Dyer had joined the Royal Horse Artillery in 1916 and was promoted to Gunner-fitter, then Sergeant Instructor Armourer where he began working with copper, creating 'trench art'. After service in France, Belgium and Egypt, he returned to Cumbria in 1922, then walked South to find work, setting up a workshop behind a forge in Mousehole. Working in Mousehole during the 1920s, he was strongly influenced by the Newlyn School of craftsmen near Penzance.
He began by making items to suit local demand. Unable to interest Tom BATTEN and Johnny Payne COTTON in handling his output at Newlyn Copper, he continued to work independently for about ten years. His best pieces show superb craftsmanship, often making use of familiar 'Newlyn' motifs of birds, shells and sea-weed. Other pieces have finely drawn local views such as St Michael's Mount.
By 1930, however, competition from cheap foreign imports forced him to close his business. The three pieces shown at the 1986 Exhibition of Arts and Crafts in Newlyn were a cylindrical tea caddy (impressed 'H Dyer', inscribed 'St Ives'), an ash tray, and a chamber candlestick.
2019: A recent correspondent, whose grandfather and Herbert Dyer were close friends, casts doubt on the paragraph above regarding the closure of Dyer's business. The correspondent remembers (and his Mother has confirmed) that Dyer was still making pieces in the 1960s, mainly as wedding gifts, from his functioning workshop. The correspondent feels privileged to be currently renting these premises as a stained glass workshop.
Brooklyn-born (16 February 1856), Dyer studied art under Gerome at the Beaux Arts and with Collin in Paris. He was primarily a figure painter, with a predeliction for paintings of children as angels.
In 1889 he arrived in St Ives for a summer holiday and stayed for the rest of his life. In 1890 he exhibited with the St Ives artists at the Dowdeswell show. Kellys (1893) gives his address as 2 Richmond Terrace where he lived with his wife Annie, also an American. His studio was in the grounds of Talland House. In 1895 he exhibited at the opening exhibition at Newlyn. Both of the Dyers were actively involved with the St Ives and Newlyn artistic communities, and Lowell served as President of STISA at least twice (1893-4 and 1918).
His eyesight was beginning to fail by the time STISA was formed, and he was almost totally blind by the date of his death. He is remembered by Charles MARRIOTT as an American from Boston and a Swedenborgian by faith, who painted angels combining Swedenborg with Botticelli. He was definitely considered the wit of the St Ives' community, and a friend to many artists of the Newlyn community as well.
John Dyer was born near Taunton in 1968. After completing a foundation course at Falmouth School of Art in 1987, he gained a BA (Hons) in Graphic Design from Middlesex Polytechnic, showing his final year work at Smiths Gallery, Covent Garden.
A popular contemporary painter who lives and works in Falmouth, Dyer's amusing and colourful works are often seen in mixed and solo exhibitions, and in the auction houses. Aside from his painting practice, he has worked as a part-time lecturer from 1991 to 2000 at Falmouth College of Art. The painter Ted DYER is his father, and he is married to the artist Joanne SHORT.
In 1989 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society by Robin Hanbury-Tennison. His work has been shown widely in Cornwall and throughout the UK. He has been Artist in Residence on many occasions, most notably at the Eden Project (2001-2008).
Julian Dyson was born in St Mawes, Cornwall, but it was not until 1972 that he began exhibiting his work. His first show (solo) was in Southhampton at the Hansard Gallery. Then after moving back to Cornwall permanently he was elected an Associate of the NSA, and began exhibiting frequently in both solo and group shows in local galleries, including the Rainyday Gallery in Penzance.
By profession a dentist, Julian Dyson increasingly took up the pen and brush to be a prolific artist as he approached retirement, though it had always been a sideline interest. His remarkable, witty and characteristic portraits of both people and animals (notably cats) are both moving and full of empathy and mystery. You do wonder about what the subject is thinking.
His studio sale after a series of group, solo and retrospective exhibitions in West Cornwall, was held by W H Lane in 2009, and most of his remaining works were sold. Two of his paintings are in the permanent collection of Falmouth Art Gallery.
Probably Annie Bruce EADIE (also found as EADE).
At the time of the 1891 Census she was living in Ayr Lane, St Ives with her husband, William EADIE, an artist.
Originating from Scotland and classified as a painter of domestic subjects, William Eadie from St John's Wood, London came to St Ives in 1885 as a winter resident. Initially he had a studio made out of an old out-house, and he and his wife Annie EADIE lived at Halsetown. He exhibited three paintings at the Dowdeswell show of 1890 with the Cornish-associated painters, and a further three at Nottingham Castle in 1894.
Eadie was one of the Founder Members, with his wife, of the St Ives Arts Club. The panels of Twelve Apostles in St John's in the Fields Church, St Ives, were painted by him. He died in London and is buried at Highgate.
Annie Eagle is a painter who divides her time between Cornwall and Basingstoke.
Daughter of Samuel (a barrister) and Marion 'May' Earle, Kathleen moved with her family from Eltham to Bromley in 1901, and their house 'The Thwaite' was the family home throughout her young years. As she had qualified as an Assistant Teacher while at school, her parents wanted her to be a teacher, but whilst at her small finishing school (near Hastings, Sussex) where she became known as an accomplished artist, she read about the FORBES SCHOOL in The Studio and proceeded to apply for further study there (1910-11).
She introduced to Newlyn, and later married in 1918, Alec George WALKER, an artist-craftsman. Together they set up a fabric-designing and -making business known as Cryséde, first in Newlyn at Myrtle Cottage (the 'Myrtage') and later in St Ives.
Myrtle Cottage had been a boarding house pre WWI for the pupils of the FORBES School. They drew their primary inspiration for their designs from the local natural environment. Kathleen not only exhibited paintings (1924) but also illustrations, dolls and leatherwork up until the 1930s at NAG. (See Alec George WALKER and CRYSEDE entries for fuller accounts of the work.)
[Photo likenesses of Kay and Alec in Hardie 1995, p59 and Hardie 2009, p65]
By profession a medical doctor, Early was first spotted as a promising talent by Ben NICHOLSON in 1946. Befriended by sculptor Denis MITCHELL, he proceeded to begin showing his work together with him in the next three years. The chronology revealed in the Tate's publication St Ives 1939-64 gives the main progress of his exhibiting life in Cornwall. He was said to be a 'natural primitive' painter, with rich, colourful application.
In 1952 he returned to medicine full-time, becoming the registrar of the Derby Mental Hospital. With the Derby Group, he exhibited in 1961 at the Derby Art Gallery. His final solo show was at the Midland Group Gallery in 1965 (Buckman).
His wife Eunice Campbell Early published his biography in 1994, The Magic Shuttle - The Story of Tom Early, St Ives and after.
The artist began his working life in his brother's shoe factory in Northamptonshire. Starting at the age of thirty-one, he took art lessons in Glasgow whilst there on business, and later studied in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and Academie Julian.
A prolific and widely-travelled painter, who lived strictly to a personal code of 'work first', he painted in the vivid atmospheric manner of the Barbizon artists, often on a large scale (thus satisfying the Edwardian taste for large drawing room pictures); he was very impressed with the French landscape artists.
He was awarded numerous international medals and awards, and worked across Europe and in Japan and Africa, exhibiting at the RA from 1883 in every year until his death in 1913. Based in London, he visited St Ives from the 1890s to 1910, where his patience and scholarly approach to art had a strong bearing on the development of young painters.
He lived in The Terrace, St Ives. Charles MARRIOTT declared himself amused by the 'rivalry between East and Hemy as raconteurs.' His own writings include The Art of Landscape Painting in Oil Colour (1906) and Brush and Pencil Notes in Landscape (1914, posthumous publication). He was awarded the Grand Order of the Corona of Italy in 1903, and knighted in England in 1910.
Izzy Eastick graduated in 2022 with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Falmouth University. Her art practice is focussed on natural history, in particular trace fossils, deep time, entanglements and liminality. She works from a studio at CAST in Helston.
The artist studied in Antwerp and Paris, and lived and painted from Balham (1889-93) and Warwick Square, London (1902). Illustrations of his work appear in The Studio magazine, and he is included in New Zealand Gallery (Wellington and Christchurch) Collections.
In 1893, his signature appears on an Arts Club letter, the same year as the Canadian artist Mary Alexander BELL, whom he subsequently married, came to St Ives. Tovey remarks that it is not surprising that St Ives was as much a 'seedbed of romance' as a welling up of artistic friendships.
Canadian by birth, Mary Bell studied in Montreal with Robert Harris, and subsequently in New York at the Art Students League with William Merritt Chase, and at the Academie Colarossi in Montparnesse, Paris (1891).
She had arrived in St Ives in 1893 from Ontario, having been for a brief period a member of the staff of the Victoria School of Art in Montreal (1892). In St Ives she met her future husband, Charles Herbert EASTLAKE. As Miss M A Bell, she painted from Tregenna Terrace in 1896 and maintained a studio in Regent's Park. The couple designed and made enamels for jewellery, and travelled extensively on the Continent.
In 1911 the couple were painting from a studio in Chelsea, London. During this period they lived in Warwick Square, London and later at 'Hollywood' in Croydon. By 1939 they had returned to Montreal, and shortly thereafter to Ontario. She died in Ottawa in 1951.
She exhibited regularly at the RA. Her studies of Dutch child-life had a great success in England and America.
Falmouth association. His portrait of Colonel J P Carne (1954) can be seen at Falmouth Town Council. His 1958 portraits of Arthur Trevena Holman 1893-1959 and Percy Miners Holman 1895-1969 are in the art collection of the Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro.
Eastman with her husband Chris THOMAS moved to North Cornwall. She taught art in secondary schools, and was an adult education tutor in art history. She also worked for the Footsbarn Travelling Theatre Co. She was a member of the North Cornwall Seven Group and exhibited with them around Cornwall, including their exhibition in 1998 at the Falmouth Art Gallery. She also exhibited at Rainyday Gallery in Penzance.
Her studies in Fine Art were originally at Reading University, where she was taught by Ray ATKINS and John Wonnacott. In 2003 Eastman was employed as an art therapist by Cornwall Partnership Trust, working with adults with mental health problems.
Rosalind Eastman died in 2024.
Cathy Eastment is a Falmouth based artist. In 2023 she joined Prime Women Artists, a supportive and creative network for women artists of all disciplines in Cornwall.
The artist was the Art Union of Cornwall prize winner in the 1920 RCPS September Show (taking home £10 10s 0d), and recorded as being from Carbis Bay. No further information currently available.
Zoe Eaton was born in London. She obtained a BA in Fine Art from the University of Northampton but is now based in St Ives.
Work by this artist is included in the University College Falmouth (UCF) art collection.
Margaret Eccleston grew up in Worcestershire. She graduated from Birmingham College of Art with a BA (Hons) in Printed Textiles, and went on to gain a postgraduate art teaching diploma from the University of Birmingham. During the 1980s Margaret had her own studio near Dartmouth, from where she ran regular workshops and holiday courses.
In 1994 she moved to St Ives, exhibiting with a number of local galleries, and working with the St Ives School of Painting. She moved to Modbury in Devon in 2005.
Sarah Eddy was born in Cornwall but moved to Brighton in her teenage years, developing a career as a performer. After thirty years away, she returned to her roots in Cornwall, settling in St Austell. She has undergone a year-long figure drawing course at Newlyn School of Art.
James Eddy creates a wide range of sculptures whose sources of inspiration include the Japanese theory of 'wabi sabi'.
'Jim' Ede, as he was affectionately known, was born near Cardiff, the son of solicitor Edward Ede and his wife. After early schooling in Cambridge (Leys), he studied painting at the FORBES SCHOOL in the two years following Elizabeth FORBES's death (1912-14). In his contribution to the Third Programme (BBC Radio) in 1931, when he was already a Tate Gallery curator, he said about his art training 'I started as a painter and hoped to be a painter, but the war of 1914 interrupted all that. When the War was over I went to an Art School [Ed: Slade]...after a year I had to earn my living, and entered the National Gallery as a photographer...'
In 1924 he met Ben NICHOLSON and Winifred NICHOLSON, and Christopher WOOD, aside from meeting prominent figures such as Chagall, Miro and Picasso, and to them he credited the opening of his eyes to a whole new way of considering art and spaces. He began a correspondence with Alfred WALLIS in St Ives and bought his work, already owning many works of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, about whom he was to write two major biographies.
As collectors of modern art, Jim and his wife Helene (Helen) Schlapp, an artist and teacher from Edinburgh, were generous in their donations to museums, galleries, and universities in the UK and abroad. These donations included many art works with specific Cornish significance, such as Barbara HEPWORTH, Naum GABO, Bryan PEARCE, William SCOTT, Ben and Winifred Nicholson, and others. A major legacy of Jim Ede, now owned by Cambridge University (given in 1966), is Kettle's Yard, a series of four cottages re-developed by the Edes and their architect Roland Atridge to house their collections within their 'continuing way of life'. The final years of their married lives were spent in Edinburgh (from 1973) where they also made major donations to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.
A nice contemporary tie-up was made in 2011 when Andrew LANYON took his latest exhibition Von Ribbentrop in St Ives, Art and War in the Last Resort, first launched in Cornwall at Kestle Barton near Manaccan, Cornwall, to show in London and then travel on to Kettle's Yard where it was received with enthusiastic acclaim.
Mentioned in Whybrow's 1901-10 list of artists in and around St Ives; no further information currently available.
A correspondent (2016) suggests that Alice Jane Edelsten may have died in Torquay in 1924.
A sculptor who was born at Sandy, Bedfordshire and lived in Ballingham, Hereford. She studied at the Slade under James Harward THOMAS in 1918-21, as did Maude WETHERED, and her commissions included the large granite War Memorial at Zennor.
Claire Edkins works from a studio at Buryas Bridge, near Penzance.