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Shining Through Tears
P.O.A.
Birch spent 63 years living and painting in Cornwall, here he was surrounded by endless inspiration. Much of his work was done ‘en plein air’, with just minor adjustments made in the studio. He was known by the local farmers to store his half-finished canvases in their barns so that he didn’t have to carry them home with him on his bicycle.
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Lamorna Birch was a renowned landscape painter in both oil and watercolour and a prominent member of the second generation of the Newlyn School of Artists. He was born in Egremont in Cheshire in June 1869, and as a boy moved to Manchester and later to Lancashire working in a mill, painting at dawn and sunset. He was constantly torn between his love for art and fishing.
He was self-taught in art but did spend a year at the Atelier Colarossi in Paris 1895-6. From 1889 he regularly visited Cornwall and came under the influence of Stanhope Forbes, who was regarded as the greatest of the Newlyn School of artists, a group who settled in Newlyn because of the bright light and the relaxed atmosphere of the fishing village. Although being a near contemporary of the early Newlyn artists, Birch took an independent stance by living along the road at Lamorna; because there was another artist in Newlyn named Lionel Birch, John Birch added the name Lamorna to his known and from 1896 he even signed his work S. J. Lamorna Birch. Lamorna was to provide Birch with an endless range of landscape subjects, especially because of his passionate interest in rivers. He set up a studio near the river at Lamorna, only half a mile from Lamorna Cove. He later moved to Flagstaff Cottage at the head of the bay. He attracted other artists to the area and received a letter asking for art lessons; the student was named Emily Vivian, whom he later married. They had two daughters.Birch exhibited very widely – 146 paintings at the Royal Academy and 287 at the Royal Society of Watercolour Artists alone – being elected a member of the Royal Academy in 1934, and he was a very popular and gregarious fellow.
In Cornwall he was friendly with other artists, carrying out an amusing correspondence with Stanhope Forbes, and he was especially friendly with the famous Laura Knight who often came round to the Birch’s house with her husband Harold, also an artist. Birch’s elder daughter, Mornie, has related how Laura would sketch her and her sister before they went to bed.
Birch was a passionate fisherman, and is sometimes called the “The Fisherman Artist”. Each summer he and his wife (whom he called “mouse”) went on a river-based holiday, usually in Scotland but sometimes in Austria. He was a very keen traveller, visiting New Zealand and Australia in 1937. In 1947, two paintings by Birch were presented by the people of Cornwall to HM Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh on the occasion of their marriage.
When Lamorna Birch died in 1955 The Times obituary commented: “Birch, who was an athletic bearded man, looking very much younger than his years with the bright eyes and eager manner of a terrier, was the best of companions in any grade of society.”
