Stanhope Alexander Forbes RA (18 November 1857 – 2 March 1947) was an Irish artist and a founding member of the influential Newlyn school of painters.

[2][7] He is buried in Guillemont Road Cemetery where his headstone bears an inscription composed by his father: HE SAW BEYOND THE FILTH OF BATTLE, AND THOUGHT DEATH A FAIR PRICE TO PAY TO BELONG TO THE COMPANY OF THESE FELLOWS.

[8] Stanhope Forbes also sculpted and erected a memorial to his son in their local parish church with the inscription: "I will get me out of my COUNTRY & from my KINDRED & from my FATHER'S house unto a LAND that GOD will shew me".

His father then worked for the Luxembourg Railway and after a period of poor health Forbes was removed from Dulwich College and studied under private teachers in Brussels.

[2][10] Forbes returned to Ireland for a few months to visit Dr Andrew Melville, family friend and Queen's College professor.

Henry Herbert La Thangue, who also attended Dulwich College, Lambeth School of Art and the Royal Academy, came to Paris, too, and studied at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts.

[1][6] Of Brittany, Mrs Lionel Birch wrote: In that most beautiful and interesting portion of France, there seemed to be found everything that an artist could desire.

Inhabited by a race of a distinct and marked type, wearing still the beautiful national costumes which had been handed down from bygone ages, and retaining the old language of their forefathers, each village followed religiously the old traditions which ordered the fashion of their dress and the conduct of their lives.

[14] A painting made there, A Street in Brittany, was shown and well received at the 1882 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and sold later that year to the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool.

[16] Other artists who were painting in Brittany at the time and who Forbes may have met, were Norman Garstin, Nathaniel Hill, Joseph Malachy Kavanagh and Walter Osborne.

[2] Of this place, Forbes said: I had come from France and, wandering down into Cornwall, came one spring morning along that dusty road by which Newlyn is approached from Penzance.

What lode-some of artistic metal the place contains I know not; but its effects were strongly felt in the studios of Paris and Antwerp particularly, by a number of young English painters studying there, who just about then, by some common impulse, seemed drawn towards this corner of their native land...

There are plenty of names amongst them which are still, and I hope will long by, associated with Newlyn, and the beauty of this fair district, which charmed us from the first, has not lost its power, and holds us still.

It attracted students such as Ernest and Doris "Dod" Shaw,[1][2] Frank Gascoigne Heath and Jill and Geoffrey Garnier.

[citation needed] The Newlyn area had experienced an economic downturn as the result of failing fishing, mining and farming industries.

Intolerant of all shams and false sentiment, the painter has made himself one with the people he depicts; he has understood the humour which lies so close to tears.