Footnotes

Exhibited
London, New English Art Club, 1886, no.13

Literature
Pall Mall Gazette 'Extra', 'The New English Art Club', 1886, p.72, illustrated in a line drawing
F.R. Gunzi, Fred Hall, Naturalism, Caricature and the Luministe Landscape, 2016, p.8 (exhibition catalogue, Penlee House Gallery and Museum)

For all the mundanity of the task it represents, Fred Hall's A Fisherman's Daughter is an important rediscovery. The girl, wearing a pristine apron and white tunic stands in a whitewashed loft unravelling a 'Seine' net, one of the huge nets with numerous floats, used to trap large shoals of pilchards off the Cornish coast at Mount's Bay. Seen in use in Charles Napier Hemy's How we caught the Pilchards, 1885 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), the net was an essential piece of equipment employed by the Newlyn fleet, before the advent of steam trawlers.¹ Because of its size, it must be hooked to a wall and offstage, a helper, perhaps the fisherman himself, may be conducting repairs. Furnishings in this Spartan interior – the stick-back chair, cheap engraving, lantern and earthenware – are those found elsewhere in the work of Frank Bramley, Walter Langley, Chevallier Tayler, Frank Bourdillon and other Newlyn painters.

Although indoors, the young woman wears a pink sun-bonnet – something in common usage by fieldworkers from the Scottish borders to the south-west, but which was now, in the opinion of Alice Meynell, dying out. 'It', according to the writer, 'shaded the wild-rose faces of girls, before the stale and second-hand habits of clothing had begun to prevail', and studying Fred Hall's A Fisherman's Daughter, we instantly realize that this girl, for all that her hands are swollen by rough labour, is conscious of how she appears.²

So too is the painter. A related head study [fig.1] reveals how alluring such a headdress could be, and its comparison with The Pink Bonnet [fig.2] by Edwin Harris indicates how closely integrated with other Newlyn School painters Hall, in a short time, had become.³

However, while these head studies of fisher-folk reveal the common endeavour of the Newlyn painters, for Hall they were merely a waystage to the greater ambitions of the present work. The twenty-four year old Hall had sampled the village ambiance in 1884 before settling there the following year. Trained, like Bramley at Lincoln School of Art, but under its new teacher, Alfred Webster, Hall had spent a year at the Academie Royale d'Anvers, in Antwerp under the rigorous tutelage of Charles Verlat.⁵ After a brief recognizance in Walberswick, probably in the company of Walter Osborne, he returned to Cornwall and can be securely placed in the village in the winter of 1885-6, when the present canvas was painted.⁶

His mentors lay beyond the confines of Newlyn in the wider community of young British artists who had trained in the European ateliers and were influenced by the modern Naturalism of Jules Bastien-Lepage, promoted in Britain by George Clausen and Henry Herbert La Thangue.⁷ Illustrated alongside major works by these artists in the Pall Mall Gazette 'Extra', A Fisherman's Daughter can be identified as the artist's contribution to the first New English Art Club exhibition in April 1886 [fig. 3].⁸

Discussed in meetings of young artists throughout the previous winter, the club's formation was the first step in the emergence of a new avant-garde in British art.⁹ Members of the group were trained in foreign ateliers, painted en plein air using square-shaped brushes, and adopted subjects that, for the most part, were drawn from real life. With this naturalistic manner, they challenged the conservatism of the Royal Academy and were repelled with a vehemence similar to that which met the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, some thirty-five years earlier. Naturalism, as the club's – and Hall's - early history makes clear, was the prelude to a fine-grained Impressionism.

However, in its first incarnation in 1886, the club relied heavily on works by artists of the Newlyn School and while Stanhope Forbes jockeyed for leadership, we should not neglect the superb aesthetic quality of works like A Fisherman's Daughter. It is, in Whistlerian terms, a 'harmony' in whites; the handling, crisp and confident. To some extent this is a by-product of the use of chisel-shaped brushes for cross-hatching forms to give them solidity, but it also subtly differentiates the work from that of later European proponents of l'art sociale, and places it alongside that of sophisticated 'aesthete' Naturalists such as Dagnan-Bouveret and Jules-Alexis Meunier.

In 1902 when a Newlyn School retrospective exhibition was held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, Charles Lewis Hind referred to Fred Hall as one of the group, 'by accident not design'. Hall's 'glowing landscapes' were seen to come from 'another source', and 'his gift for caricature has nothing in common with Newlyn sobriety'.¹⁰ Although intensely committed in the mid-1880s, Hall, like Chevallier Tayler, was a semi-detached member of the group. Moving temporarily to Porlock in Somerset in the summer 1888 where he spent at least eighteen months before returning to Newlyn and finally leaving Cornwall in 1898, just as the dogmatic Forbes was setting up his art school. The glory days were over and the moment when a fisherman's daughter first took up her pose, unravelling a Seine net, had long passed.

¹See also Napier Hemy's monumental Pilchards, 1897 (Tate), Percy Craft's Tucking a School of Pilchards, 1897 (Penlee House Gallery, Penzance), and Stanhope Forbes's The Seine Boat, 1904 (Private Collection).
²A. Meynell, The Art Journal, 'Newlyn', 1889, p.139. It may be that such bonnets remained in use until the early twentieth century in remote areas. One of the women in Stanhope Forbes's The Fleet in Sight, 1911 (Private Collection), for instance, wears such a bonnet. For an interesting discussion of working women's attire in Newlyn see Mary O'Neill, Art and Artifice, 'Cornwall's 'Fisherfolk'', 2014 (Sansom), pp.43-59.
³Hall and Harris appear to have produced closely comparable head studies of the same models; see Hall's Portrait of a Fisher Boy and Harris's Boy Wearing a Hat.
⁴Hall showed An Orchard Scene near Newlyn, Cornwall at the Society of British Artists in the winter of 1884/5, probably the picture mistitled Autumn 1918, the cover illustration for F.R. Gunzi, Fred Hall, 2016.
⁵Alfred George Webster (1852-1916) was George Clausen's brother-in-law; for British students in Antwerp, see Jeanne Sheehy, Art History, 'The Flight from South Kensington, British Artists at the Antwerp Academy, 1877-1885', vol.20, 1997, pp.124-153.
⁶The first reference to Hall in Stanhope Forbes' letters (Hyman Keitman Archive, Tate Britain) occurs when he attended Forbes' birthday dinner with Frank Bramley and William Banks Fortescue on 8 November 1885.
⁷Hall's awareness of Clausen's work is indicated in An Orchard near Newlyn, Cornwall, 1884 (sold Bonhams 2 July 2002, lot 6, see note 4).
⁸Clausen's Shepherdess, 1885 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) and La Thangue's In the Dauphiné, 1884-6 (Private Collection), appeared alongside A Fisherman's Daughter on the same page of the Pall Mall Gazette 'Extra', illustrated from the artist's original sketches. F.R. Gunzi (Fred Hall, 2016, p.8) appears to conflate the title of the present work with that of Old Birds, one of Hall's exhibits at the Royal Academy in 1887. This latter work, quite different in character, showing an old woman plucking a goose, was illustrated from an original sketch in the Pall Mall Gazette 'Extra', 1887, p.14.
⁹K. McConkey, The New English, A History of the New English Art Club, 2006 (RA Publications), pp.29-42.
¹⁰C.L.H., The Academy and Literature, 'Art: From Newlyn to Whitechapel', 5 April 1902, p.369. R. Jope-Slade, Black and White Handbook to the Royal Academy and New Gallery, 'The Outsiders', 1893, p.25, gives the erroneous impression that Hall had been 'ten years a Newlyner'.

We are grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.