Charles Simpson Painter of Animals and Birds, Coastline & Moorland

Charles Simpson , in the early 1920s the leading figure in the St Ives art colony, produced paintings of great variety. In 1913 he married Ruth Alison, a promising student at the Forbes School and together they established the St Ives School of Art, where Ruth taught portraiture. Charles exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy: pictures of his wife and daughter Leonora students on the beach, huge impressionist canvases of the estuary in the early light. Simpson was known for his pastoral paintings and large seascapes with gulls. The twenty-two paintings of The Herring Season record the activities of the fishing industry in St Ives; another series contains eighty paintings of birds found along the shore and cliffs. Simpson moved to London in 1924, forging yet another career, as a fine painter of horse racing and hunting in Leicestershire and Yorkshire. He travelled by motorcycle to attend race meetings, open exhibitions of his hunting and racing pictures and to carry out commissions for horse-and-rider portraits. He returned to Cornwall, living in Lamorna where he painted the coastline and his favourite subject - ducks on the stream or millpond.Branfield, John is the author of 'Charles Simpson Painter of Animals and Birds, Coastline & Moorland', published 2007 under ISBN 9781904537434 and ISBN 190453743X.