Farmyard with Goats

Oil on board 12.5" x 15.75"

Frederick Hall was born in Yorkshire, where his father had a medical practice. Hall is best known for his landscape and rustic genre paintings. He first studied at the Lincoln School of Art, before moving with the artist Frank Bramley to Antwerp to study under Charles Verlat. On his return to England he was to become one of the most permanent and accomplished members of the Newlyn School in Cornwall. He worked there from 1883 until 1898 with artists such as Stanhope Forbes and Frank Bramley. Continental training had exposed these artists to the work of French naturalist painters such as Jules Bastien-Lepage, Edgar Degas and Edouard Manet.

His pictures show identification with the ideas of the Newlyn School about social realism and the use of local non-professional models and plein-air painting that depicted recognisable sites. However he also pandered to the popular taste for storytelling pictures in works such as "The result of High Living" which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1892. He developed quite a reputation as a caricaturist and his friend, the painter Norman Garstin praised his talents in this field in an article for the "Art Journal". In his landscape and pastoral paintings of the 1890's, Hall showed an understanding of Impressionism that revealed similarities to the work of George Clausen, in his use of warm, atmospheric colour and the relationship of figure to setting. During the 1890's he painted less in Newlyn and spent more time in Porlock on the coast of Somerset.