PENLEE House Gallery and Museum in Penzance is staging two exhibitions this spring.

The first, ‘Harry Penhaul: Life Through a Lens’, is a one-room show featuring around 30 informal portrait photographs of the local community in the 1950s by this well-known local photographer.

Since acquiring Penhaul’s archive back in 2001, the museum has been busy digitising the vast collection of over 6,000 prints and glass plate slides, staging exhibitions of his work every few years.

This latest one-room show will feature some previously unseen images of life in and around West Cornwall in the 1950s, alongside some of his most well-loved images.

Recently appointed collections officer, Tamsin Chaffin, said, “It has been fascinating researching the collection, and we are hoping that our visitors may even recognise some of the people in the photographs and help us to put names to faces.”

The second exhibition, ‘Face to Face: Portraits from Penlee’s Collections’, is an intriguing assortment of portraits of people associated with Cornwall.

The county has been blessed in playing host to a rich vain of visiting and resident artists, so its inhabitants have been portrayed by some of the greatest painters of all time.

One such is the county’s first famous painter, ‘the Cornish Wonder’, John Opie (1761 to 1807). The exhibition includes his acclaimed portrait of ‘The Old Jew of Penzance’.

Not least amongst the artists associated with Cornwall are the Newlyn School painters, and the exhibition includes portraits by Stanhope Forbes, Elizabeth Forbes, Harold Harvey and Dod Procter.

Some of the most enchanting paintings are the delightful, unnamed depictions of fishermen and their wives and families by artists such as Edwin Harris and Walter Langley.

The show will also include newly acquired works by Leonard Fuller, as well as self-portraits by Midge Bruford and Pat Algar, and busts by sculptor Barbara Tribe.

The exhibitions runs from January 21 to April 18.