T.C. Gotch: The Disconsolate Year

"A Cottage Interior, Newlyn" by T.C. Gotch

"In 1891 T.C. Gotch was industrious, sincere and capable. His teaching had been thorough and eclectic, but he had not yet quite found his metier. He saw life, and he painted what he observed, all in that gray envelope of atmosphere which the Newlyn men and women have made famous at a dozen Academies. They study light direct, transfused and reflected. They paint the truth. They suggest atmosphere in their pictures, and can draw with the best, but the Newlyn colony do not concern themselves particularly with colour. The pictures that Mr. Gotch painted prior to 1891 prove him to have been Newlynite to his finger tips.

His Academy contribution of 1890, 'Twixt Life and Death,' is a typical example of that manner. Gray, sad, dramatic, obvious, it is a scene you may chance upon any stormy day at Newlyn, and one her adopted painter sons love to mirror. Mr. Gotch was to paint one more Newlyn subject, the 'Sharing Fish' of 1891, and then heyho(!) for colour, allegory, and that fine decorative quality which culminated in the 'Alleluia.'

But when I saw him in the month of May of his Disconsolate Year, he had not decided to winter in Florence, where he was to recapture that colour sense which his admiration for the practice and performance of the Newlyn men had unconsciously atrophied. He stood at the parting of the ways. Dissatisfied with the past, uncertain about the future, he looked sad and vexed, although he did not confess to it on that day in the late spring.

To be continued

(Excerpt from "T.C. Gotch and His Pictures" by Lewis Hind in "The Windsor Magazine")