WITH due respect to a town which has loyally served the nation for hundreds of years, Gosport is not the place you might not choose to be born if you had an ambition to follow a career in fine art.

And if you had been born there in the 1850s you might at the appropriate time decide to move to other places where artists and their agents gathered in droves – perhaps Paris, London, or Pont-Aven in Brittany.

But Martin Snape, who was born in Gosport and educated there, spent his life painting hundreds of local scenes. As it happens, in a town that thrived on messy boatyards, chaotic quays and all the paraphernalia of the sea, late Victorian Gosport was an ideal place for an artist with a good eye.

He came from a family that lived and breathed art! His father Alfred was himself an artist, as well as a drawing master at Burney’s Naval Academy in Clarence Square, near Spring Garden Cottage, where the family lived. Also, his mother is listed in the 1861 census as ‘painter and teacher of drawing’.

When Queen Victoria’s son, Prince Albert, Duke of Edinburgh, was staying at Alverbank on Stokes Bay in the 1850s, it was Alfred who taught him drawing. Like most pupils at Burney’s, the young prince was cramming home the knowledge necessary to pass entry examinations for the Royal Navy.

Alfred Snape, who was relatively well off and the son of a Royal Marine, decided to send all his sons to the Burney’s Naval Academy, at the cost of 52 guineas a year each, though he later regarded it as a waste of money. Perhaps it was ‘longstop’ in case a naval career did in fact appeal: after all, in Gosport, becoming a naval officer was the aspiration of many young men.

As it happened, all his children drew and painted with great skill, often not signing their works, but the most successful were Martin, born in 1852, and his younger brother, William Hamilton Snape, who was ten years his junior. Unlike his brother, William left Gosport for a short period, to work as an illustrator on Girl’s Own Paper and other periodicals. However, ill health forced an early return to his home town, according to gallery owner Richard Martin, who has sold many of their pictures over the past 40 years.

He said: ‘William was a very talented painter of landscapes, portraits and some really wonderful cottage interiors, but his life was tragically cut short at the age of 42 due to a Chlorodyne overdose, probably accidental but all too common in those days.’

Many of Martin’s works are now in the collections of the Hampshire Cultural Trust and the Gosport Gallery at the Gosport Discovery Centre, or in private hands. His earliest works are watercolours, but later he worked in oils and other media. Between 1874 and 1901 his pictures were occasionally on show in exhibitions at the Royal Academy.

Twenty-two pictures by the Snape brothers are currently on sale in Gosport, including seven watercolours of Portsmouth Harbour by Martin, seven other local views, including three atmospheric rural scenes near Browndown by William, plus views of the Hampshire countryside (www.richardmartingallery.co.uk).

The Snape family are remembered as ‘real Gosport people’, devoted to a corner of Hampshire that has been a vital part of wartime Britain in any period, and was certainly never dull.

This is perhaps why Martin, unlike his brother, never sought the glittering prizes won by other artists of his time – like Augustus John from Fordingbridge, or even John Singer Jones and Edward Burne-Jones. He was not breaking new ground, but following the style of a previous generation, that of Constable and Turner.

Living near the rail station in Gosport, Martin in his early years often explored new vistas, especially the Meon valley, but also further afield in the West Country and the Highlands of Scotland. The effect of changing conditions of light on the landscape was his forte, and he often painted the same scene repeatedly at different times of day, or as the weather changed.

A friend of his, Frederick Davison, recalled that his ‘recording of the ever-changing scene in and around Portsmouth Harbour from sunrise to sunset, at low water and high water, the stench of the mud and vibrating greens, those rusty hulks against a background of yachts and the might of the navy, has never been so vividly portrayed by any other artist of the time’.

In a critical review, Tara McKinney Marinus, former Visual Arts Exhibitions Manager of the Hampshire Cultural Trust, writes: ‘He can … be considered a fine regional landscape painter in his own right, creating art that showed a deep and abiding love of the area in which he lived and worked.

‘His immersion in nature painting outdoors was a moral activity … just as it had been for his great artistic predecessor John Constable. The resulting works display a sincere intimacy, atmosphere and locality.’

Although a modest and unassuming man, anyone who met him might realise that he was definitely ‘out of the ordinary’. One of his students remembered him as ‘a quiet, kind, inward-thinking man who dressed badly and needed a shave [at] most times’.

He had enormous powers of observation and therefore his paintings are both works of art and historical records. They are alive with all the clutter of the shore – dinghies and masted vessels, steamboats, abandoned hulks, groynes, mooring piles, boathouses and repair sheds, rippling water lapping on the shore and – one of his favourite touches – gently rising smoke.

They cover a huge range of locations in Gosport and around Portsmouth Harbour – Elson Creek, Rat Island, Hardway, Coldharbour (in the vicinity of Clarence Square), the Camber Old Portsmouth, the Gosport waterfront and ‘Fraser and White’s coal-yard’.

Further afield, he painted the Royal [Naval] Academy Portsmouth, the Hamble river from Warsash, the view from Titchfield Haven along to Hill Head, Lee-on-the-Solent and Stokes Bay, and many many more places.

As well as being an extremely accomplished artist he was also a talented amateur botanist. In a paper he published in the Proceedings of the Hampshire Field Club in 1915 he demonstrated his profound interest in local flora. It is a scientifically useful snapshot from more than 100 years ago, yet is expressed with humanity and touches of poetry.

Amongst the many plants he recorded was the Nottingham Catchfly, which was ‘abundant on Browndown near Stokes Bay’: modern records from the Hampshire & IOW Wildlife Trust’s The Flora of Hampshire show that it is still there. A species of Samphire grew in ‘the joints of the masonry of the sea-wall at Fort Blockhouse’ but had declined as ‘most of it was picked by a friend to whom it was shown in an unguarded moment’. However, it must have survived, as it is now ‘locally abundant’.

 In 1930, after a full life producing hundreds of sketches and paintings, in watercolour and oils, Martin died and was buried in the ancient graveyard of St Mary the Virgin, Rowner. It was where he had often sought the friendship of the rector Rev. Edward Prideaux-Brune. 

He was a fellow spirit in a corner of the county not noted for its culture, for the Brunes had been the most important family in the area since the 13th century. Seated at Grange Farm, Rowner, they had clung on to their estate by intermarrying with the Prideaux family from the West County.

Edward Prideaux-Brune, whose diaries are in the National Archives, and served as Vice-President of the Hampshire Field Club, was the nearest to a patron that Martin Snape ever had.

barryshurlock@gmail.com