Village on a Cornish Coast

This early work was painted at the villages of Kingsand-Cawsand in Cornwall, during Rees's first visit to Europe. The artist recalled this period of his life in his autobiography: "I went down to Cornwall at one stage to the dual village of Corsan Kingsan (sic)... You only knew when you passed from one place to another by a mark on the wall of a building. On one side it was Corsan and on the other, Kingsan. There were long, great stone buildings down near the water, built for the herring trade, even then destroyed by the shipping in the Channel, and I used to go and sit there and paint on the stony beach. If it was bad weather and the fishermen could not go out I listened to them talking but only understood half a dozen words because their brogue was so thick... I did some painting down in Cornwall, some of it done outside standing on ice but I caught a terrific cold and realized that if you had any brains at all, you would never paint twice in the English winter out-of-doors." (L Rees, Peaks and Valleys, An Autobiography, Sydney 1985, p.123 - 125)

René Free commented on this painting in the following extract. "His paintings of Kingsand-Cawsand in Cornwall feature his developing interest in light on stone wall, architecture weathered by nature, and buildings revealing the way people live. The misty greyness of England suited his tonal painting. In Cornish Coast he departs from the 'road running into the picture' type composition, and constructs by horizontal bands to produce a unified surface effect - another method of Corot. This frontality became a characteristic of his landscape painting." (R Free, op.cit, pp.29-30)

We are grateful to Alan Rees for assisting with this catalogue entry.