Through the Marshes

Painting, oil on canvas, 'Through the Marshes', by Stanhope Alexander Forbes, 1927. Depicts railway workers (permanent way) and a train crossing the Marazion Marshes near Penzance on the Great Western Railway line. Framed and glazed, glass.

Stanhope Forbes, is best known as one of the founders of the Newlyn School of painters based in the western tip of Cornwall, but he also had strong links to the railway, as both his father and older brother were senior railway managers.

Forbes was drawn to Cornwall by the clear coastal light and the opportunity to paint ordinary, working people in his social realist style. His typical subjects were found in the local farms and fishing villages but perhaps inevitably given his family background, he was also drawn to the railway.

This peaceful scene, Through the Marshes, painted in 1927, shows a local Great Western Railway train steaming off into the distance as it crosses Marazion Marsh. In the foreground a gang is at work on maintaining the track, a subject Forbes had painted for a poster completed for the London, Midland & Scottish Railway three years earlier.