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Norman Garstin (1847-1926) 
Professions: Painter; Landscape painter; Genre Painter; Still life painter
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f - NORMAN GARSTIN 1847-1926
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Norman Garstin (1847-1926)
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Norman Garstin, R.B.C. (1847-1926)
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Norman Garstin (1847-1926) The Breton Needleworker
Norman Garstin Biography
(b Cahirconlish, Co. Limerick, 28 Aug 1847; d Penzance, Cornwall, 22 June 1926). Irish painter and writer. He attempted various professions, including diamond-mining and journalism in South Africa (1872–7), before becoming an artist. At the Koninklijke Academie, Antwerp (1878–80), under Charles Verlat, in Paris (1881–4) as a student of Carolus-Duran and in Venice (1885) Garstin became friends with future Newlyn school painters. Saint’s House and Field, Tangier (1885; Plymouth, City Mus. & A.G.), a small oil panel painted en plein air , exemplifies both the medium and the suggestive approach he preferred throughout his career. In 1886 he married and settled in Newlyn and then Penzance (1890). Financial pressures forced him to produce portraits and such large anecdotal genre scenes as Her Signal (exh. RA 1892; Truro, Co. Mus. & A.G.) for which his talents for simplified forms and surface design were less well suited. Though he exhibited widely, he received little recognition. Garstin supplemented his income by writing, lecturing, teaching and, from 1899, taking art students on summer trips to the Continent. His perceptive, witty articles for The Studio , the Art Journal and the Cornhill Magazine about artists he knew and places he had painted reveal his cosmopolitan taste and experiences. He admired the Japanese aesthetic, and the Impressionists’ and Manet’s challenge to academic canons. His most famous work, The Rain it Raineth Every Day (1889; Penzance, Penlee House Mus. & A.G.), acknowledges his debts to Degas’s innovative compositions and Whistler’s tonalism. His daughter, Alethea Garstin (1894–1978), was also a painter.
Grove Art excerpts - Electronic ©2003, Oxford Art Online
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