A Summer's Moon (oil on canvas)

This is typical of Talmage's idyllic paintings of about 1920, when he staged an exhibition at the Fine Art Society, and it may possibly be number 14 in that show, Milking Time. Cornish by descent, he had a shooting accident when he was young and learned to paint with his left hand instead of his right. In St Ives in the 1890s, with Julius Olsson and Adrian Stokes, Talmage founded an Artists’ Club, and later a Cornish school of painting. One of his pupils was the Canadian artist Emily Carr: Talmage once said to her that 'there is sunlight in the shadows' which apparently casual remark changed the way she painted for ever and she never forgot it.