Leonard Richmond 1889 -1965

Leonard Richmond was born in Somerset, and studied at Taunton and Chelsea Polytechnic. In WWI he was the Canadian Government war artist and in 1925 was commissioned to promote rail and hotel facilities through poster art in western Canada, by the Canadian Pacific Railway. His large colourful posters adveritising the region and the Canadian Rockies were much admired, and he worked for the English railways as well. During the 1930s he visited St Ives regularly, taking a studio there in 1932, setting up a summer painting school in 1935. He lived successively in Brentford (1912), Southall (1914), London (1919), and was giving his address in Guildford in 1935. Leonard Richmond is one of the many artists who began work in West Cornwall at an earlier date, moved away and then returned to Cornwall at a later date, in his case, for three years from 1946 to 49. Prolific exhibitor at Fine Art Society, RA, Cooling and Walker's Galleries. Also showed widely overseas winning a number of awards. These included the Tuthill Prize at Chicago International Watercolour Exhibition in 1928 and in 1947 silver medal at Paris Salon. Member of PS, RBA, RI and ROI. His work is represented in many public galleries (see Art UK). THIS COLLECTION FORMED PART OF A GROUP OF PASTELS OBTAINED BY THE ARTIST HYMAN SEGAL WHEN HE TOOK OVER RICHMOND'S STUDIO IN ST.IVES. Until the art colonies at Newlyn, Lamorna and St Ives sprang to life in the 19th century, Britain had witnessed little among its own artists of the plein air approach to painting being practised in France and her neighbours. But painters who migrated to Cornwall were to follow the continental example of working out of doors in wind, sun and rain, and painting with an eye for social realism. Indeed, the Newlyn painter Norman Garstin, observed that ‘your work cannot really be good unless you have caught a cold doing it’ while Lamorna Birch, father of the colony at Lamorna, remembered: ‘It was our creed that beautiful things had to be painted on the spot.’ It was nothing short of a revolution and the art-buying public liked what they saw. But first painters had to overcome the hostility of hidebound institutions such as the Royal Academy which thought art in Cornwall had become ‘too foreign’. In due course the Academy relented and Cornish painters went on to enjoy the highest accolade: that of changing the face of art in Britain. The legendary clear light and vivid colour of St Ives – where the sea is a remarkable Mediterranean blue - had a particularly strong pull for overseas artists, among them in the late 19th century James McNeill Whistler and Anders Zorn; and by the 1930s St Ives had achieved so much popularity that it was being promoted as ‘the most painted place in the world’. I am happy to introduce this exhibition of 25 paintings which reminds us of the legacy of these colonies and the inspiration artists found in the West Country, in Cornwall and Devon, including images dating from pre-war years which are so redolent of family holidays spent beside the sea. Mary McCrossan’s ‘White Giggs’ painted at St Ives serves as a signature piece for the many artists who were mesmerised by light and colour and the reflections of boats bobbing at anchor, while Leonard Richmond’s ‘Sands, St Ives’ relates to the travel posters he painted at that time, luring holidaymakers to the West of England in the old chocolate-and-cream carriages of the Great Western Railway. Nostalgia here by the brush load! Austin Wormleighton [AustinWormleighton is President of the Lamorna Society, a former journalist with The Times and an author of books and articles on art. He wrote A Painter Laureate: Lamorna Birch and his Circle and Morning Tide: John Anthony Park and the Painters of Light and was a major contributor to Painting at the Edge: Britain’s coastal art colonies 1880-1930. His latest book is Lost World: The untold story of London’s Stamford Bridge Studios.]