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191
Samuel John Lamorna Birch RA RWS (1869-1955)
A COOL SPOT AT CLAPPER MILL, LAMORNA, CORNWALL, 1941
oil on board
signed and dated lower left; signed and titled on reverse 14½
x 17½in. (36.83 x 44.45cm)
Provenance:
Collection of George and Maura McClelland
Lamorna Birch was born in Egremont, Cheshire, England. He was self-taught as an artist, except for a brief
period of study at the Académie Colarossi in Paris during 1895.
Birch settled in Lamorna, Cornwall in 1892. Many of his most famous pictures date from this time and
the beautiful Lamorna Cove is usually their subject matter. He was attracted to Cornwall by the Newlyn
group of artists but he ended up starting a second group based around his adopted home of Lamorna.
He exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1893, was elected as an Associate (ARA) in 1926 and made
a Royal Academician (RA) in 1934, and showed more than two hundred paintings there.[ He held his
first one-man exhibition at the Fine Art Society in 1906 and is said to have produced more than 20,000
pictures. Like a number of his contemporaries, he was profiled as an ‘Artist of Note’ in The Artist magazine,
by Richard Seddon, in the June 1944 edition.
The exhibition Shades of British Impressionism Lamorna Birch and his Circle was shown at Warrington
Museum & Art Gallery in the Mezzanine in October 2004. This details his links with Henry Scott Tuke and
Thomas Cooper Gotch and many others who settled in the artists’ colony in the 1880s and 1890s. “These
painters helped to change the face of British art. Their emphasis on colour and light, truth and social
realism brought about a revolution in British art.” says the catalogue for the show.
Estimate €1500-€2000 (approx £1305-£1740)
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