Alexander Stanhope Forbes (1857-1947)
A Sketch, Mousehole Harbour, Cornwall
POA
½
At the Royal Academy in 1905, this picture was eclipsed by Wyllie’s enormous painting of Trafalgar on the centenary of the battle, which ‘stole the show’ with the critics. However, this smaller painting is a modest masterpiece of marine art, and shows that Wyllie had lost none of the skill that he had shown thirty years earlier. The picture is full of movement, air, and light. A sea reach (as it is labelled) is the last bit of river before the sea, with the mud bank in the water to the right. The last of the shrimper fleet are hard on the starboard tack in the channel, against both wind and current, whilst some of the leading boats have already tacked inside the safety of the harbour which, from the look of the low-lying topography, may be on the east coast.
