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Gotch was born
in Kettering, Northamptonshire to a prosperous middle class
family involved in making shoes and banking. The family were
nonconformists. He attended school locally, and entered his
father’s business, before taking up the study of art at
Heatherley’s Art School in 1876. He then studied briefly in
Antwerp, before progressing to the Slade. He married a fellow
student Caroline Yates, whom he met in Paris. They had one
daughter Phyllis, who was a model in some of her father’s most
important pictures. The young family travelled to Australia,
where they settled in Melbourne. They returned to England,
settling in the artistic colony of
Newlyn in 1887. Gotch and his wife lived in Newlyn for
the rest of their lives. He painted in the style of the Newlyn
School at this time.
In 1891/2 Gotch
visited Italy, mainly basing himself in Florence. This was a
pivotal experience in his life, causing a radical change in his
style artistically. On his return from Italy Gotch started to
paint highly- finished symbolist pictures, which involved
childhood and family relationships. These paintings were
influenced by the clarity and simplicity of early Italian art.
Some of these paintings are amongst the greatest and most
interesting in Victorian art. Gotch’s was a totally unique
voice, and his pictures were highly acclaimed, and he became
successful. He also painted portraits. Many public galleries
bought his paintings. Gotch, surprisingly, did not become even
an Associate of the Royal Academy. He was, however, involved
with the Royal British Colonial Society, and was it’s
President from 1913-1928.
Thomas Cooper
Gotch died suddenly on 1st May 1931. The reputation
of the artist, and the recognition of his work is long overdue
for a positive re-assessment.
It would
be entirely wrong not to mention that the source of much of this
information comes from the catalogue of “The Last
Romantics,’ the catalogue of the exhibition at the Barbican
Art Gallery in the late 1990s.
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Obituary - Times, May the 4th
1931
Mr Thomas
Cooper Gotch, the artist and Vice president of the Royal West of
England Academy died on May 1st in his 77th
year.He has a claim to be remembered as an artist who, at a time
when realism was in the fashion and in the very bosom of its most
active school in England, boldly struck out for himself in
decorative composition. His ‘Child Enthroned,’ painted in
1894, for which the model was his daughter Phyllis, made a
sensation at the time of its exhibition, and indeed, a certain
intensity of feeling which carried off the too-literal style in
which it was painted. To some extent the great success of this
picture was a hindrance to Gotch, because it lead him to repeat
himself in other works conceived in the same convention such as
‘Allelulia,’ purchased by the Chantry Bequest Fund in 1898 and
now in the Tate Gallery; ‘A Pageant of Children,’ and ‘The
mother Enthroned.’
Born in
Kettering in 1854, the fourth son of the late Thomas Henry Gotch,
Gotch was educated at Kettering Grammar School, and studied art at
Hatherley’s, The Slade School at Antwerp, and in Paris under
Jean-Paul Laurens. In his earlier years he was a regular exhibitor
at the Academy and the salon, where he was awarded gold medals for
his work, as also at Berlin. When Gotch had his great success he
was already a member of the colony at Newlyn, Cornwall which had
formed itself under the leadership of Mr Stanhope Forbes RA.
Gotch married a
Hampshire lady, Miss Caroline Yates, and the extreme beauty and
intelligence in youth of their only child Phyllis made their home
at Newlyn a place of pilgrimage to the youth of the neighbourhood.
The child stories of the late H D Lowry, owed much of their
inspiration to her. Gotch was for a time President of the Royal
British Colonial Society of Artists. His elder brother was John
Alfred Gotch, a well known architect and writer on architecture.
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