Single Card - Norman Garstin The Rain it Raineth

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The Rain it Raineth Every Day
- Norman Garstin (1847-1926)

Norman Garstin was born in County Limerick, and as a boy enjoyed hunting and painting. He trained for two years as an architect, and then spent four years in the early 1870s in South Africa, first mining for diamonds, and then as co-founder of the Cape Times newspaper, where he made his name as a talented journalist.
However, shortly after his return to Ireland, he lost the sight of his right eye in a riding accident, which caused a crisis in his life and paradoxically prompted him to follow a career as an artist. He began his formal training as a painter in Antwerp in c.1878, and then moved to Paris, where he probably saw works by Pissaro, Gauguin and Manet, and where he met Degas, whose work he greatly admired. In 1882 he began exhibiting his work at the leading London galleries, and between 1883 and 1890 he travelled widely, to the South of France, Italy, Morocco (where his adventures provided material for a book), Spain and Canada. In 1890 he settled with his wife in Penzance, where he was to become a founder member of the Early Newlyn School. However straightened financial circumstances forced him to teach, to write articles, and to conduct sketching parties abroad, which left him too little time for painting. Of his children, his two sons became writers, and his daughter Alethea, a painter.

The Rain it Raineth, 1889 showing Penzance Promenade, was one of his finest paintings. It has been particularly praised for Garstin's convincing representation of areas of empty space stretching across the width and depth of the painting, and the accuracy of scale and recession with which has placed distant buildings and nearby figures.

Card Size: 20.5 x 15cm

Comes with a white envelope.

Published by Morrab Studio, Penzance.

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