By the Duck Pond is a wonderfully atmospheric work by Stanhope Alexander Forbes, painted when the artist’s palette had become brighter and his brushwork, freer and more impressionistic. The spreading trees are silhouetted against a luminous sky in which soft pink, peach and blue tones suggest the gentle light of late afternoon, or early evening. The painting is undated by Forbes but the long pinafore dresses of the children and free, impressionistic brushwork place the work in the first decade of the 20^th century, close in time to Evening, Worker's Return (1904), which is in the Hartlepool Museum and is similar in the artist’s handling of paint, and the attire of his subjects. 

In By the Duck Pond, rather than describing every detail, Forbes builds the scene from broken, energetic strokes: the foliage is suggested with flickering touches of colour, the figures are economically observed, and the reflections of the trees and sky dissolve into a succession of horizontal brushstrokes across the water. The result is less a literal transcription of a particular place than an evocation of an increasingly nostalgic vision of village life.

The precise location of By the Duck Pond remains uncertain. The cottages, pond and village setting invite comparison with Forbes's later Village Rendezvous, Copperhouse Creek, near Hayle, painted 2 decades later in 1938 and now in the collection of The Box, Plymouth. The resemblance is intriguing enough to raise the possibility that both works may record the same Cornish locality.

The turn of the century, when the present work was painted, was a highly productive period for Forbes and in 1904, he completed one of his masterpieces, The Seine Boat; a highly celebrated depiction of local Cornish fishermen that sold at auction in 2000 for a record-breaking £1.2 million.

By the Duck Pond is an affectionate vision of the West Cornwall that Forbes knew so intimately, and an expression of fondness for a simpler, rural way of life that was already being rapidly displaced for most of Stanhope Forbes’ Edwardian audience by a more frenetic, industrialised pace.