OPENED by St Ives MP Andrew George MP and curated by Katie Herbert and Alison Bevan, the current exhibition at Penlee House Gallery & Museum is unusual in that it is not touring to any other venue but can only be seen here.

A Cornish Childhood offers a rare chance to see, through the eyes of the late Victorian and early 20th century artists who came to this part of the world, the children who lived here then.

Curators admit the title has been borrowed "somewhat cheekily" from A L Rowse's classic autobiography but its content differs from that of the book in that it features only the pleasures and hardly touches, if at all, upon the pains of growing up in those days.

The young people who appear in these paintings, and it is astonishing how many of the artists of the period used them as subject matter, enjoyed a childhood in which there is no sadness or darkness, not even rain.

Aside from a few reminders of other issues of the day, works such as Stanhope Forbes' The Young Apprentice, Newlyn Copperworks which features JD MacKenzie, who set up the Newlyn Industrial Class as a means of providing alternative employment for youngsters when the fishing was poor, and Elizabeth Forbes' study of her son Alec Reading, who would later lose his life in the First World War, these are idealized impressions of the childhoods experienced by these children.

There is no place for the poverty, poor housing, poor health and infant mortality that then walked the streets of Newlyn and thereabouts.

Having said that, any exhibition which includes Stanhope Forbes' Chadding In Mount's Bay, Laura Knight's The Beach, HS Tuke's August Blue, Elizabeth Forbes' School Is Out, WHY Titcomb's The Church In Cornwall; A Rogation Day Procession, and Stanhope Forbes' Gala Day In Newlyn, has to be special.

An age of hob-nailed boots all round, light years away from child or teenage fashion, high-heels, suede shoes or sandals, despite the hard times, they show that life was not all doom and gloom, that the young in heart were able to forget their troubles and to make the most of what they had, as little and limited as it may have been.

With any number of other quite delightful, not to say enchanting and engrossing, period paintings of children at play, from Charles Simpson's The Sandpit - On Porthminster Beach and Harold Harvey's Sport On The Shore to Ernest Procter's All The Fun Of The Fair and WHY Titcomb's A Mariner's Sunday School, plus works by Frank Gascoigne Heath, Dorothea Sharp, Frank Wright Bourdillon, Jessie Ada Titcomb, Dod Procter, John Guttridge Sykes, Edwin Harris, Walter Langley, Leonard J Fuller, TC Gotch and Garnet Ruskin Wolseley, the exhibition adds up to "a sociological survey of the lives of children from the area's fishing and farming communities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries" which may be sun-filled and seen through rose-coloured spectacles but is still valuable for all that.

Immensely enjoyable to boot, A Cornish Childhood should not be missed.

It can be seen in Penlee House Gallery & Museum, 10am-5pm (last admission 4.30pm) Monday-Saturday, until September 4.