Stanley Horace Gardiner

Available for sale from Big Sky Fine Art in the English county of Dorset, this original painting is by the Cornish artist Stanley Gardiner and is dated 1926. <br> The watercolour is presented and supplied in a sympathetic contemporary frame (which is shown in these photographs), mounted using conservation materials and behind non-reflective Tru Vue UltraVue® UV70 glass.<br> This antique watercolour is in very good condition. It wants for nothing and is supplied ready to hang and display.<br> The watercolour is signed and dated lower left.<br> <br> Stanley Gardiner was the last of the famous Lamorna group of artists, and a much-loved teacher. He was born in Reading, Berkshire on 18 November 1887. On leaving school he was apprenticed to a decorator, but he clearly had aspirations to paint more than walls as in his spare time he used house paint to create paintings on the prepared sides of cardboard boxes. He received a scholarship to Reading University where he studied art. He later continued his formal studies at the Art Academy College in Arbroath, where he specialised in landscape painting and won the Wells Prize in Art. <br> Gardiner then taught at University College in Reading, before travelling to America where he worked and taught for a few years. He returned to England in World War 1 to enroll, and served in the Armed Forces.<br> Gardiner married, and in 1922 he and his wife visited Lamorna in Cornwall for a holiday. They fell in love with the place immediately. Gardiner met the artist Samuel John Lamorna Birch, who encouraged him to settle there, and the couple soon moved there on a permanent basis. Indeed, they remained there for the rest of their lives. At first they endured real poverty, living in an army hut behind The Wink Public House. Gardiner worked at making frames for other artists in the Lamorna and Newlyn area, including Lamorna Birch and Stanhope Forbes. He later moved to Lily Cottage, overlooking the river, and formed a small painting school, run from his home, and built his own studio, called Bludor.<br> In 1926 Gardiner studied at the Forbes School, and he exhibited in the Newlyn Art Gallery Christmas exhibition that same year. <br> <br> Gardiner’s talent as an artist was soon recognised and he began to exhibit widely, including the Royal Academy (1927-1947), the Royal Watercolour Society, the Fine Art Society, the Irish Salon, the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool and the Berkshire Art Society. He had his first one man show in London in 1939 with 42 paintings of Cornwall. Gardiner was elected an Associate of the Royal Watercolour Society and a member of the New Society of Artists.<br> <br> Gardiner loved to paint in the open air and often took pupils for lessons in the open air, carrying on the long-held plein air tradition of the Lamorna artists. <br> <br> In 1938 the artist Richard Copeland Weatherby captured the vitality of Gardiner as a man and as a painter in his work ‘A Portrait of Stanley Gardiner’. This portrait hung in the Royal Academy in 1945 and later became part of the permanent collection of the Penlee House Gallery in Penzance. <br> Gardiner spent the rest of his life living and working in the Lamorna valley, where he became an integral part of the community and the last professional artist of the Lamorna colony. <br> Stanley and his wife had a son, Keith, in 1934. As an adult Keith also worked as an artist, taking over his father’s studio, and wrote a book entitled “A Painter’s Paradise – memories of an artist’s son growing up in Lamorna”.<br> <br> Today the works of Stanley Gardiner are held in the Royal Collection, Penlee House, Penzance, and private collections worldwide.<br> <br> © Big Sky Fine Art<br> <br> This original watercolour painting by Lamorna artist Stanley Gardiner depicts a winding country road close to Fowey in South Cornwall. The road is barely more than a track, with no markings, and it bends to the left as we view the painting, dipping from sight. The road is flanked by impressively tall trees. In the background is a wide rounded hill, along the top of which similar trees are silhouetted against the sky. The palette is rich and earthy, autumnal even, and there is a magical atmosphere to this scene. Nearby Fowey is a port town and civil parish at the mouth of the River Fowey on the coast of Cornwall. The whole area is exceptionally beautiful.