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THIS OBJECT IS PART OF THE PROJECT 'A HISTORY OF CORNWALL IN 100 OBJECTS'.

PENLEE HOUSE GALLERY AND MUSEUM. This extremely important study is an early preparatory work leading to Stanhope Forbes's iconic and best-known painting, 'Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach' of 1885. On arriving in Newlyn in January 1884, Forbes wrote to his mother: 'The wet sands and the fish and the people buying is what has determined me to stop - but I don't know whether it is to be painted'.

This study was one of the first paintings that the artist executed in Newlyn in February 1884. It shows all the hallmarks of plein-air, square brush painting that characterised the Newlyn School. Forbes did stay, dying at Newlyn as late as 1947. He persuaded Passmore Edwards to pay for an art gallery and when many other artists left in the 1890s, started an art colony with his wife Elizabeth which changed the course of British Art. Among their students were Geoffrey Garnier and his wife Jill, the original owners of this study.