At Work and at Play 45
to be concentrated within such a small place and their paintings were primar-
ily responsible for the version of this place received by the affl uent Londoners.
Deacon argues that while the school professed to be engaged in painting with
‘unfl inching realism’ their realist project ‘had clear limits’ and could not resist
elements of sentiment and pathos. He identifi es such paintings as Walter Lang-
ley’s Among the Missing – Scene in a Cornish Fishing Village (1884) in which a
woman weeps at the harbour-side for her missing husband, as being imbued with
sentiment and overlaid with its own narrative.^20 In the limitations of the artists’
quest for realism is revealed a need or desire to see Newlyn as a pocket of timeless-
ness protected from encroaching modernity.^21 Th e way in which the artists relate
to Newlyn typifi es the creation of rural locales from an urban-centred perspec-
tive as a place anchored in tradition and old-fashioned ways, a place of charm
and simplicity which was in some way immune from the wider world which the
artists shut out of their paintings as they looked in on the fi shing community
with nostalgic yearning. Th is was in the face of actual change within the fi shing
communities, the gradual decline of the industry but also material changes to the
houses and harbours and the type of fi shing undertaken. Yet this reality was not
of interest to the artists whose imposed representations were becoming impor-
tant to an emerging construction of Englishness. As Deacon argues, ‘while fi shing
communities were constructed as a primitive, conservative and timeless “other”
they were also being recuperated as part of a reconstructed English “nation”, one
that included the domestic, the rural and the provincial’. Cornwall’s hybridity as
simultaneously English and not-English made its incorporation into such a narra-
tive possible, but it also made possible what followed. Deacon asserts that
the artists’ incorporation of Newlyn into an English nationhood soon clashed with
another interpretation of this ‘remote other’, as a Celtic periphery. In the Edwardian
period and later in the twentieth century it was to be the ‘Celtic’ representation that
became fi xed in Cornwall rather than the representation of ‘rural England’.^22Cornwall’s diff erence ultimately prevented its incorporation into an English nar-
rative while suggesting other possibilities beyond the boundaries that an English
identity imposed.
Coastal Boundaries
In her forthcoming article on women and the Cornish coast in fi lm and tel-
evision, Moseley suggests that because ‘Cornwall’s own identity ... is uncertain,
anxious, perpetually in process; for Cornish cultural practitioners, it might be
described as a representationally “liminal” or “Th ird Space” of enunciation, a
landscape of both indeterminacy and possibility’. While arguing that this is rel-
evant to the place-image of Cornwall as a whole, Moseley demonstrates that it
has particular signifi cance for the coastal borderland of the beach and the sea: