Commentary by Pamela Nunn

Although Flora (and John) Reid lived and worked in Cornwall for over a decade, she has not been identified in the long term with the Cornish school. To some extent this is because the Reids lived in the Looe/Polperro area that lies outside the two communities that anchored the Cornish school of painting, Newlyn and St Ives. But, as this work shows, it was also because she did not keep workig in the same vein as that which made the Cornish school so famous and popular in the two decades spanning the end of the nineteenth and the start of the twentieth centuries.

Although Potato Gatherers (1883) and Fieldworkers (1884) show the affinity with the French painter Jules Bastien-Lepage made known to the English gallery-goer by the Newlyn School, Reid did not remain a plein-air painter as they were. After the 1880s she did not employ their characteristic 'square-brush' technique nor did she maintain the outdoor, mobile light that characterises 'Lepage-ist' work. So, despite the specific identity of the worker depicted here, this painting has more in common with her Continental market-place scenes than with Cornish school classics by, say, Stanhope Forbes or Walter Langley. That said, there is a slight echo in A Cornish Fishwife of the paintings of Maria Webb Robinson (1840-1920), an Irish artist who, with her husband, pioneered the St Ives art community in the late 1880s and made her name with robustly painted figure compositions with this kind of colouring.

It can be noted that Reid exhibited in 1902 a watercolour entitled Dutch Fishwife and in 1903 a painting called Old Fishwife: research has yet to determine to what extent the present work derives from either of these.

Bibliography

A Cornish Fishwife by Flora Macdonald Reid (1860-1945). Art UK. Web. 8 July 2022.

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Created 8 July 2022