Home-Along: Evening

The scene is the quay at Newlyn in Cornwall. It is ‘home-along’ hour, as it was locally known, when the men returned from the quarries to their wives and sweethearts. Alexander Stanhope Forbes set out to capture not only the subtle effects of light at dusk but also the atmosphere of a particular daily event in a particular place. Forbes had lived in Newlyn for 21 years and he was now well qualified to paint the lives of the Cornish people, as all his fellow Newlyn artists sought to do, with sympathy and understanding.He heightens the realism with poses of almost self-conscious awkwardness and it may be that he had studied photography as intelligently as Edgar Degas. His cutting off of the edges of the figures and the legs of the the dog adds to the immediacy and naturalness of the image.