A Cornish Fisherman

Walter Langley, RI RBSA (1852 – 1922)

Watercolour. Signed. Dated 1892.

6¾” x 4¾” (17.2 cm x 12.1 cm)

The pioneer of the Newlyn School, Walter Langley first visited the Cornish fishing village in 1880 and settled there two years later. Born in Birmingham, he trained at the city’s School of Design before winning a scholarship to study at The South Kensington Schools in London. Coming from a working-class background, Langley had an immediate empathy with the fishermen of Newlyn and their families, and his paintings are an enduring social record of their daily lives and the hardships and tragedies they faced. Langley’s pictures were at their most evocative in watercolour, and he exhibited 80 works at The Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours, of which he became a member in 1883. Such was his reputation as a portrait painter that in 1895 he was invited to submit a self-portrait to hang in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, an honour bestowed on only the most distinguished international artists.