Former Chairman of NAG Council of Management (1994-6), Hardie worked with the Gallery on projects and exhibitions where some historical perspective was required. An example of this was the (2011) Centennial exhibition in celebration of the life and achievements of the 19th century philanthropist and Cornishman, John Passmore Edwards (1823-1911), who funded the building of the Newlyn Art Gallery (John Opie Memorial) in 1895.
She was a writer and publisher on local art history, and the editor of the centennial book about NAG published in 1995, 100 Years in Newlyn, Diary of a Gallery 1895-1995 (available from the Gallery). In 2009 Artists in Newlyn & West Cornwall 1880-1940, A Dictionary & Sourcebook was published, in which she brought together a large team of contributors to help tell the stories of this remarkable collection of artists who worked in Cornwall. Acting as Coordinator of the West Cornwall Art Archive and the Hypatia Art Collection, she contributed regularly to the various activities of related groups, until 2016 acting as general editor of developments such as this Cornwall Artists Index Project (CAI).
In the 2010 exhibition 'Exquisite Trove', sponsored by The House of Fairy Tales (July-October) at NAG, Hardie exhibited her installation created with the artist Roy CALLOW, entitled The DWELLINGS Bookcase, a telling of her own life through the books she had read and valued, and which were placed in miniature replicas of the houses she had lived in.
In 2016 she retired from the General Editorship of this Index (CAI), a voluntary post requiring daily attention to a myriad of detail about artists far and wide. In the 2012 Honours list, she was appointed a MBE (Member of the British Empire) and received her Medal in March, 2013 from the Queen, 'for services to the arts and heritage of West Cornwall'.
2019 saw the publication of Melissa Hardie's Bronte Territories: Cornwall and the Unexplored Maternal Legacy, 1760-1870.
Melissa Hardie died peacefully on 5 July 2022, a remarkable woman greatly missed.
Four members of the Langmaid family of Polperro were among those fishermen photographed by Lewis Harding, a local Polperro photographer who pioneered the art of collodion wet plate photography in Cornwall in the 19th Century.
Born in London, he was educated in France, becoming a lay catechist in the Roman Catholic Church. He then accompanied the first Catholic Bishop of Sydney to Australia in 1835, and in 1838 was sent to the penal colony on Norfolk Island to prepare the way for the appointment of two priests.
He returned to Cornwall in 1846 in poor health, and appears to have taken up photography in 1856. Harding's remarkable photographs of Polperro and its inhabitants in the 19th Century can be seen today in the Polperro Heritage Museum, including the portrait of Joseph Langmaid.
A painting by this artist, entitled 'Our Daily Bread' (1941) and depicting the Scillonian driving through the waves with a light aircraft aloft. The provisioning of the Scillies is an important aspect of the history of the islands, the reference being made in this painting that hangs in the Isles of Scilly Museum.
Still to be researched.
A correspondent (2018) has been in touch to say he has two watercolours by Harding of Cornish village scenes, purchased in 1966 in Camborne. He was told that the painter had shown his work at London's Royal Academy.
Sophie Harding spent her childhood in Dorset. After leaving school she studied at Central St Martins in London, graduating with a BA (Hons) in Fashion and Textiles. She works from her studio in Penzance, painting coastal scenes in a style of naive simplicity and charm. Her great-aunt Jeka Kemp was a well-known post-impressionist painter, and her grandmother was a cousin of Arthur Rackham.
Kerry Harding, a landscape painter, works from Krowji Studios in Redruth. In 1994 she gained a BA (Hons) at the Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art, Oxford University. She followed up her studies with an MA in Fine Art at Falmouth College of Art in 2003. Later that year she was awarded a residency and solo exhibition at the Perth International Arts Festival. She has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad, and her work is held in private and hotel collections across Europe, the Middle East, Japan, Australia and Africa.
Harding is a member of the Arborealists, an international group of 50 painters which was founded in 2013 following the success of 'Under the Green Wood : Picturing the British Tree' - an exhibition held at the St Barbe Museum & Art Gallery in Hampshire.
An accomplished teacher of painting, Kerry Harding is running an online course in 2021 at St Ives School of Painting: 'Experimental Landscapes in Oil'.
Sue Harding was born in Kent. In 2000 she moved to Sussex, where she studied Fine Art, obtaining a BA (Hons) in 2003. After a spell in Tavistock and Plymouth, she is now based in Hayle.
Chris Hardman has exhibited at the Veryan Galleries, on the Roseland peninsula. He is based at Krowji Studios, Redruth.
Chloe Harford is a ceramicist who produces Raku animals. She is the partner of Chris HAWKINS.
Miss Evelyn Harke (fl.1899-1930)
Painter of mainly working horses. Lived in London and showed at the RA, SWA, GI, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool and at the London Salon. She exhibited two paintings of horses at St Ives in the Summer of 1914 and she painted at Étaples around 1907. The art colony at Étaples had its heyday between 1880 - 1914, after which it was disrupted by World War I. Although broadly international, it was made up mainly of English-speakers from North America, Australasia and the British Isles. While some artists settled in the area, other visitors stayed only a season, or an even shorter time, as they journeyed from art colony to art colony along the coasts of Normandy and Brittany. Her painting "A Corner of the Market, Étaples" was a Royal Academy exhibit in 1907. Her address in 1907 was given as: Miss E Harke, 113 Church Road, Upper Norwood, London.
There is uncertainty over the birth and death dates of this artist and we would be pleased to receive evidence of these.
A correspondent (2019) has been in touch to tell us that her father, a US Air Force pilot, befriended Evelyn Harke and her sister during World War II, in 1944. He was given a number of paintings by her.
This artist produced a West Penwith subject, subsequently sold at auction (nd).
Audrey Harper grew up in Birmingham and became an office worker and comptometer operator before her marriage to the artist Lez BRAMWELL. Thanks to his encouragement she resumed an early interest in painting and exhibited in Norwich and Great Yarmouth. In 1975 she moved to west Cornwall with Lez and her son (also an artist), where she specialised in small watercolour seascapes on art silk. She was also the author of a 1960s illustrated children's story entitled 'The Adventures of Molly Moneypig'.
After a 30-year career as an NHS health professional, Carol Harper returned to her love of art by taking a Fine Art degree in Painting and Drawing at the University of Northampton. Subsequently she moved to Cornwall, to be nearer her family.
Julie Harper is a St Ives-based ceramicist. Her work has been shown at the New Craftsman Gallery in St Ives.
Born in Leeds, Jeffrey Harris started painting as a boy while exploring the Yorkshire Dales. He obtained a BA at Leeds College of Art, majoring in painting, drawing and printmaking. An early influence on his work was visiting lecturer Victor Passmore. Following two years in the army, he completed a Bachelor of Education.
In 1956 Harris moved to Lelant, near St Ives, as the newly appointed art teacher of the secondary school in Hayle. He married Tasmanian-born painter Gwen LEITCH in 1959. The pair shared her studio (7 Porthmeor Studio) for the next 12 years, living in Academy Place and later on Bowling Green Terrace.
His early paintings were abstract and semi-figurative, usually in oil on masonite or canvas. He also made constructions and wooden reliefs. His painting often plays with flat two-dimensional perspective. Elements of pattern and abstraction, colour and symbolism referenced his childhood in Yorkshire and his father's work as a tailor. During 1967 Jeff lived at the Monastery St Elias in Devon, where he studied iconography. From 1966 to 1969 he taught painting and drawing at Falmouth Art School.
In 1970 Harris and his wife Gwen emigrated to Australia with their four children. After a spell in Tasmania, they moved to Adelaide. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s both Harris and Leitch taught at the South Australian School of Art, maintaining their art practice and exhibiting. Following his early retirement in 1990, Harris was able to focus exclusively on his art.
Gwen died in 2006. He remains an active painter in Australia. His 2022 retrospective at Belgrave St Ives reveals his considerable versatility, able to move fluently between representational and abstract pictorial modes. In his early work he responded to the Cornish landscape while traversing a modernist path through abstraction, while his later gestural canvases explore the geological forms of Australia.
In the UK, his work is held in collections such as the Arts Council, Southbank Centre, Cornwall County Council, Whitworth Art collection, Manchester University, Alston Hall, UK Education Department, Lancashire. It can also be found in private collections in the UK, Australia and USA.
Born in Ladywood, Birmingham and educated at Old Edgbaston School where he formed a life-long friendship with the artist, Phil Whiting. At age fourteen he entered the Birmingham School of Art in 1869, where he was a student friend of Walter LANGLEY, and then spent two years as an assistant Master, taking private pupils (amongst whom was Kate BUNCE) before attending Verlat's Academy, Antwerp in 1880. William John WAINWRIGHT and Frank BRAMLEY were at Verlat's concurrently.
Harris visited Newlyn in 1881, initially before the first of his two Breton summers, the second of which in 1882 was spent in Pont Aven, where he met Elizabeth ARMSTRONG (later Forbes). He settled in Newlyn in 1883 with his first wife and from 1884-87 the family took over Cliff Castle Cottage, where his son was born in 1884 and baptised at St. Peters, Newlyn on 24th June 1885. His young wife tragically died in 1887 at the age of twenty-five, having been nursed by Elizabeth and others in turn. It was at Cliff Castle, at the invitation of the Harrises, that Elizabeth Armstrong first made the acquaintance of Stanhope FORBES.
After his wife's death Harris moved with his son and a nurse to Belle Vue House, where Elizabeth and her mother also lodged. Forbes was also to join them there after Elizabeth and Stanhope were married. In 1895 Harris left Newlyn finally, and met his second wife, Sally (nee Cornwell), a Penzance girl and mutual friend of Walter Langley, in Plymouth. They were to spend the following three years, in Cardiff, Newport and Bristol where Harris concentrated on portraiture. Sally's close friend, Ethel Pengelly, left in Penzance after their marriage, was to become the second wife to Walter Langley who was widowed at forty-three.
In 1898 Harris returned to Birmingham where he continued to paint portraits. He died, age 50, on 5 January 1906 in Cleeve Prior, near Evesham, Worcestershire (GRO).
[Photo portrait in Hardie 2009 p42]
In 1907, the year following Edwin HARRIS's death (1855-1906), a Mrs Edwin Harris (presumably Sally Cornwell Harris) displayed A Picture by Louise Harris at NAG, which was sold.
Mentioned in Whybrow's 1911-20 list of artists in and around St Ives.
Mentioned by R Langley as one of the Birmingham artists who painted in Cornwall. The painting mentioned is Pardennick Head, Lands End (1880).
No further information currently known.
Jacqui Harris lives near Bude in north Cornwall. During the 1990s she completed a BA (Hons) in Fine Art at the University of Plymouth, specialising in Printmaking and Textiles. Since then she has taught in schools, and has provided workshops in monoprinting and collagraphs to both adults and groups of children.
Annabel moved to Cornwall as a child and lived on a small farm near Redruth. Always influenced by the countryside, her Cornish upbringing has deepened her love of the wildlife and rugged landscape. Annabel has exhibited with SWLA (Society of Wildlife Artists) at The Mall Galleries, London,where she was awarded the Award for Drawing in 2008, and has also exhibited at Oxford University Museum of Natural History, Falmouth Art Gallery, and The Poly, Falmouth. Annabel has also had illustrations published in Bugs Britannica, Random House. Currently studying for a BA in Fine Art at University College Falmouth.
Michael Harris's paintings focus mainly on the human form. He works from Krowji Studios, Redruth.
Two of Penny Harris' forebears were well-known artists. Her great-grandfather, Washington Francis Friend, was a Canadian watercolourist. Her mother, Olive Frances Friend, was a painter in the pre-Raphaelite style. Penny Harris was initially taught by her mother, going on to study at Exeter College of Art. She painted along traditional lines until she discovered the art of painting on glass and developed a career as a painter of wildlife in this medium. She signed her work 'Matrix'.
During the 1980s she acquired an unusual gallery for her paintings, in the 11th century South Gateway leading into the town of Launceston in east Cornwall.
Anna Harris's work revolves around gathering materials from the landscape, particularly from intertidal zones. In 2022 she obtained a BA (Hons) from Falmouth University.
Her work has been widely exhibited in Cornwall.
Georgie Harrison obtained a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Birmingham University and moved to Cornwall in 2017.
Christina Harrison is a Penzance-based artist. She is a regular exhibitor at STISA open shows.