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Lot Essay
When the papers were filled with news of the final German push on the Western Front, reviews of the Royal Academy were cut back to a minimum. Significantly however, Harvey's work caught the eye of the local paper which commented on his 'exquisite' landscape, describing it as 'the kind you could live with' (The Cornishman and Cornish Telegraph, 29 May 1918, p. 6). The Penwith countryside, on a summer's day, remained an idyllic oasis of calm in which the painter's wife inspects the colourful borders in a garden she has lovingly planted.
After his marriage to Gertrude Bodinnar in April 1911, the Harveys lived at Maen Cottage, half way up Chywoone Hill, the steep incline which rises from Newlyn to the cluster of houses known as Tredavoe (Risdon, 2001, pp. 71-2). Here, at 'Rosevean' in Tredavoe Lane, he established a studio that became a popular meeting place for the Newlyn artists' colony. However, with the outbreak of hostilities, the community was depleted and in her memoirs, Laura Knight recalled the restrictions now imposed on artists. Paintings of British coastline were strictly forbidden and Penzance, a naval base from the beginning of the war, became an area of strategic importance overnight. To be seen with a sketchbook risked arrest as a spy.
Nevertheless, throughout this period, Harvey continued to paint en plein air, reducing his landscape settings to minor elements in what were fundamentally, contre jour figure compositions. At the same time, Gertrude, his favourite model, is often seen in sunlit rooms, sewing or gazing into mirrors.
An exception to this was a series of resplendent hillside garden pictures of which the present depiction of Summer, is the central work. It takes its cue from pictures of the 1880s by Clausen, Stott, Osborne and others that marked the beginnings of rural naturalism. Yet much had happened since those days as a result of the adoption of Impressionist ideas about colour, and the matching of visual sensation on-the-motif with the painter's brushstroke. Flowers, in this process, became colour notes and Harvey's pictures by 1918 were correspondingly less concerned with illusion and more with design. This is clear when we compare the present work with In the Garden - Summer, 1918 (Private Collection), a portrait of Gertrude reclining in a deckchair in the same hilltop garden. Both pictures, in their obvious delight in the glory of colour, insist on quiet continuities - a joyous counterpoint to grim newspaper reports from the fields of Northern France.
KMc.
After his marriage to Gertrude Bodinnar in April 1911, the Harveys lived at Maen Cottage, half way up Chywoone Hill, the steep incline which rises from Newlyn to the cluster of houses known as Tredavoe (Risdon, 2001, pp. 71-2). Here, at 'Rosevean' in Tredavoe Lane, he established a studio that became a popular meeting place for the Newlyn artists' colony. However, with the outbreak of hostilities, the community was depleted and in her memoirs, Laura Knight recalled the restrictions now imposed on artists. Paintings of British coastline were strictly forbidden and Penzance, a naval base from the beginning of the war, became an area of strategic importance overnight. To be seen with a sketchbook risked arrest as a spy.
Nevertheless, throughout this period, Harvey continued to paint en plein air, reducing his landscape settings to minor elements in what were fundamentally, contre jour figure compositions. At the same time, Gertrude, his favourite model, is often seen in sunlit rooms, sewing or gazing into mirrors.
An exception to this was a series of resplendent hillside garden pictures of which the present depiction of Summer, is the central work. It takes its cue from pictures of the 1880s by Clausen, Stott, Osborne and others that marked the beginnings of rural naturalism. Yet much had happened since those days as a result of the adoption of Impressionist ideas about colour, and the matching of visual sensation on-the-motif with the painter's brushstroke. Flowers, in this process, became colour notes and Harvey's pictures by 1918 were correspondingly less concerned with illusion and more with design. This is clear when we compare the present work with In the Garden - Summer, 1918 (Private Collection), a portrait of Gertrude reclining in a deckchair in the same hilltop garden. Both pictures, in their obvious delight in the glory of colour, insist on quiet continuities - a joyous counterpoint to grim newspaper reports from the fields of Northern France.
KMc.