Brooke was an artist-painter, an architect and later a Captain in WWI. He was born in Sibton, Suffolk, and the son of a Magistrate and landed proprietor, and his wife (born in Buenos Aires). He and his wife Gwendoline had two daughters when they arrived in St Ives, thought to be in 1895 (from a painting of the town dated in that year). Their address, as provided to the RA was Ayr Cottage, St Ives, and with them came a governess for their daughters, and two domestic servants, including a cook from Madron.
The RA lists 4 paintings sent in to them from 1895-1899 and in 1902 he exhibited three paintings at the Whitechapel Exhibition of Cornish Artists, London, giving St Ives as his reference. The family had previously lived in London (1886) and Suffolk (1887).
Brooke was the lead signatory and provided the covering letter from the St Ives Arts Club artists to Mr Glanville of the St Ives Town Council in 1898, which voiced the concerns of many artists about plans for redevelopment and changes to the town.
It is not known when they departed St Ives, but further art records do not record further exhibited work. Internet records list him as Captain Frederick W Brooke who died in Popscott, Witham, near Braintree, Essex only weeks short of his 92nd birthday. His elder daughter, Gladys predeceased him, dying at her villa in Monaco in 1946, and his second daughter, Mrs D Huxley and his wife survived him.
Maureen Brooke was born in Holland in 1962. At a young age, she and her family moved to the Caribbean. On leaving school she became a deckhand, travelling widely on sailing yachts before returning to Europe to study horticulture. After marrying, she moved to Cornwall, and in 1990 undertook a City & Guilds in ceramics.
Working from her studio in Rock, north Cornwall, Nina Brooke creates paintings of the sea which capture a unique aerial perspective. She was born in Cornwall and attended school in Dorset, before taking up studies at Oxford Brookes and Falmouth Art School. She has also attended courses at Newlyn School of Art.
Libby Brooks is a sculptor based in Launceston. After obtaining a BA (Hons) in Fine Art Sculpture from Chelsea School of Art, she went on to gain an MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art. During this time she was awarded two residencies, one in Caracas, the other in Paris. Her work is inspired by the philosophical understanding of 'non-duality'.
Flo Brooks is based at Krowji Studios, Redruth. She is primarily a painter, using acrylic on wood, but her practice extends into collage, publishing, social engagement and installation.
In 2023 she created a large-scale painting for Clapham. 'Inner Bark Out' centres on Clapham Common as a unique site of gathering, exploring the social, political and ecological threads encountered and generated in public parks and commons. The piece is installed at Bridge underpass, Bedford Road, Clapham North, SW4, 7EF.
William Brooks is the artist providing the earliest title in the Penlee House collection in Penzance, Cornwall. Entitled Mount's Bay (1794), nothing is known about the artist himself.
There is also an artist named William Henry Brooke (1772-1860) who painted Lanherne Bay, Nr the Nunnery, Cornwall (1819), a painting that Tate Gallery, London holds. This may or may not be the artist that Penlee House records. Woods lists several artists with William as first or second name and Brooke or Brooks as surname.
Romaine Brooks, born Beatrice Romaine GODDARD in Italy, was an American painter who worked mostly in Paris and Capri, specialising in portraiture. She is best known for her images of women in androgynous or masculine dress, including her self-portrait of 1923, which is her most widely reproduced work. While living in London between 1902 and 1904, she spent some time in St Ives, where she developed a palette of fine gradations of grey. From then on her paintings were dominated by grey, white and black. She painted very little after 1925 and died in Nice aged 96.
Drake Brookshaw was a graphic designer, lithographer and illustrator. Born in Southwark, London, he studied at the Central School of Arts & Crafts, subsequently teaching at Goldsmiths College. He drew many book covers, and designed posters for the London Underground in the late 1920s. He also created illustrations for the pre-war Radio Times. During World War II he was trained as an air gunner but once his artistic skill was acknowledged, he was allotted the task of supervising and designing the camouflage for the Manston Air Base. Later he was commissioned as an air photography interpreter, serving in Sicily and Italy. He and his first wife Doreen, a potter, bought a house in Port Isaac in the 1940s. They set up a pottery in Malaga but returned to Port Isaac every summer. Brookshaw showed his work regularly in Cornwall from 1959.
After a serious illness, this charming and modest artist returned permanently to Cornwall in 1992, settling in Wadebridge. Sadly, he died three days before the preview of a retrospective exhibition of his work in Wadebridge.
The ceramist son of potter Alan BROUGH and the tapestry designer and maker Sheila BROUGH. Adrian was brought from his birthplace in Devon at the age of seven, and attended school in St Ives while his father worked at the LEACH POTTERY. He grew up and earned his pocket money in the surroundings of his father's pottery at Newlyn, where there was always work to be done around the kilns and glazes.
He was taught to throw pots by his neighbour and friend, William MARSHALL, when he entered the four year art and design course at Cornwall Technical College at Camborne. Completing his diploma there (with Distinction in Design), he became a member of the Society of Designer Craftsmen and also the Society for Industrial Artists & Designers. A first commission was achieved from the South West Electricity Board.
His work is exhibited in local galleries and nationally; he works from a bespoke studio at The Old Farmhouse, Lelant, where he mentors students.
Sheila Brough is a textile artist, designer and dressmaker in West Cornwall, and wife of ceramist Alan BROUGH. Having obtained a degree and teaching diploma in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, London, Sheila lectured in fashion design in Newton Abbot during the 1960s. More recently, she was an adult education lecturer in embroidery and textiles at Penzance School of Art. Currently she is offering weekly textile classes at Heamoor, Penzance. She also works as a bridal designer. Her son Adrian BROUGH is based in St Ives, where he has his own pottery and teaching centre.
Born in Wilmslow, Cheshire the son of a distinguished sculptor - also Alan Brough - Alan Brough and his family of accomplished artists and teachers of art have long been respected and admired in West Cornwall. He credits Janet Darnell LEACH and Bernard LEACH with much of his later learning about the art and techniques of pottery-making, although the foundation and appreciation of the importance of clay and its fundamental uses in history - domestically, artistically and even technologically - was absorbed early from his father and upbringing in a creative family environment.
He came first to Cornwall in 1968, at the invitation of the late William MARSHALL, when the latter was required to throw pots for the ageing Bernard LEACH. At that stage, Brough took over teaching students and other duties at the Leach Pottery, and remained there for four years before starting his own pottery at Newlyn near the harbour.
His career, exhibitions, and studio information are liberally documented on the internet, and will not be fully rehearsed here.
The artist exhibited two paintings under this name in the Dowdeswell Exhibition of 1890. Their titles were A Rough Pasture and A North-west Breeze.
The daughter of Daniel Brown, a paint manufacturer, she lived in London (Forest Gate) and exhibited at RA from 1883-87.
The 1891 Census lists her as an Artist, born in Bath, Somerset, and living at Trevordun Place, Falmouth. By 1893 she was living in New Barnet, Herts. Not known to have exhibited locally.
Brown was an artist, known by caricature (Fitz, p267 in Tovey 2009) to be a Scot. He is listed in the 1901 Census as the 20 year-old artist/painter son of John Eccles Brown, an India Rubber Manufacturer, living on Porthminster Hill. From Census data (1901), however, he was stated to have been born in St Ives.
An H Brown is known to have attended the Falmouth School of Art in 1912, and to have submitted one work to the RA, but this may or may not be the same person. No further information is currently available at this time.
Noticing a Birmingham exhibition by this artist in 1896, Johnson & Greutzner identify her as giving an address in Teignmouth, Devon. Tovey lists a working life of painting principally still-life in St Ives from 1898 to 1937. She exhibited with the RCPS in Cornwall and was a member of STISA.
Born in Ruddington, near Nottingham, Brown studied at Nottingham School of Art under Andrew McCallum. From 1889 to 1892 he attended the Herkomer School of Art at Bushey. One of the earliest visiting painters to West Cornwall, during the early 1990s he worked from St Ives and Carbis Bay.
An artist giving the name Alfred BROWN exhibited two paintings, A Rough Pasture and A North-west Breeze, in the Dowdeswell Exhibition of 1890, and - if this is the same person - indicates association with the Newlyn and St Ives painters even earlier. Also at this period he began exhibiting at the RA. The Drinking Pool, purchased by Manchester in 1895, is a well known and iconic representation of his work in genre.
Popular for his atmospheric treatment of sea and coastal subjects with brooding skies, he helped bring St Ives landscape and marine painting to national prominence, being made one of the first honorary members of STISA in the 1930s.
At the Opening Exhibition of NAG in 1895 he showed a landscape entitled Wherries running down to Yarmouth. A major retrospective exhibition of his work was held in 1935 at Norwich Castle Museum, and in 1938 he was knighted. Sir John was also well-known for his Norfolk and Suffolk landscapes, although he did paint some portraits. He was a Royal Academician who deliberately resisted Modernist influences, annd was one of the signatures on the Glanville letter of November 1898 concerned about development schemes in St Ives.
His work The Raincloud, was selected for the 1988 RA Exhibition The Edwardians and After (1900-1950 paintings). He was married to the artist Mia Edwards (see separately under Mia Arnesby BROWN), who predeceased him. He died in Norfolk, his alternative home to that in St Ives for many years.
Ingrid Brown is a portrait, figurative and plein air artist living in west Cornwall. In 2011 she obtained a BA in History of Art from York University, followed by an MA in Architectural History and Theory.
Her work has been exhibited in Cornwall and London. She works to commission.
Born on 14 March 1851 in Chelmsford, Essex, Brown studied at the Royal College of Art (1868-77) and in Paris at Academie Julian with Robert-Fleury and Bougereau (1883). In the Edgbastonia, Fred Brown is noted ‘before his professional days’ to have shared a house in Newlyn in 1881 with eight other artists, including William John WAINWRIGHT, Charles Henry WHITWORTH, Edwin HARRIS and Richard Malcolm LLOYD.
Bednar has noted a Newlyn title by Brown in 1881, and in 1892 he succeeded Alphonse Legros as a Slade Professor. Scott has noted ‘a fairly brief connection with Walberswick’ in his essay on the coastal artists colonies in Painting at the Edge. Brown played an important part in the founding of the NEAC with a number of others, including those from Newlyn. Two of his paintings were purchased in 1933 (Portrait of the Painter) and 1940 (The Ivy Arch) for the Chantrey Bequest. He died on 8 January, 1941, age 89, at Richmond upon Thames.
Born in Monmouthshire, she studied with Professor Herkomer at Bushey, and exhibited at the Nottingham Castle Exhibition of Cornish Painters (1894) as Mia Edwards.
In 1896 she married John Alfred Arnesby BROWN. She was included in many exhibitions with Marianne L M STOKES and Elizabeth FORBES, frequently exhibiting her paintings of children. Her primary exhibiting was in the RA. The couple maintained a home in Norfolk and St Ives, roughly splitting the year between the two, with winter and spring in St Ives.
Born in Glasgow, he studied initially at the Glasgow School of Art under Newbery. At the age of 18 he went to the Slade for five years under Brown, Tonks and Wilson Steer, winning a scholarship and prizes for head and figure painting. For many years he assisted Gerald Moira in mural decoration work in a number of important buildings, such as Lloyds and the Central Criminal Courts, and was in charge of women artists who decorated the first Wembley Exhibition restaurants. In 1894 his address was in London, and in 1911 at Weston Turville nr Aylesbury.
In 1922 he was appointed Principal of the Reigate and Redhill School of Arts and Crafts, a position he retained for 18 years. However, he paid regular visits to Cornwall as the titles of his 1930s exhibition pieces show, and he acted as Temporary Headmaster at the Penzance School of Art in 1941 upon the sudden death of James W LIAS; he was then superseded within the year by the appointment of Edward Bouverie HOYTON to the post.
He settled in St Ives during WWII, living at Lyonesse, Talland Road at the time of his 1944 RA exhibition, but moved with his wife, an accomplished weaver, and elderly sister Marjorie Brown to nearby Carbis Bay in 1946. Mrs Todd Brown was partly responsible for the creation of the Cornwall League of Spinners, Dyers and Weavers. He moved to Torquay in 1950, and died there in 1952.
Born in East Sheen, London, Jennifer came to Cornwall first in 1953 on holiday, after having a range of shopkeeping, child-minding and infant teaching jobs. Her works are meticulous, beautifully and finely drawn, and show a quirky and hilarious sense of humour.
Mentioned in Whybrow's 1901-10 list of artists in and around St Ives.
Lizzie Brown embarked on her painting practice as a consequence of studying for a degree in the History of Art with the Open University. She works from a studio in Coverack.
Rachel Brown works in mixed media textiles to create works inspired by subjects such as fish and birds around her in the village of Lerryn.
Colin Brown is a Christian minister based in Falmouth, and his paintings depict places that have inspired, challenged, encouraged or moved him.