Society of Bexhill Museums

Mr Miller set the scene by describing the era during which Alfred grew up and in which he followed his career as an artist, a time of great change in rural life.

Farming had been paramount in the country, and most paid employment, skilled and unskilled, was linked to this, or to domestic service to the gentry and to the middle class.

With industrialisation and the rapid development of towns and railways, all this was changing, and with it the disappearance of a way of life. Farming itself was becoming more mechanised and gradually the horse was being replaced as the main means of power. At the same time the evils of the life of the urban poor were becoming apparent, and Alfred Robert Quinton was keen to preserve the scenes of rural life which he remembered from his youth.

Alfred's parents had moved to London from rural Suffolk in 1850 and he was born in 1853 '“ their fifth son. At school he showed promise as an artist and received his headmaster's prize for drawing in the form of a book entitled Drawing From Nature which influenced him greatly.

Alfred then attended art school and trained as an engraver before becoming an oil painter. His last known painting in oils before he changed to the medium of watercolour for which he is best known, was dated 1885.

Although his studios were in London, Alfred travelled widely on the continent, and painted landscapes and wrote and illustrated travel articles. In 1894 he made an epic journey by bicycle from Lands End to John o'Groats painting landscapes of rural scenes. Some of his work was commissioned, but much of his work was done for Raphael Tuck and later for Joseph Salmon for the newly popular picture postcards and calendar market.

A prolific painter of a vanishing rural scene of thatched cottages, village churches, inns, country craftsmen and farm workers, he was known to have painted over 2,000 pictures in his lifetime, and was still painting the day before he died aged 81 in 1934.

Acclaimed in his lifetime for his nostalgic appeal to a "golden" bygone age, he is less known now, but is appreciated for his very detailed recording of country scenes and people in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Our next afternoon lecture will take place at St .Augustine's Church Hall on Wednesday, January 30 at 2.30 p.m. Lawrence Stevens, a master saddler, will talk about leather making in Sussex over the years.

Visitors and guests are always welcome, and membership of the Society of Bexhill Museums is open to anyone interested. The next coffee morning is at 10 am on Thursday, February 7 at Parkhurst Hall, Parkhurst Road.