Charles Walter Simpson

1885 - 1971 

Charles Walter Simpson was a leading figure in the St Ives art colony in the early 1920s, he was born in Surrey and was expected to follow his father into the army, but Simpson suffered serious injury when thrown from a horse at the age of 15, the blow affecting both hearing and sight. His considerable talent for drawing led him to pursue a career in painting and he entered the Bushey School of Painting under Lucy Kemp-Welch—the great animal painter. It was in homage to another great animal painter, J. A. Arnesby Brown, that he first went to Cornwall to stay on a farm near St Erth. The move resulted in his first success at the Royal Academy in 1907—Autumn Ploughing. Later, with his wife, the portraitist Ruth Alison, he established the St Ives School of Art at the Piazza studios.

The Simpsons lived in London from 1924 to 1929 where Charles held an exhibition of sketches of the rodeo. Further commissions included writing and illustrating books on hunting and a series of articles for Country Life. He returned to Cornwall in 1930 to concentrate on painting local landscapes and views of the harbour and sea.