Langley was a Birmingham-born artist (8 June 1852 GRO) who began attending evening classes at Birmingham School of Design at the age of ten, after which he was apprenticed for seven years to  lithographer August Bierman, although he continued with his studies at the design school.  Langley began to teach himself to paint, and first exhibited three water colours at the RBSA in 1873. He was awarded a two-year scholarship to study design at South Kensington School of Art (1873-75), married Clara Perkins, with whom he had four children, and was instrumental in forming the Birmingham Art Circle.

After a brief visit to Newlyn in 1880, Langley finally settled there in 1882, and is credited with being the earliest ‘pioneer’ of the Newlyn ‘colony’ of artists, certainly the first major artist to do so. He worked away from time to time, and due to disagreements with other artists left for London in disgust, but returned in 1893. After Clara died in 1895 he again attempted to move away, this time back to Birmingham, but again was to return.

He was Gold medallist at the Paris Salon in 1889 for a collection of four watercolours, and he exhibited again in Paris in 1909 from Penzance, and 1932 from London (2).   At the Opening Exhibition of NAG he showed four works: The Old Campaigner (sold), The old, old story, A country lass and Tolpedn Penwith.He was honoured by the Uffizi Gallery, Florence who invited him to donate a self-portrait to the Medici Collection in 1895. 

In 1897, he married Ethel Pengelly as his second wife, the couple having one more child.

The Cornish Magazine of 1898 used a print of Langley’s One Man One Vote to illustrate an article by Henry Lucy about the MP Leonard Courtney (later Lord Courtney of Penwith). It shows a man, probably a fisherman, staring into space in front of his fireplace, with a copy of the Cornishman newspaper crumpling to the floor. He produced a number of fine watercolours of the fisherfolk of Polperro.

Langley made visits to Holland in 1904 and 1905, and a trip to Belgium the following year. Though not providing him with much work that he could send to the RA, or other exhibiting venues for sale, he considered that the paintings he subsequently executed, with some influences of the Hague school of artists, were amongst his best work ever. His special subjects were the painting of fisherfolk and the real life issues of living, working and dying in fishing villages; he remained loyal to these themes until his death in Penzance on 21 March, 1922, age 69.

[See William WAINWRIGHT’s account in Hardie (2009) ‘The Art of Walter Langley’, a posthumous (1923) celebratory exploration of his watercolour artistry.]