Harold Harvey (1874-1941)

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When recent works by local artists were shown at the Passmore Edwards Gallery, Newlyn, in March 1911, Harold Harvey's paintings were grouped with those of the younger generation, specifically those of Harold and Laura Knight. Up to this point, according to the provincial papers, 'the significance of the work of such artists' had not been 'fully apprehended'. With due regard to older artists such as Stanhope Forbes, Mrs Knight specifically had shot to fame in the previous two years, on the basis of a 'school of thought' that 'for some years now, Mr Harvey in particular has been developing …'.¹

^{Morning Sunshine - Harold Harvey (1874-1941) (£25,000-35,000)}

While there was some partisanship in the comment – Harvey was born in Penzance – there can be no doubt that his Impressionistic handling had the strongest appeal to more recent incomers to the Penwith peninsula. In the contemporary rhetoric of 'city versus country', the cheerful specimens of Englishness contained in works like Morning Sunshine epitomised health and happiness.²  To this painting 'one instinctively turns', the reviewer continues, for an everyday scene 'above Newlyn' that:

… represents the bringing in of clothes which have been drying in the open. One is arrested by the virility of the three figures descending the steep ground in the bright light – the healthy-faced and gladsome girls and the woman with the basket of clothes under her arm, but one is equally as much impressed with the truly great conception of light which Mr Harvey has caught. There is also a delightful peep of Newlyn Pier and the shimmering sea at the foot of the slope.³

The Passmore Edwards exhibition was a mere prelude to the Royal Academy which opened in May, where Morning Sunshine was once more greeted with approval:

A most attractive open air subject picture is Mr Harold Harvey's 'Morning Sunshine' with three young girls promenading a green bank sloping sideways to the sea. Their hair and dresses are caught by sunlight, and the landscape is alive with the freshness of a spring morning.⁴

While the painting was much admired, it is also clear that Morning Sunshine was revised at some point between its initial showing and 1980, and the three foreground figures have been reduced to two.⁵ Further research may reveal the reasons for this.

However, it remains the case that the work in its present form fits well into the sequence of Harvey's smaller works around 1910. In 1908, for instance, he had painted Young Washergirls, his first painting of a procession of girls carrying wicker baskets of washing. These figures with baskets, accompanied by a small child, are re-cast in The Blackberry Harvest c.1910 (figs.1&2).⁶

^{Fig.1  Harold Harvey, Young Washergirls, 1908, 30 x 40cm, Private Collection,  Fig.2  Harold Harvey, The Blackberry Harvest c.1910, 40.7 x 35.6cm, Private Collection}

Although we recognise the faces of his models here and elsewhere, their names, before the 1920s, elude us. Yet names in the end are of little consequence when what we are meant to admire is a domestic ritual practiced in the glorious light and warm breezes of a Cornish headland. When his Academy piece, Morning Sunshine, was on its way to London in April 1911, Harvey gave his hand in marriage to Gertrude Bodinnar and moved up to Maen Cottage at the top of Newlyn, where it was a short step out on to the grassy slope to revisit familiar scenes he had already made his own.

Kenneth McConkey
January 2025

_{1    ‘The Newlyn Pictures, 1911 Exhibition’ The Cornishman, 23 March 1911, p. 3.}

_{2     See for instance CFG Masterman, The Condition of England, 1909 (Methuen & Co.), a polemic on the social divisions and current transformations taking place in English society.}

_{3     As note 1.}

_{4     'The Royal Academy II - West Country Artists', Western Morning News, 6 May 1911, p.4. Harvey also showed a smaller work, Milking Time (Private Collection, Ridson 2024 no. 125) in the 1911 Academy.}

_{5     When viewed c.1981 by the present author, this change had been made.}

_{6       Young Washergirls, (Ridson 2024, no. 124) after its sale at Lawrence's, Crewkerne, on 25 September 1980, appeared in The Plein Air Tradition, an exhibition at Whitford and Hughes, London in 1982 (no. 134) as Washing Day; see also Washday, 1907 (Ridson 2024, no. 123), a work showing a mother, daughter and younger child retrieving washing from hedgerows near the hilltop. The Blackberry Harvest (Ridson 2024, no. 188) was sold at Christie's, 5 June 2008, and although not reviewed until Harvey's solo exhibition in Plymouth in 1912, must date from c.1910; see 'Pictures at Plymouth by Mr Harold Harvey', Western Daily Mercury, 23 August 1912, p.8.}

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