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Promoting Irish Culture and History from Little Rock, Arkansas, USA

Tag Archives: Jersey


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Death of Norman Garstin, Painter, Teacher, Art Critic & Journalist

Norman Garstin, Irish painter, teacher, art critic and journalist associated with the Newlyn School of painters, dies on June 22, 1926, at Penzance, Cornwall, England.

Garstin is born on August 28, 1847, in Caherconlish, County Limerick, to Captain William Garstin and Mary Moore Garstin. He is raised by aunts and grandparents following his father’s suicide and his mother’s incapacitating disabilities.

Garstin attends Victoria College on the island of Jersey and then he works in architecture and engineering for brief periods. He then travels to South Africa where he befriends Cecil Rhodes, works as a journalist and is involved in government in Cape Town.

Pursuing an interest in art, Garstin trains in 1880 in Antwerp at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. From 1882 to 1884 he studies in Paris at an academy founded by Carolus-Duran. He then travels and paints his way through Spain, Morocco and Venice, Italy.

In 1886, Garstin marries Louisa Jones, also known as Dochie. Many of Garstin’s friends from school in Antwerp had settled in Newlyn. He and Dochie move to Mount Vernon in Newlyn by 1886. They have three children: Crosbie, Denis and Alethea. The boys take up journalism and Alethea becomes an artist. The family moves to Penzance by 1895.

In 1888 Garstin becomes a member of the New English Art Club (NEAC). He becomes a member of the Newlyn Society of Artists (NSA) and is on the Newlyn Art Gallery‘s Provisional Committee for its opening in 1895. Regarding the plein-air approach used by St. Ives and Newlyn artists he says they are “filled with this idea of a fresh unarranged nature to be studied in her fields, and by her streams, and on the margin of her great seas – in these things they were to find the motives of their art.”

Garstin is a teacher and takes groups to “his favorite painting haunts on the Continent.” For instance, Frances Hodgkins, a New Zealand artist, attends Garstin’s 1901 and 1902 summer sketching classes in France. He teaches Harold Harvey, the only Cornish Newlyn School painter, and his daughter, Alethea.

Garstin’s work consists primarily of small oil panels in the plein air style, something he had picked up from the French Impressionists, like Édouard Manet. He is also fascinated by Japanese prints and admires the work of the American painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Some of his works are at Tate and Penlee House.

One of Garstin’s best and most famous works is his 1889 painting The Rain, It Raineth Every Day of the Penzance promenade. The title of the work comes from William Shakespeare‘s King Lear and Twelfth Night. “The composition of this painting demonstrates Garstin’s admiration for Japanese art,” says Penlee House.

Garstin dies in Penzance on June 22, 1926.

(Pictured: “The Rain It Raineth Every Day” oil on canvas by Norman Garstin, 1889, Penlee House)


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Birth of Samuel Lover, Songwriter, Novelist & Painter

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Samuel Lover, Irish songwriter, composer, novelist, and a painter of portraits, chiefly miniatures, is born at 60 Grafton Street in Dublin on February 24, 1797. He is also known as “Ben Trovato” (“well invented”) and is the grandfather of Victor Herbert. He is noted as saying, “When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen.”

Lover goes to school at Samuel Whyte’s at 79 Grafton Street, now home to Bewley’s café. By 1830 he is secretary of the Royal Hibernian Academy and lives at 9 D’Olier Street. In 1835 he moves to London and begins composing music for a series of comic stage works. To some of them, like the operetta Il Paddy Whack in Italia (1841), he contributes both words and music, for others he merely contributes a few songs.

Lover produces a number of Irish songs, of which several – including The Angel’s Whisper, Molly Bawn, and The Four-leaved Shamrock – attain great popularity. He also writes novels, of which Rory O’Moore and Handy Andy are the best known, and short Irish sketches which, with his songs, he combines into a popular entertainment called Irish Nights or Irish Evenings. With the latter, he tours North America between 1846 and 1848. He joins with Charles Dickens in founding Bentley’s Magazine.

Lover’s grandson is composer Victor Herbert whose mother is Lover’s daughter Fanny. Herbert is best remembered for his many successful musicals and operettas that premier on Broadway. As a small child he lives with the Lovers in a musical environment following the divorce of his mother.

Samuel Lover dies on July 6, 1868, in Saint Helier on the island of Jersey. A memorial in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin summarises his achievements:

“Poet, painter, novelist and composer, who, in the exercise of a genius as distinguished in its versatility as in its power, by his pen and pencil illustrated so happily the characteristics of the peasantry of his country that his name will ever be honourably identified with Ireland.”


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Death of Samuel Lover, Songwriter & Painter

Samuel Lover, Irish songwriter, composer, novelist, and a painter of portraits, chiefly miniatures, dies on July 6, 1868. He was the grandfather of composer, cellist, and conductor Victor Herbert.

Lover is born at number 60 Grafton Street, Dublin and goes to school at Samuel Whyte’s at 79 Grafton Street, now home to Bewley’s, an Irish hot beverage company. By 1830 he is secretary of the Royal Hibernian Academy and lives at number 9 D’Olier Street. In 1835 he moves to London and begins composing music for a series of comic stage works. To some of them, like the operetta Il Paddy Whack in Italia (1841), he contributes both words and music, for others he merely contributes a few songs.

Lover produces a number of Irish songs, of which several – including The Angel’s Whisper, Molly Bawn, and The Four-leaved Shamrock – attain great popularity. He also writes novels, of which Rory O’Moore and Handy Andy are the best known, and short Irish sketches which, with his songs, he combines into a popular entertainment called Irish Nights or Irish Evenings. With the latter, he tours North America between 1846 and 1848. He joins with Charles Dickens in founding Bentley’s Magazine.

Lover’s grandson is composer Victor Herbert whose mother is Lover’s daughter Fanny. Irish-born and German-raised, Herbert is best known for his many successful musicals and operettas that premiere on Broadway. As a child he stays with the Lovers in a musical environment following the death of his father.

Samuel Lover dies on July 6, 1868, in Saint Helier on Jersey. A memorial in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin summarises his achievements:

Poet, painter, novelist and composer, who, in the exercise of a genius as distinguished in its versatility as in its power, by his pen and pencil illustrated so happily the characteristics of the peasantry of his country that his name will ever be honourably identified with Ireland.


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Birth of Sir Charles Brett, Solicitor & Journalist

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Sir Charles Edward Bainbridge Brett, Northern Irish solicitor, journalist, author and founding member, and first chairman, of the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society (UAHS), is born in Holywood, County Down, on October 30, 1928. He is known to many simply as Charlie Brett.

Brett is born into a long line of solicitors, the family firm being L’Estrange and Brett, based in Belfast. He is a partner there from 1954 until 1994. He is educated at Rugby School and New College, Oxford, where he is President of the Poetry Society and a friend of Dylan Thomas and attends lectures by Lord Clark.

Between 1949 and 1950 he works in France as a journalist with the Continental Daily Mail, where he is said to have mixed in anarchist and Trotskyite circles.

In 1956, the Earl of Antrim invites Brett to join the Northern Ireland Committee of the National Trust. On finding there are no books written to prepare himself for this, he resolves to write the necessary volumes. In 1957 he becomes the first chairman of the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society, founded alongside, amongst others Lady Dunleath. Brett serves as chairman for ten years and then as President from 1979 until his death.

With the National Trust he puts his legal skill to use in order to establish a public footpath along the cliffs of the North Coast of Ulster. He also sits on the board of the Irish Architectural Archive in Dublin.

In 1971, he is appointed to the board of the newly created Northern Ireland Housing Executive. He serves as Chairman for five years from 1979, during which time 50,000 dwellings are built. He is asked to compile a list of historic buildings in Jersey in 1975. In 1986, Brett becomes the first chairman of the International Fund for Ireland, established to encourage investment in Ireland.

Brett is also involved in Northern Irish politics, being chairman of the Northern Ireland Labour Party for a time. In 1981 he receives a CBE, this is followed by a Knighthood in 1990.

Brett dies on December 19, 2005. His church memorial is located along those of his family in the Comber Church of Ireland Parish Church of St. Mary, in Comber, North County Down.