A Glimpse Inside St Ives School of Painting in 1948

Another World, a short film preserved by the BFI National Archive, takes viewers through the streets, harbour and artistic community of post-war St Ives. Filmed in 1948, it captures the town at a moment in its history, as its longstanding tradition of landscape and marine painting met the ideas that would soon make St Ives an internationally important centre for modern art.

For us, one sequence is particularly special.

The film shows Leonard Fuller teaching a class inside the Porthmeor Studios and setting out through St Ives with a group of students. More than 75 years later, the sight feels familiar: a tutor surrounded by easels and attentive students, followed by a group walking together through the town, looking closely at the landscape around them.

The footage provides a rare moving record of the School during its first decade.

St Ives School of Painting had opened in the Porthmeor Studios ten years earlier, in 1938, founded by Leonard Fuller and Borlase Smart. The studios were already part of a much longer artistic story. Since the late nineteenth century, artists had travelled to St Ives to paint its harbour, fishing community, rugged coastline and distinctive coastal light. The arrival of the railway in 1877 made the town more accessible, helping it develop into a thriving international artists’ colony.

In the film, that relationship between place and practice is visible everywhere. Fuller’s students are not separated from the town around them. They move through its streets, observe its buildings and harbour, and encounter St Ives as a living subject.

It is a way of learning that continues here today. Students still gather in the same historic studios before heading outside with sketchbooks and materials. The streets, beaches, harbour and coastline continue to provide both subject matter and a starting point for experimentation.