Footnotes

Provenance
Purchased directly from the artist's daughter in Newlyn.
Anon. sale, Sotheby's, London, 27 November 1996, lot 10.

Exhibited
London, Royal Academy, 1891, no. 740.
Nottingham, Nottingham Castle, Special exhibition of Cornish Painters, 1894, no. 206.
Bristol, Royal West of England Academy, Gotch retrospective, 1923.
Kettering, Alfred East Art Gallery, T. C. Gotch Memorial Exhibition, 1932, no. 42.
Newlyn & Bristol, Artists of the Newlyn School, 1880-1900, 1958.
Beaconsfield, David Messum Fine Paintings, A Breath of Fresh Air, 1974, no. 41.
Newlyn, Plymouth & Bristol, Artists of the Newlyn School, 1880-1900, 1979, no. 61.
Santa Fe, Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of New Mexico, Rural and Urban Naturalism: Masterpieces of late Nineteenth Century French and British art from the Marchman Collection, 1987, no. 14, illustrated.
Penzance, Penlee House Gallery & Museum, A Village in Focus: Newlyn, 2009.
Penzance, Penlee House Gallery and Museum, The Brotherhood of the Palette, June - September 2009.
Nottingham & Penzance, Cornish Light: The Nottingham 1894 Exhibition Revisited, 2015.

Literature
Royal Academy Pictures, 1891, p. 88.
'The Pictures of 1891', Pall Mall Gazette Extra, 1891, p. 39.
Lewis Hind, 'T. C. Gotch and his pictures', The Windsor Magazine, 1896, pp. 273 & 277.
Caroline Fox, Stanhope Forbes and the Newlyn School, Newton Abbot, 1993, p.61.
Tom Cross, The Shining Sands: Artists in Newlyn & St. Ives, 1880-1930, Tiverton, 1994, p. 66.
Patrick Hepburn, Thomas Cooper Gotch: The making of an artist, Kettering, 1994, p. 18.
Pamela Lomax, The Golden Dream: A biography of Thomas Cooper Gotch, Bristol, 2004, passim, illustrated p. 20.
Frank Ruhrmund, 'Evocative focus on pity and pain', The Cornishman, January 2009, illustrated p. 24.
David Tovey et al, Cornish Light: The Nottingham 1894 Exhibition Revisited, Bristol, 2015, passim, illustrated pl. 18, p. 87.


The picture illustrates an old custom, now almost vanished, which obtained in Newlyn. A few fishwives would jointly buy a quantity of fish, and would then proceed to divide it into equal lots. When they were satisfied that the lots were equal they would hail a passerby, and each giving him a token of identity, such as a key, a stone, a piece of seaweed, a scrap of wood, or what not, he would then, at hazard, throw them, one of each share, thus literally "casting the lot".
(RWA exhibition catalogue, 1923).

Although he regularly visited and worked in Cornwall during his life, the pure 'Newlyn' phase of Thomas Cooper Gotch's career was short. Gotch was resident in Newlyn from 1887 until 1891, when he left for Italy. During this early phase of his career, Gotch adhered to the principles of plein air painting, using square brushes and working alongside Newlyn stalwarts such as Stanhope Forbes, Walter Langley and Edwin Harris. According to Pamela Lomax, during this period, Gotch produced just 19 'Newlyn' paintings among the 63 he recorded in his workbooks¹. Gotch noted himself that 'for a time [I] did a good deal of work which might, more or less inaccurately, be described as belonging to the Newlyn School, that is, I painted, or endeavoured to paint, what I saw'².

Sharing Fish was begun in September 1890, and completed over the following winter. For the first time in his career, Gotch worked from a cartoon, and used familiar models for his composition; the younger woman, far right, was Mary Rowe, who posed as the central figure in Forbes' The Health of the Bride (1889). Set in Newlyn, under the slip that leads to the old pier, there is a clear nod to Forbes' iconic Fish sale on a Cornish Beach (RA, 1885) which helped establish not only Forbes' reputation, but that of the Newlyn colony.

The last major work of this early phase, the work marked Gotch's literal as well as artistic departure from Newlyn. Lewis Hind describes 1891 as 'the Crisis of his career' and the modest reception the painting received when hung 'above the line' at the Royal Academy in 1891 (following on from a similarly disappointing showing of Twixt Life and Death at the RA the previous year) heralded a change in artistic direction³. While Gotch was disappointed by the response received from the Royal Academy, when the work was shown in Gotch's studio for Newlyn Show Day, The Cornishman noted, more favourably, how the 'crumpled and dilapidated bonnets ... brought out strongly the tanned and wrinkled faces beneath ... rendered the old women truly artistic subjects⁴.

¹ Pamela Lomax, The Golden Dream: A biography of Thomas Cooper Gotch, Bristol, 2004, pp. 13-14.
²Black and White, 1895, quoted in Lomax, pp. 12-13.
³Lomax, p. 111
⁴The Cornishman, 2 April 1891.