Elizabeth Adela Stanhope Forbes, ARWS (Canadian, 1859-1912)The Gipsy signed and indistinctly dated 'EAFORBES.' (lower left); signed and inscribed ''The Gipsy'/Mrs Elizabeth Stanhope Forbes/Trewarveneth/Newlyn/Penzance' (on a label attached to the frame) oil on canvas96.5 x 122.5cm (38 x 48 1/4in).Footnotes:Provenance(possibly) CD Morton Esq., by 1906.(possibly) Sotheby's 22 February 1972.1Property of a deceased's estate.ExhibitedLondon, Royal Academy, 1901, no. 315.Literature'Women's Studios', The Gentlewoman, 6 April 1901, p. 40.Royal Academy Illustrated, 1901, p. 22.Pall Mall Magazine 'Extra', Pictures of 1901, 1901, p. 64 (illustrated).'The Royal Academy – Second Notice', The Times, 24 May 1901, p. 13.The Royal Academy – Supplement to the Illustrated London News, 18 May 1901, p. IV (illustrated). 'The Royal Academy – Final Notice', Pall Mall Gazette, 16 May 1901, p. 2.Gladys B Crozier, 'Elizabeth Stanhope Forbes', The Art Journal, 1904, p. 383.Mrs Lionel Birch, Stanhope A Forbes ARA and Elizabeth Stanhope Forbes ARWS, 1906, Cassell & Co, p. 80 (illustrated).Austin Chester, 'The Art of Mrs Stanhope Forbes', Windsor Magazine, vol XXVIII, November 1908, p. 628. Judith Cook, Melissa Hardie and Christiana Payne, Singing from the Walls, The Life and Art of Elizabeth Forbes, 2000, Sansom & Co, no 4.97, p. 181.By 1900 the radical first phase of Newlyn School painting had passed, and many original 1880s founders of the colony had left west Cornwall. The recent news that Stanhope and Elizabeth Forbes had opened an art school however, initiated a new phase for the artists' colony that would, in the early years of the century, see the emergence of a distinguished cast of young artists that included Harold Harvey, Dod and Ernest Procter, and Laura and Harold Knight. The continuing success of the colony however, depended upon the Forbes's ability to diversify – to expand its focus on the heroic fisherman and encompass, in Elizabeth Forbes's case, child-lore, chivalric romance, and tales of fairies and woodland sprites. For these, the woods behind Trewarveneth, her home on the hilltop above the town, provided, as Austin Chester noted, 'the inspiration'.2 Depicted with the dedication of a devotee of Bastien-Lepage, according to E Bonney Steyne in The Studio, works such as At the Edge of the Wood (1894, Wolverhampton Art Gallery), demonstrate the use of 'square brush' technique that persists in the treatment of trees in the present lot.3 Painted over the winter of 1900-1, the canvas was not the first modern representation of gypsies. Forbes's husband, Stanhope Alexander Forbes, had addressed the subject in Their ever-shifting home, the progress of which he reported to Elizabeth, then his fiancé, in 1887.4 This stern piece of social realism casts the Romany family as penniless vagrants, viewed with suspicion by local cottagers. In the ensuing decade, the factual reporter in Stanhope left poetic fancy to Elizabeth. When, in 1900, a gypsy girl entered her woodland it signified a moment when serious interest in the origins and lifestyle of the Romany was growing. Within a year of the showing of Their ever-shifting home, the Gypsy Lore Society had been formed and although in its first incarnation it lasted only a few years, the interest was maintained by enthusiasts such as John Sampson, the librarian at University College, London, who took Augustus John, then a Slade student and arch-bohemian, under his wing. As the society, and its journal revived in the early years of the century, many bourgeois travellers inspired by Matthew Arnold's Scholar Gypsy took to the open road. Although lampooned by Jerome K Jerome in the character of 'Mr Toad', these renegades from the suburbs would form the membership of the Caravan Club. In this social and cultural phenomenon, Forbes's The Gipsy, and her husband's Nomads, (Royal Academy 1903, no. 258, unlocated) have been neglected. The work's re-appearance at this moment is therefore significant. The characterisation of Forbes's young woman is also of great interest. Clearly not one of the downtrodden of the earth, she sports a striped skirt and red bandana and by her side is her fiddle. Dance and song, as musicologists and composers were currently discovering, defined the Romany. Her life, unlike that portrayed by Forbes's husband, was to be envied, not pitied, and as the artist indicates, her music comes directly from the natural world, from the birds that surround her. One enthusiastic onlooker, who ironically credited Elizabeth Forbes's work to her husband, read the picture's clues: 'Here The Gypsy[sic] touches actuality as Sinfi Lovell, or the dauntless women of Borrow's wanderings touched a more commonplace present. But this gypsy, alone, with fiddle mute beside her, listening in a pause of her own music to the lyrical pipe of a robin in the leafless woods has a more plaintive charm.5 This unidentified reviewer touched upon the possible sources of the work. While George Borrow's classics, Lavengro (1851) and The Romany Rye (1857) remained in print, Theodore Watts-Dunton's Aylwin published in December 1898, was very much current when Forbes began her painting. A lengthy novel which draws on gypsy lore it tells the tale of the young Hal Aylwin who enlists the assistance of Sinfi Lovell – a 'sublime creation' according to critics – while in search of his true love, Winifred. Sinfi's 'dukkeripen' (fortune-telling in Romany) was the fount of ancient wisdom. Forbes does not of course identify a specific literary source for her work, and gypsies in Cornwall were not an unusual sight, but this young woman asserts more solidity and as much spiritual power as Will-o-the-wisp (1900), in the triptych she had recently shown at the Women's Exhibition at Earl's Court. In the following years, Forbes would return to the celebration of child lore in her Leicester Galleries exhibition of 1904, but it was the emblematic Gipsy that would resonate in the wanderings of Augustus John, the joyful gypsy parades of Alfred Munnings, and the dark-eyed Romany girls of Laura Knight. We are grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for compiling this catalogue entry. 1 Cook and Hardie 2000 indicate that two pictures, and possibly three, bear the title, Gypsy, or The Gypsy. They cite a work sold at Newlyn Art Gallery in 1906 for £10, in addition to that owned by CD Morton. At such a low price, the former may be no more than a drawing for the present work which, as contemporary illustrations confirm, is that which appeared at the Royal Academy. 2 Austin Chester, 'The Art of Mrs Stanhope Forbes', Windsor Magazine, vol XXVIII, November 1908, p. 628.3 EBS, 'The Paintings and Etchings of Mrs Stanhope Forbes', The Studio, vol IV, 1894, p. 188. 4 See Caroline Fox and Francis Greenacre, Artists of the Newlyn School, 1880-1900, 1979, exhibition catalogue, Newlyn, Plymouth and Bristol Art Galleries, pp. 83-4.5 EWR, 'The Royal Academy – Local Exhibits', The Western Daily Press, 20 May 1901, p. 3.For further information on this lot please visit Bonhams.com
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