Samuel John Lamorna Birch
(1860 – 1955)Lamorna Birch was a renowned landscape painter in both oil and watercolour and a prominent member of the second generation of the Newlyn School of Artists. He was born in Egremont in Cheshire in June 1869, and as a boy moved to Manchester and later to Lancashire working in a mill, painting at dawn and sunset.
Apart from a brief period of study at the Atelier Colarossi, Paris, in 1895, he was largely self-taught as an artist.
Birch first visited West Cornwall in the late 1880s and settled in the Lamorna Valley in 1892 where he came in contact with the Newlyn School of artists – Dame Laura Knight and her husband Harold and Stanhope Forbes. He adopted the epithet Lamorna in 1895 to distinguish himself from fellow artist Lionel Birch (an idea suggested by Stanhope Forbes).
Lamorna was to provide Birch with an endless range of landscape subjects, responding especially to his passionate interest in rivers. He set up a studio near the river at Lamorna, only half a mile from Lamorna Cove. He later moved to Flagstaff Cottage at the head of the bay, where he painted and gave art lessons. One of his students was Emily Vivian, whom he later married. They had two daughters.
Birch exhibited very widely - 146 paintings at the Royal Academy and 287 at the Royal Society of Watercolour Artists alone. He was elected a member of the Royal Academy in 1934.
Birch was a passionate fisherman, and is sometimes called the “The Fisherman Artist”. Each summer he and his wife went on a river-based holiday, frequently in Scotland. Two paintings by Birch were presented by the people of Cornwall to HM Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh on the occasion of their marriage. When Lamorna Birch died in 1955 The Times obituary commented: “Birch, who was an athletic, bearded man, looking very much younger than his years with the bright eyes and eager manner of a terrier, was the best of companions in any grade of society.”
M-J S
“Rosneath” (pencil, 30x35 cm)
