Footnotes

Provenance
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
London, The Leicester Galleries, Ernest Procter Memorial Exhibition, January 1936, cat.no.31

Please note that there is an additional painting of a landscape, verso.

Ernest Procter, though born and raised in Tynemouth, Northumberland, is quintessentially a Cornish artist; the area featuring prominently throughout his work. After studying at Leeds School of Art in the late 1890s, Procter enrolled at Stanhope Forbes' School of Painting in Newlyn, where he would meet his future wife, Doris 'Dod' Shaw (1890–1972). The pair were among Forbes' most accomplished pupils.

In 1910, Procter moved to Paris to study at the Atelier Colarossi, where he encountered and was influenced by several leading artists of the day, including Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Paul Cézanne. He and Dod married in 1912 and remained in France with their son Bill, born the following year, until the end of the First World War. A committed Quaker, raised in a staunchly Quaker household, Procter was a conscientious objector. Nonetheless, he contributed to the war effort by serving with the Friends Ambulance Service under the British Red Cross Society, working as an orderly in Dunkirk and providing essential care to the wounded and their families.

After the war, both Dod and Ernest were commissioned to decorate the newly built Kokine Palace in Rangoon (now Yangon), Burma, for the Honourable Lim Ching Tsong. Assisted by Burmese, Indian, and Chinese craftspeople, the Procters adorned the palace walls with richly coloured murals of East Asian landscapes, rendered in tones of blue, green, and gold, and clearly reflective of their Post-Impressionist influences.

By 1920, the couple had returned to Cornwall, eventually settling in North Corner, a cottage in Newlyn. Around this time, Procter and his friend and fellow artist Harold Harvey (1874–1971) founded their own art school in Newlyn, which they ran together until the mid-1920s. Among their students was Phyllis Mary (Billie) Waters (1896–1979), who later became Procter's apprentice. By this stage, Procter's artistic approach had evolved into the polished, neoclassical style that he is known for.

The present work, titled The Dancers, exemplifies this approach; a balance of classicism, a sensitivity to the Cornish landscape, and a refined sense of design. The painting depicts a young couple entwined against a backdrop of rolling green hills, beneath a tree from which the young man's jacket is hung. The figures' symmetrical posture mirrors the contours of the hills behind them, while their interwoven limbs form an endless figure-of-eight, even their fingers intricately enmeshed at the composition's centre. As was the case in many of Procter's paintings, the pursuit of design sometimes led him to pose his figures in slightly unnatural or constrained positions.

Procter's chosen colour palette for this painting also reflects his considered and deliberate approach to design. The young woman's vivid crimson shirt, positioned at the heart of the composition, creates a striking contrast with the natural greens and browns of the landscape. This deliberate focal point guides the viewer's eye outward along the rhythm of the entwined limbs and into the broader space beyond, an effective aesthetic decision Critics such as J. Wood Palmer would later praise Procter's 'flawless sense of design' and the 'rhythm and strange detached purity and grace' of his work, qualities very much evident in The Dancers (J. Wood Palmer, The Studio, 1945, pp.43-47).