Becalmed

For all his dislike of Whistler’s posturing the present canvas indicates that the two artists had more in common than the Newlyn painter cared to admit in the mid-1880s. Forbes’s sense of spacing, interval and colour harmony in this luminous sketch, would easily qualify him as a Whistlerian Impressionist. Subtle transitions on the glacial surface of the sea are enough to indicate the space of a bay. Rowing boats marking the moorings of larger craft, are dotted across the middle distance like crotchets and quavers on a line of music. Yet in the crisp delineation of the single remaining fishing boat, there is an unmistakable echo of Bastien-Lepage, Forbes’s true mentor. While accounts of his early years in Newlyn justifiably concentrate on major works submitted to the Royal Academy, many smaller studies and sketches cited in reviews, point to the fuller sense of a developing oeuvre. Most have disappeared. Those that are known, like the present example, reveal an artist of great sensitivity.

This picture has been thought to represent Brixham harbour, however the precise date of Forbes’s visit to the Devon port, if it happened at all, is unrecorded. The relative thinness of the paint and higher key may place it later than Forbes’s Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach, 1885 (Plymouth Art Gallery) - circa 1888-90 – and making it possible that it could be an untraced picture listed in the artist’s sales book for 1890 as When boats are idle in the bay.
KMc.