Samuel John Lamorna Birch RA RWS Lamorna Cove, Cornwall

An original early 20th-century watercolour painting, Samuel John Lamorna Birch RA RWS, Lamorna Cove, Cornwall.

This beautiful light-filled watercolour shows the azure seas and distinctive coastline at Lamorna Cove on the Penwith peninsula in west Cornwall. Samuel John 'Lamorna' Birch RA RWS (1869–1955) settled at Lamorna in 1892, and many of his most famous pictures date from this time and the beautiful Lamorna Cove. He would become the founder and father figure of the Lamorna colony of artists and writers in West Cornwall, which included Alfred Munnings, Laura Knight and Harold Knight. The blossoming community was encouraged by Colonel Paynter of the Boskenna estate who owned the cove.

Birch was largely self-taught, spending his early years in the north of England, at Egremont in Cheshire, Manchester and Halton, near Lancaster, where he worked in an office and in cotton mills. From 1889 he regularly visited Cornwall and was influenced by Stanhope Forbes, who had settled at Newlyn in 1884 and who founded the Newlyn School of Art in 1899 with his wife Elizabeth Adela Armstrong. Forbes encouraged Birch to study in Paris at the Atelier Colarossi between 1895 and 1896, and he also suggested that Birch adopt the sobriquet 'Lamorna' to distinguish himself from Lionel Birch, an artist who was also working in the area at that time.

Lamorna Birch had a deep connection with the landscape of west Cornwall. He was an early riser and liked to begin his work soon after dawn. He dressed distinctively in heavy tweed suits and breeches, and he became a well-liked and admired figure in the local community. He was known to store his half-finished canvases in the barns of local farmers so that he did not have to carry them home with him on his bicycle. Birch was to spend sixty-three years of his life living at Lamorna, first at Boleigh Farm and then later at Flagstaff Cottage with his wife Emily, who was also an artist.

Birch also travelled widely in the UK and he was a keen fisherman. He made frequent visits to Scotland, Wales, the North West of England and the West Country to indulge his twin passions of painting and fishing. It has been said that Birch painted water with both the eye of an artist and the understanding of a fisherman. He established an excellent reputation and exhibited his work widely, including at the Royal Academy, where he exhibited for fifty consecutive years and where he was made a Royal Academician in 1934. He also exhibited at the Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, the Manchester City Art Gallery and at the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolours.

Works by Lamorna Birch can be found in numerous public collections, including Tate, London; Bristol Museum & Art Gallery; Penlee House Gallery & Museum, Penzance; Lancaster City Museum; Manchester Art Gallery; and Royal Cornwall Museum.