THOMAS COOPER GOTCH RBA RI (1854-1931)

A Village Backstreet (c. 1890 United Kingdom)

Item Stock Code

770

Item Medium Description

Watercolour

Item Signed, Inscribed, Dated Details

Signed

European Dimensions

10.00 cm wide 18.00 cm high

UK/USA Converted Dimensions

3.94 inches wide 7.09 inches high

Item Description / Dealer Expertise

Gotch was born in Kettering, Northamptonshire. He studied at Heatherley’s Art School and the Slade with and later in Antwerp and Paris. After a trip to Australia in 1884 he and his wife returned to England and after several visits to Cornwall decided to live permanently in Newlyn in 1887. For some years he worked along traditional Newlyn lines, treating local subjects in a realistic manner but a visit to Florence in 1891-2 lend him in the direction of more symbolistic and allegorical subjects with a distinctly decorative treatment.

Gotch was a close friend of Henry Scott Tuke and together with Stanhope Forbes they became founder members of the New English Art Club in 1886. He exhibited at the Royal Academy 1880-1931, was a member of the Royal Society of British Artists and Royal Institute of Oil Painters. He is represented in many public and major private art collections.

GOTCH

Type	Artist/Maker
Qualificiations	RBA RI
Country of origin	England
Born	1854
Died	1931

Thomas Cooper Gotch was an English Pre-Raphaelite painter and book illustrator, and one of the first of the ‘Newlyn School’ artists to arrive from London. Like the French plein air painters, he sought to capture the effects of light and atmosphere with a rugged, square edged brush. As Stanhope Alexander Forbes explained: it was a breath of fresh air in the tired atmosphere of the studios, and painters began to see that it needed more than an occasional visit to the country to get to the heart of its mysteries; that he who wished to solve them must live amongst the scenes he sought to render and become thoroughly familiarised with every aspect of nature ... most of us ... set up our easels in country districts, where we could pose our models and attack our work, in sunshine or in shadow, under the open sky (1).

In Newlyn, Gotch painted local scenes in the then-fashionable realist manner, albeit with his own romantic edge. A visit to Florence, Italy in 1891 introduced him to the work of the romantic European symbolists and inspired him to change to a more romantic decorative style. He painted portraits, Christian scenes, history paintings, and landscapes. The paintings for which he is best known, however, are those of young girls usually dressed in ornate garb, a subject matter often noted to be very modern for his time.

(1) Caroline Fox, and Francis Greenacre, Artists of the Newlyn School (1880-1900). Newlyn Orion Galleries Limited, 1979, page 12.

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Status

FOR SALE

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THOMAS COOPER GOTCH RBA RI (1854-1931)

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