Description:An exhibition of some work by local artist, Walter Langley.
Langley was born in Irving Street on June 8th 1852, the son of William Langley (a Birmingham tailor) and Mary Ann Langley. He was apprenticed to a firm of lithographers before winning a scholarship in the South Kensington School to study design. He returned to Birmingham as a lithographer, but turned to painting in the late 1870s. In 1876 he married Clara Perkins in Birmingham. In the 1881 census he is listed as living at 19 Lee Crescent (not far from his birthplace).
Langley settled in Newlyn in 1882, two years before Stanhope Forbes, and later lived at Penzance. His best work is considered to be largely that of the 1880s, mainly in watercolour, though he later turned to oils. His subjects, as with the other Newlyn painters, were typically Cornish fisherfolk, and he had a particular fondness for single figures leaning on their elbows sitting in interiors and looking pensive. Although the Newlyn ideal was realist, almost bleak, some of Langley's work tended towards the sentimental. Langley died on March 21st 1922 in Penzance and was buried in Penzance Cemetery.