Lamorna Birch

Samuel John "Lamorna" Birch, RA, RWS (1869 - 1955) was an artist in oils and watercolours. At the suggestion of fellow artist Stanhope Forbes, Birch adopted the soubriquet "Lamorna" to distinguish himself from Lionel Birch, also an artist.

Lamorna Birch was born in Egremont in Cheshire. He was self-taught as an artist, other than for a brief period of study at the Atelier Colarossi in Paris during 1895.

He is thought of as a painter of northern England, but his most important period was when he settled in Lamorna, Cornwall in 1902, and many of his most famous pictures date from this time and the beautiful Lamorna Cove is usually their subject matter. The nickname "Lamorna" was given to him by the Newlyn School artist, Stanhope Forbes, to distinguish him from Lionel Birch, who was also working in the area at that time.

He exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1892. He held his first one man exhibition at the Fine Art Society in 1906. He is said to have produced more than 20,000 pictures.

The exhibition A Charmed Circle: Lamorna Birch and his Circle of Friends was shown at The Mezzanine at Warrington in 2005. This details his links with Henry Scott Tuke and Thomas Cooper Gotch and many others who settled in the artists' colony in the 1880s and 1890s. "These painters helped to change the face of British art. Their emphasis on colour and light, truth and social realism brought about a revolution in British art." says the catalogue for the show.

The paintings are the excellent portrayal of the events and scenes that we see around us. The painters are the best cameras of the world. They reproduce many different types of pictures. They even draw imaginary pictures that do not exist in this world. We tend to use both thinned oil paints and dense oil paints. Masterpieces can be dyed more than once, but each time it may be different from the existing paintings.h

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