How a lost painting found its way home

For a small specialised gallery such as Penlee House in Penzance, Cornwall, the experience of being recorded by the Public Catalogue Foundation has been especially useful.

"We specialise in Newlyn School and St Ives paintings from 1880-1930. It's very narrow," explains Penlee curator Alison Bevan. "We happened to be looking through the PCF catalogue for Southampton and came across a rare painting by Sydney Mortimer Lawrence, an American living in St Ives in the 1880s, called 'Setting Sun off the Cornish Coast'." The painting, a large landscape, was something that Penlee House had always hoped to obtain but it had been, effectively, considered missing for years. It had turned up in a dark corner of the storeroom at Southampton Art Gallery when the PCF came cataloguing. Now, thanks to its rediscovery, Penlee House is able to show this work in its summer exhibition Lyrical Light: St Ives 1889-1914... more>