Arminell Morshead

(Devon 1889-1966 London)

Chy-An-Chy Corner, St. Ives, c.1930s

oil on canvas

with the artist’s hand-written label to the reverse ‘ARMINELL MORSHEAD/ STUDIO A 22 BLOMFIELD RD/ LONDON W.9/ CHY-AN-CHY CORNER, ST. IVES/ No. 15’

41.5 x 51 cm.

in a period frame

Arminell Morshead was born in Tavistock, Devon, and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art with Malcolm Osborne and with Frank Short at the Royal College of Art. She was known for her printmaking, which was her bread-and-butter, but also for her horse and polo pictures. She showed variously at the Royal Academy, RP, ROI, RCamA, Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool and abroad.

This Cornish scene was painted in the late 1930s- early 1940s when the artist’s colony in St. Ives was thriving with wartime evacuees, with many artists from London including Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson among their numbers. It’s likely that Morshead herself was living there around this time, and may well have been sharing a studio with the artist Amy Watt, who had the Chy-an-Chy studio, overlooking the harbour.