Best in show: Falmouth Art Gallery

“Sophie Anderson, who was born in Paris and was the daughter of a French architect and an English mother, became a painter well-known for her rather sentimental portraits of women and children in rural settings and other subjects with strong botanical themes.

Her picture No Walk Today, depicting a young Victorian girl dressed up for a trip out but staring out at the rain, sold at Sotheby’s for more than £1m in 2008.

Anderson was a major figure in the artists’ colony at Capri, but she spent the latter years of her life in Falmouth. She is buried with her artist husband Walter in the town’s cemetery.

The couple had been good friends with Henry Scott Tuke and William Ayerst Ingram, the two founders of the first Falmouth Art Gallery, which opened in Grove Place in 1894. According to the local paper at the time, this painting was granted pride of place at the very first exhibition.

I have a strong affinity with this work because our late director Brian Stewart tried desperately to buy it at auction back in 2010 but he was ultimately unsuccessful.

Shortly after his sudden death, we were able to track it down, apply for money from the Art Fund and secure it to celebrate the contribution Brian had made to the town and the museum.

Alongside its connection to Brian and the original gallery, it’s an important work because there aren’t many studies of flowers by Anderson. I like the detail of the fabric and wood carving and the fact that the flowers are in various states of health.

It’s not really a ‘flowery’ painting of the kind that the original commercial gallery stocked because it thought they might appeal to female art buyers; it’s a study of life and death and has some very dark elements to it.

The exhibition focuses on the first 20 years of the gallery and also includes works by John Singer Sargent, Stanhope Forbes, Richard Harry Carter, Charles Napier Hemy and an etching by James McNeill Whistler.

Falmouth was a place where artists liked to congregate and work. The Newlyn and St Ives schools in Cornwall are well known and respected but what happened here is often omitted from the history books and I think that’s a shame.”

Natalie Rigby is the collections manager at Falmouth Art Gallery

Artists of the First Falmouth Art Gallery runs until 19 April