Book Description

The Victorian painter John Brett delighted in the natural world. As a Pre-Raphaelite in the mid-century, he created glowing landscapes, famously the Stonebreaker of 1857 and The Val d'Aosta painted in the following year, which showed all the qualities of the Pre-Raphaelites, truthfulness to nature and almost obsessional attention to detail. He was at this time influenced by the teachings of John Ruskin, although their friendship was to end in some acrimony. There were to be other sides to John Brett and from the 1870s onwards he devoted much of his time to painting the sea and the coast of the British Isles, including, as this sumptuous book shows, the many faces and colors of Cornwall. Painting during long family holidays, he left over 200 known views of the coastline from Fowey in the east to Bude in the north. In thirty years, he recorded with Ruskinian precision and Pre-Raphaelite intensity of color its varied beauties, revelling in the diverse moods of sea and sky, the golden sands and the majesty and grandeur of the Cornish cliffs.