings in the sky close to the child in green. FRAME This picture is contained in a simple and attractive modern gilt frame in good condition.
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Unlike many of the other painters who made their home in Cornwall, Harvey was a Cornishman by birth and this undoubtedly gave him a closer understanding of the people and landscapes he painted. He was born into a middle-class family (his father was a bank clerk in Penzance) but as has been observed 'as a local child he would have been aware of the realities of life in that community in a way in which most 'foreigners' could never be.' (Kenneth McConkey, Peter Risdon and Pauline Sheppard, Harold Harvey, Painter of Cornwall, 2001, p. 37). This empathy led to a desire to depict the reality of humble country life, but not in the sentimental way that the Victorians had painted it, the likes of Hubert Herkomer or Luke Fildes.  

Harvey was committed to the principles of plein-air painting, and his greatest works were painted out of doors in the sunshine, capturing the brilliance of colour and light which give his pictures such a modern and expressive quality. Holidays was painted in 1912, during the period in which Harvey's art was much influenced by that of Stanhope Forbes, the greatest exponent of the Newlyn School of painters, who were concerned with the portrayal of coastal life, the trials and tribulations of the fishermen and their families. He and the younger artists he influenced, found a renewed interest in the people, animals and traditional ways of life that existed on the cliffs and shores and in the fields and lanes of the villages of Cornwall. Harvey was one of those who embraced these subjects, and with his perceptive and sensitive regard for the Cornish people, he was able to translate the everyday scenes of farmers working, milk-maids going to market and stable-lads tending their horses, into summaries of a whole way of life which the modern age was threatening to destroy. In Holidays, he depicted the innocent joy of a group of Cornish children, on a cliff top where they are barefoot from paddling in the sea below, and have whirlers in their hands to play with in the sea-breezes. For both Forbes and Harvey, it was these people and their lives that offered the noble and worthy subjects which represented an age which despite its advances was continually looking back to a more innocent and simpler existence.

Harvey's career spanned the two generations of the Newlyn school, the first being represented by Norman Garstin, Walter Langley and Stanhope Forbes and the second being represented by Laura and Harold Knight who arrived in Newlyn in 1907. Although Harvey learnt much from Forbes' paintings of fisherfolk and stable-hands, his work has the Modernist qualities of the later generations, a clarity of forms, crispness of lighting and lushness of colour. Holidays is perhaps closer to the work of the Knights than it is to Forbes, and like Laura Knight, who delighted in painting children playing on the cliffs above Lamorna, Harvey here has created an image of childhood, lit by the summer sunlight refracted from the ocean, that many artists found so irresistible in Cornwall.