12/05/2026
To accompany this year's 'Making Waves' exhibition at St. Ives Museum Cornish Art Historian David Tovey will be giving a talk at Porthmeor Studios on Friday 12th June. Scan the QR code below for tickets or contact the Cornish Riviera Box Office on 01726 63513.
The period from its foundation in 1927 to 1960 was the heyday of the St. Ives Society of Artists (STISA), with many Royal Academicians exhibiting. In order to put St. Ives Museum's 2026 exhibition 'Making Waves' into a wider context, this lecture concentrates on the St Ives resident artists who were the Committee members of STISA and organised the extraordinarily successful touring shows that visited more than twenty Provincial Public Galleries and even went out to South Africa in 1947. These artists all enjoyed very successful careers and had work bought by Public Galleries and yet in the past have been denigrated by modernist art historians as being second rate traditional artists who merely produced pot-boilers for the tourist market. This lecture aims to show how wrong that viewpoint is. Artists featured include Moffat Lindner, Borlase Smart, George Bradshaw, John Park, Arthur Hayward, Bernard Ninnes, Thomas Maidment, Shearer Armstrong, Dorothea Sharp and Marcella Smith.
