This autumn, Penlee House Gallery & Museum, Penzance, is staging two exhibitions. The first, ‘Lamorna Birch: A Painter Laureate’, is a one-room show featuring around 25 paintings by this much-loved artist, all from the collection of the late Austin Wormleighton. The exhibition title echoes that of Austin’s 1995 biography about Birch. Austin was a founding member of the Lamorna Society and was President right up until his death in 2019. This exhibition is being staged to celebrate the second edition of the book, updated by Austin and published posthumously.

A painter of pure landscape, self-taught and self-made, Samuel John Lamorna Birch (1869 – 1955) was the founder and father figure of the Lamorna colony of artists and writers in West Cornwall.

Birch’s origins were humble. He was born into a working-class family and left school at age twelve to work for a textile manufacturer. Even at work, the young Birch was forever sketching. Determined to be a professional artist, he had his first pictures exhibited at Manchester City Art Gallery while still in his teens. Following a transfer to the company’s Lancashire premises in the picturesque Lune Valley, Birch began painting the surrounding countryside in his spare time and developed a passion for landscape painting that would remain with him all his life.

In the early 1890s, Birch began making painting trips to Cornwall, discovering the village of Lamorna, about four miles along the coast from Newlyn. Unlike the Newlyn School artists, Birch preferred not to paint people; his subject was always the landscape. He finally settled in Lamorna in 1892 and took up painting as a profession, later becoming good friends with fellow artists Harold and Laura Knightand Alfred Munnings.

In Cornwall, he shed his working-class roots and adopted the persona of a country gentleman. When not painting, he was fishing, and his constant observation of nature and its expression in his work led him to become one of the most recognised and popular artists of his time. He exhibited a total of 237 pictures at the Royal Academy over the course of his career. It is estimated that he producedaround 20,000 paintings during his lifetime.

Penlee House Curator, Katie Herbert, says: “We are delighted to be able to stage this exhibition of Austin’s collection and promote the second edition of his fantastic biography on Lamorna Birch.”