COUNTRY HOUSE SALE (A451) Tue, 10th Jul 2012 Viewing: 10JUL12 - STANSTED MOUNTFITCHET - BAND Lot 412

Estimate: £20000 - £30000 + Fees *Frederick Hall (1860-1948) (CG) *Frederick Hall (1860-1948) (CG), 'THE END OF THE DAY' Signed and dated 1890 l.r., oil on canvas 94 x 153cm

*Artist's resale rights may apply to this lot.

Exhibited: Royal Academy, Summer Exhibition, 1891, no.751 (illustrated Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy, and the uncertainty about whether a painting would be accepted or where it was to be hung caused a good deal of anxiety.

Hall exhibited there for the first time in 1887 and in 1890 showed a painting of Porlock, now lost, which was 'shamefully skied right up at the top'. In their catalogue of the 1979 exhibition of 'Artists of the School', Fox and Greenacre write that 'it is tempting to regard this lost landscape as one of the first mature landscapes for which he is now justly best known. Paintings such as inThe End of the Dayin, inThe Ploughin and inThe Drinking Poolin of 1891 (date of exhibition),1896 and 1898 have the same scale and relationship of figures and landscapes as such works as Stanhope Forbes' own inThe Drinking Placein of 1900. The difference is the mellower mood, the more emphatic sentiment and the subtle evanescent tints of English Impressionism of George Clausen and H.H.La Thangue'.

In the late 1880s, Hall began to spend more time at Porlock near Minehead in Somerset, and it is likely that the 'The End of the Day' was painted there. By the time he married in 1898, he had ceased to visit Porlock, and 1897 was the last year his Royal Academy pictures were exhibited under his Newlyn address. p.40).

Literature: Caroline Fox and Francis Greenacre, catalogue of 'Artists of the 1880-1900', 1979, pp. 154 and 156

Fred Hall was among a group of artists, gathered around Stanhope Forbes (1857-1947), who arrived in the fishing village of Newlyn in about 1884. There is some doubt about the exact date, although we know that the artist, having exhibited in London in 1883, showed another painting, entitled 'An Orchard near Newlyn, ', at the end of 1884; however, Forbes does not mention him until November the following year.

The artists of Newlyn, many of whom had studied in Paris and Antwerp or visited the colonies at Quimperle and Pont Aven in Brittany, were much influenced by the French plein air painters, in particular Jules Bastien Lepage (1848-1884) and, like them, took their inspiration from nature. As Norman Garstin wrote, it was 'the friendship and camaraderie of the ateliers of Paris and Antwerp, a sympathy with each other's intentions, a mild climate for out of door work, a grey roofed village overhanging a lovely bay - these were the determining causes that led to the young artists setting up their easels hard by the Cornish sea'. Their aim was the faithful depiction of their immediate surroundings and, in Forbes' words, 'to closely study every changing mood of out door life'.

A characteristic of the early Newlyn paintings, also regarded by contemporaries as of French influence, was the 'consistent squareness of touch', as one critic put it, which allowed the artist to blur the outlines and concentrate on 'tone and value' in search of atmosphere. As Forbes wrote, 'beauty lies as much in the light, the atmosphere which surrounds all things, as in their actual form and fashion'. By the late 1880s, this square brush technique had largely been softened, but was still in evidence.

The artists showed their new work at a private view in Newlyn, but the objective that dominated their year was the