Lamorna Birch painting at Lamorna

Originally from Cheshire, Samuel John ‘Lamorna’ Birch first visited Cornwall in the 1890s. In 1902, the year of his marriage to Houghton Emily Vivian who was the daughter of a mining agent from Camborne, he settled at Flagstaff Cottage, looking out to sea above Lamorna Cove. He lived there for the rest of his life.

He is considered to be the father of the Lamorna Artist’s Colony and in the following years a great number of other artists came and went, many of whom went on to become celebrated names themselves, such as Dame Laura Knight, Sir Alfred Munnings and Augustus John. Birch was a self-taught, traditional, predominantly landscape painter and would have been a familiar sight in the valley, working outdoors at his easel.