Stanhope Alexander Forbes R.A., (18 November 1857, – 2 March 1947), was an artist and member of the influential Newlyn school of painters. Often called 'the father of the Newlyn School', Forbes's painting A Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach (1885), brought national recognition to the eponymous art colony that had grown up around that fishing village in the far west of Cornwall.
He was married to fellow painter Elizabeth Forbes (1859-1912) and together they founded the School of Painting in Newlyn in 1899, which attracted students such as Ernest and Dod Procter, Frank Gascoigne Heath and Jill and Geoffrey Garnier.
Forbes was born in Dublin, the son of an English Railway manager and his French wife. Schooled at Dulwich, he studied art at the Lambeth School of Art (now the City & Guilds of London Art School), then in Paris under Léon Bonnat. Forbes went to Brittany in 1881 with fellow artist La Thangue. In France he came into contact with the new en plein air painters.
He moved to Newlyn in Cornwall in 1884, and soon became a leading figure in the growing colony of artists, most of whom shared his Breton-inspired passion for rural naturalism.
In Newlyn, Forbes tutored the landscape watercolourist Mabel Mary Spanton.[1]