Today the coast of Britain conjures up sun filled childhood memories, family holidays, adolescent romances and blissful honeymoons. However, delving into its long history, we find that it was seldom idyllic. It had a dark side as a gateway for invaders, slave traders, wreckers, smugglers and naval press gangs, as witnessed by the remains of castles, Martello towers, gun emplacements, rocket research sites and an array of concrete defence bunkers. For centuries landowners and the clergy had been highly suspicious of its anarchical nature, as for them, an area that was covered twice a day with water seemed a place of instability and those that lived there were unstable themselves. Essentially it was beyond control and demonised as a place of invasion and, in peacetime, of idlers and outcasts. As early as 1302 Norman authorities in Wales fined fishermen from Aberystwyth for selling herring below the high-water mark to avoid market tolls.
Once the Roman’s left Britain in the fifth century, a long period of turmoil ensued, and for the next five hundred years, Scandinavian, European and Irish invaders ravaged the mainland. It was a time considered so bleak that it was once referred to by scholars as ‘The Dark Ages’. The resistance fighter Arthmael ap Meurig ap Tewdrig resisted the marauders along the western seaboard from Cornwall to Strathclyde, he is immortalised as King Arthur of the Roundtable. From 800-1100 A.D. Dublin was a Viking stronghold and became the largest slave trading centre in Western Europe. Scottish, Welsh and Irish slaves were traded, some as far afield as Iceland. By the start of the 17th century the Corsairs from North Africa also took thousands of men, women and children from Devon, Cornwall, Ireland and Wales, to ransom or sell as slaves. Hundreds of poor Cornish fishermen were taken with no hope of a ransom being paid. Some sought a kind of freedom by converting to Islam but most of the women became concubines, no wonder coastal dwellers were wary. Over time they in turn became isolated and marginalised, along with the coast itself.
For centuries the coast only appeared sporadically in paintings as a backdrop for naval or maritime scenarios. This was to change when J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851) painted hundreds of watercolours of coastal places around the British Isles. Atmospherics were important to Turner, but not to the exclusion of an accurate record of the types of vessels used for particular fishing practices, nor the activities of the fisherfolk at sea or on land. For richer individuals Weymouth and Lyme Regis had been fashionable holiday and bathing resorts even before Turner painted them in 1811. Interestingly his depictions demonstrate that bathing activities and their clothing arrangements were much more casual than what was to eventuate later at the height of Victorian prudery. Recently Kurt Jackson has “repainted” Turner’s Cornish views.
After the Napoleonic wars there was peace for 70 years heralding an expansion of the railway system that facilitated thousands of workers from the industrial centres and other inland towns to avail themselves of the curative sea air, so the beach became a natural sanatorium. This meant coastal villages and towns becoming holiday resorts whose rapid growth meant an increasing need for accommodation and entertainment. Pier buildings sprang up everywhere and these, along with lighthouses, became iconic coastal architectural features.
The cultural lives of coastal dwellers, with their myths and legends, has been limited in the visual arts. I am discounting a plethora of harbour or seascape paintings which are snap shots more than in-depth exploration of seaboard culture. It was left to photography to fill this lacuna from the mid-19th century. Thankfully hundreds of photographic collections from around Britain, many rescued from destruction, are to be found in local and national museums. Rail connections to these hitherto isolated communities accommodated the arrival of artists, predominantly middle class, who were surprised at the hardship and stoicism of the people living a precarious and often dangerous existence... this was embraced as a new subject matter.
William Etty (1787-1849) depicted a beach scene as a backdrop for a classical, mythological scene entitled Hero and Leander. It is not the classical subject matter that is of interest but the lovers dying on a storm washed beach. It triggers deep seated trepidation concerning deaths along shorelines, that could be the drownings of the fisher-folk and mariners of my birthplace, which were summed up thus: “We have no weapons but honesty and faith against the assault of winter; and death walks in the pathways of fish” .This was written by Borth author and playwright A. E. Richards whose works were based on Borth’s fisher and maritime culture... many read like a Greek tragedy. Richards’s trove of imagery has not been exploited at all. His contemporary Dylan Thomas did likewise in Under Milkwood, giving us glimpses into the lives of people in small Welsh coastal communities. Ronnie Copas has painted some characters from Thomas’s play; so too has Seimon Pugh Jones whose memorable series of portraits of many of the characters are painted with a photographer’s eye.
James Burrell Smith (1822-1897) was a prolific painter of landscapes all over Britain, including Wales, one of which was of Aberwennol Bay near Borth, that depicted a sloop and a girl with 2 fish baskets. Pre-Raphaelite John Brett (1831-1902) painted large scale views of the Welsh coast in meticulous detail. To access his subject matter, he bought a farmhouse in Fishguard around 1860 and from there sailed around the coast in his own yacht, The Viking, which was a converted schooner. Brett was also a talented photographer who recorded much of his family life, especially their voyages on The Viking. Alfred Worthington (1835-1927) came to Aberystwyth as a portrait painter and photographer. He soon became entranced with the local maritime and fishing community. Scenes of the port and the surrounding coves left an invaluable record. There was also the mysterious “Welsh Primitive” operating around 1850. This anonymous water colourist painted a series of Cardiganshire coastal scenes, including the wrecking of the Borth sloop John & Mary at the mouth of Aberystwyth harbour. The late Muriel Delahaye settled in Borth and painted everyday scenes and historical events which were executed in a very personal, heartfelt, naïve style.
Between 1901 and 1907 a group of 40 or so artists worked from the Yorkshire coastal village of Staithes, which was a remote location until the arrival of the railway in 1883. For the first three years they exhibited in the Staithes Fisherman’s Institute then, as the group grew, they gained gallery space in Whitby. After 1907 there were no exhibition venues large enough to exhibit in and many of the artists had to further their careers elsewhere. This group had often lodged or rented attic rooms that gave them a first-hand experience of the hardship of the villagers. Joseph Bagshawe (1870-1909) was a competent yachtsman who often accompanied the Staithes fishermen on their boats. These experiences lent his work an intense knowledgeable realism. Owen Bowen (1873-1967) had a remarkably long career and was a much-feted painter and his precocious talent was recognised when he was merely 17. When the group disbanded, Dame Laura Knight (1877-1970) and her painter husband, Harold (1874-1961) moved to Cornwall to join the Newlyn School.
The Newlyn School had been established in 1880 around the fishing village of that name, which was adjacent to Penzance... it also included nearby Lamorna. Many of the individual artists had already been to Brittany but Newlyn had its advantages. It had fantastic light, was cheap to live in and had abundant models amongst the villagers. This art colony was founded by Walter Langley (1892-1922) but the main figure was Stanhope Forbes (1857-1947) who settled there in 1884 with his Canadian born wife Elizabeth, who was a notable painter in her own right. The work from this school, in particular, captured the lives of fishermen and their families in a way that truly demonstrated the often grim reality of their precarious existence.
With the return of conflicts in the 20th century some English artists, influenced by surrealism, painted beach subjects. Edward Wadsworth (1889-1949) whose paintings were highly detailed, as in The Beached Margin and Tomorrow Morning, exude an air of foreboding and anxiety, possibly reflecting his First World War naval experiences. Paul Nash (1889-1946) was another who included a coastal scene in his Landscape, From a Dream, which is a portent
of the outbreak of war and depicts the coast as a vexatious invader’s platform. This unease is also present in the murals of Mildred Eldridge painted in the 1950’s for the nurses’ refectory at the Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic Hospital, at Gobowen, in North Wales. Obviously affected by the recent Second World War experience, one panel depicts a coast-scape full of metal cages and unexploded bomb-like containers around which children, grown-ups and sea birds hardly find room.
John Bellany (1942-2013) was an acclaimed Scottish painter descended from a long line of fisherfolk from Port Sedon where he was born. His work was that of a knowing insider painting the Lothian seascapes and the stoic fishing community who were deeply religious whilst retaining their myths and superstitions. These people had a fear of God as well as the sea as it had taken so many lives in the locality. In Bellany’s lifetime he saw a decline in fish stocks and religious beliefs which inspired him to memorialise them. His art was highly acclaimed, and Damien Hirst considered him one of Britain’s major painters of the 20th century.
Joan Kathleen Harding Eardley (1921-63) was of Scottish descent and after her father’s death she, her mother and sibling moved to Glasgow, where her first notable works were images of the deprived children of Townhead. Towards the end of her short life she moved to the small fishing village of Catterline where she painted haunting and evocative seascapes, many undertaken outdoors during storms. It is said of her paintings that they seem to be the work of an experienced mariner, as they display powerful atmospherics and an emotional depth beyond mere representation.
Alfred Wallis (1855-1942) was a naïve painter who was a major influence on a community of artists that worked around St Ives in Cornwall. He became an iconic figure for the likes of Peter Lanyon, Christopher Wood, Ben Nicholson and others. Wallis, a local man, had been a seaman for much of his life and for a decade a fisherman working on sailing ships between Penzance and Newfoundland. He experienced the transition from sail to steam reflected in much of his work. Wallis did not start painting until he was 70 years of age using house paint and any odd shaped scraps of material as his “canvases”. In his final years he was in a poorhouse, heading for a pauper’s grave, when his artist friends bought a plot in the local churchyard. His grave is covered with tiles made by renowned St Ives potter Bernard Leach. One of Wallis’s admirers was Christopher Wood (1901-1930) who, although born in Liverpool, was drawn to exploring his Celtic Cornish roots at St Ives as well as Brittany. His empathy with coastal people illuminates much of his art as he seems to have reached the very soul of his subjects.
Peter Lanyon (1918-1964) born in St Ives, was a fervent Cornish nationalist and his gritty place-based art is redolent of that community and its farming and fishing culture.His desire was to establish an authentic regional style of art which, unfortunately, saw him falling out with Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo, whom he perceived were moving toward an international agenda... which they did so successfully. Bryan Pearce (1929-2007) was another local born artist whose naïve scenarios are often devoid of people. His work has an aura of a timeless, tranquil, heaven on earth that is unspoiled by the interference of humans or the weather. Others of the St Ives group who celebrated the Cornish coast were Patrick Heron 1920-1999, John Minton (1917-1957) and Ben Nicholson (1894-1982). In all these artists’ work one may detect Wallis’s influence.
The dynamics of coastal settlements have changed in the last two hundred years. Many are now best known as seaside resorts, yet others still retain their fisherfolk tradition. With the decline of the maritime and fishing industries after the Second World War, tourism has been the lifeblood of some of these places. The fishing communities, the timeless sea itself and some truly beautiful coastlines, still draws artists today.
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