John Leighton
100 M ASTERPIECES National Galleries of Scotland
Edinburgh · 2015
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The National Galleries of Scotland: A Brief History The Origins of the Collection
Fig.3 | View of the Scottish National Gallery and Royal Scottish Academy Building, with Edinburgh Castle and Princes Street in the background
Unlike many other great European art galleries, Scotland’s art collection was not formed by the nationalisation of a former royal or princely collection, nor was there a major founding gift to c reate its nucleus. The first permanent displays of art in Edinburgh were the result of various efforts to establish a national collection and they reflected a complex mix of artistic, social and economic motives stretching back to the early e ighteenth century. The main impetus behind moves to establish a national collection in Scotland came from the needs of artists, both as students and as professionals. In the aftermath of the Act of Union between Scotland and England of 1707, Government efforts to improve the standard of industrial design in Scotland had led in 1760 to the formation of an art school called the Trustees Academy, the predecessor of Edinburgh’s present College of Art. There was early recognition of the need for students and artists to have direct access to works of art by the great masters of the past as exemplars for instruction and inspiration. However, unless they could travel abroad or had access to private collections, there were few old master paintings available for artists in Scotland to study. The needs of design and manufacture were gradually overtaken by an interest in nurturing the fine arts in Scotland. There was a desire to improve artistic standards and also to encourage a wider public appreciation of art, thereby stimulating patronage of modern Scottish artists. These motives eventually inspired the founding of the Institution for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts in Scotland in 1819. Created mainly by aristocrats and wealthy collectors, the Institution (which received its Royal Charter in 1827) mounted loan exhibitions of old masters usually selected from the private collections of its own members as well as some exhibitions of works by living artists. By the early 1820s it was decided that these shows required purpose-built premises which could also accommodate the growing needs of the Trustees Academy. A new building was created on The Mound in Edinburgh, designed by a leading architect, William Henry Playfair and opened in 1826 (fig.4). The original, rather austere structure was later enlarged and refined by the same architect to create the elegant building which we know today with its prominent façade on Edinburgh’s Princes Street. As well as promoting the fine arts through exhibitions, the Institution also started to buy paintings as the basis of a national collection. Initially these were purchases of work by living artists but in 1830–1 they bought 100 masterpieces | 11
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Fig.4 | Alexander Nasmyth, Princes Street with the Commencement of the Building of the Royal Institution, 1825 Oil on canvas, 122.5 x 165.5 cm Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh [NG 2542]
Fig.5 | Jacopo Bassano, The Adoration of the Kings, 1542 Oil on canvas, 183 x 235 cm Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh [NG 100] Fig.6 | Unknown artist (Scottish school), The Interior of the National Gallery of Scotland, c.1867–77. Oil on canvas, 50.5 x 61 cm Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh [NG 2299]
Early Years
thirty-eight ‘ancient pictures’ in Italy, including two important works by Anthony van Dyck, The Lomellini Family, about 1626–7 and Saint Sebastian Bound for Martyrdom, about 1620–1. These efforts by men of influence provided important momentum for the founding of a National Gallery in Scotland. The opening in 1824 of the National Gallery in London provided further encouragement to create a similar institution north of the border. Ultimately, however, it was Scotland’s artists who played the key role in our early history. In 1826 the Scottish Academy was formed by a group of artists who felt alienated by the elitism of the Institution. They were frustrated with this body’s half-hearted promotion of contemporary art and also by the lack of progress in creating a permanent art collection. The new Academy staged its own exhibitions and also began to collect paintings. These were mainly by living British artists and a few old masters which included one outstanding work, Jacopo Bassano’s wonderfully exuberant The Adoration of the Kings which was then thought to be a work by Titian (fig.5). 12 | A Brief History
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From 1835, the Academy leased space in the Royal Institution building. However, the tensions and rivalry between the Academy and the Institution were aggravated further by this arrangement and it became clear that a new building would be required to accommodate the various competing demands for space. A second building was designed, again by Playfair, to be situated just behind the original Royal Institution on The Mound. The foundation stone of what was to become Scotland’s National Gallery was laid in 1850 by Prince Albert. When the new Gallery opened nine years later, the artists’ long-held desire for access to a permanent collection of significant works of art was finally realised. The new Gallery included old masters transferred from the Institution and from the Academy as well as some gifts, bequests and loans. The National Gallery collection was shown in the western half of the building and the Academy occupied the eastern half, establishing from the outset a dialogue between past and present art that still remains an important part of the character of Scotland’s National Galleries today.
In 1859, visitors to the newly opened National Gallery of Scotland would have encountered a somewhat eclectic mix of old master paintings, portraits and more recent works. Initially, there were some 300 pieces on display with a preponderance of relatively recent pictures from the Academy. Rather than conveying any sense of chronology or art-historical development, the arrangement was essentially decorative with large and small pieces all crammed together like a giant jigsaw puzzle over the entire height of the walls (fig.6). Every piece was carefully labelled, and a descriptive catalogue was also available. However, the sundry nature of the early collection would have made it difficult to draw any meaningful distinctions; works were loosely categorised as being by either ‘Ancient Masters’ or ‘British Artists’ which in effect meant either ‘old’ or ‘modern’. The new permanent displays were generally welcomed by commentators although some were quick to point out the limitations of the collection. On 19 March 1859 a critic for The Daily Scotsman conceded that the presentation was ‘interesting and striking’ but described the collection as a ‘mere assemblage’ which was ‘lamentably deficient’ in allowing comparisons between artists and their national schools. The collection was indeed modest at first, with just a handful of what we would now recognise as masterpieces interspersed with assorted pictures of varying quality. However, the public came in large numbers to view their new National Gallery. From the outset, an effort was made to open the Gallery to a wide audience, or as one commentator put it, to ‘classes of the community who have hitherto enjoyed too few opportunities
of culture’. Admission was free on three days a week and the Gallery was also opened by gaslight on Saturday evenings ‘for the benefit of the working classes’, a popular move which attracted large crowds. In the first seven months of its opening, just short of 80,000 visitors came to enjoy the new displays, apparently exceeding all expectations. Scotland’s new National Gallery was already a success with its public. In its early years the National Gallery had no funds for buying art and was entirely dependent on the generosity of benefactors to add to the collection. Fortunately, the new Gallery attracted some major gifts and loans. These included the bequest of one of Gainsborough’s finest works, the hauntingly b eautiful portrait of The Honourable Mrs Graham (no.22) which was bequeathed in the year of the Gallery’s opening with the stringent condition that the painting should never leave Edinburgh; it has remained on the walls ever since as one of the familiar icons of the collection. Another early bequest associated with the opening came from Lady Murray of Henderland. Her husband, Lord Murray, had inherited an outstanding group of drawings by the Scottish artist Allan Ramsay as well as several important British and French paintings, probably collected by Ramsay’s son, General John Ramsay. The Lord Advocate of Scotland, Lord Murray died in March 1859, a fortnight before the opening of the National Gallery. His widow’s memorial gift of drawings (mainly by Ramsay with some Italian old master drawings) effectively established the national holding of works on paper, laying the foundations for what is now a world-class collection of graphic art. A subsequent
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1 Bernardo Daddi (about 1300–1348) Triptych, 1338
Tempera, silver (tarnished) and gold on panel; wings 58 x 15.5 cm (left); 57.7 x 15.2 cm (right); centre 53.5 x 28 cm (inside mouldings) Purchased 1938 [NG 1904] The first painting in this selection entered the collection of the Scottish National Gallery in 1938, precisely 600 years after it was made. It has survived through more than six centuries to remain in remarkably good condition and, with its exquisite craftsmanship and direct rendering of emotion, this Triptych is among the most compelling early Italian pictures in the collection. An inscription on the base gives us its exact date of 1338 and experts agree that the artist was Bernardo Daddi who ran a large and successful workshop in Florence, specialising in this kind of portable altarpiece as well as larger-scale works. With its wings closed, it could be moved easily; with the wings open, the triptych could be used for private devotion or set up in a small chapel, perhaps in a monastery or convent. Daddi is thought to have trained with Giotto, the leading artist in Florence in the early fourteenth century. Giotto introduced a more naturalistic approach to his subjects with solid figures, modelled in real light, who appear to exist in a convincing space. Daddi’s style combined elements of Giotto’s innovative approach with a more traditional emphasis on flat pattern and decoration. The artist delighted in finely wrought detail and in exquisite ornament, incorporating precious metals and expensive pigments into his work. Like Giotto, however, he was concerned to introduce a variety of gesture and real emotion into his work; in the central scene of the Triptych, it is
hard not to be moved by the swooning Madonna, the passionate grief of the red-cloaked Mary Magdalene or details such as the rivulets of blood that run down the length of the cross to gather in a pool at its base. In Florentine art of this period it is rare to have the Crucifixion as the centrepiece with the Madonna and Child displaced to the wings. Here, a Nativity occupies the larger part of the left-hand shutter and the Madonna enthroned and surrounded by saints is shown on the opposite wing. The choice of subject matter probably reflects the concerns of a private patron rather than the whims of the artist. As our eyes move across the surface, we are drawn
to the tiny scene in the upper left shutter depicting the Martyrdom of Saint Peter (who was crucified upside down). Again we see Daddi’s ability to convey narrative with expressive details such as the figure using his foot to pin down the saint’s arm while he nails him to the upturned cross. On the opposite shutter, there is an unusual rendering of Saint Nicholas, the prototype for the modern Santa Claus. According to legend, the saint saved the daughters of an impoverished nobleman from prostitution by donating money for their dowries. Saint Nicholas passes a ball of gold through the window of a room where the three daughters lie sleeping near their distressed father.
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12 Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) An Old Woman Cooking Eggs, 1618
Oil on canvas, 100.5 x 119.5 cm Purchased with the aid of the Art Fund and a special Treasury Grant, 1955 [NG 2180] Velázquez was still a teenager when he painted this captivating work. It is dated 1618 which means that it was made shortly after he had completed his apprenticeship in his native Seville. The astonishing and utterly convincing realism is nothing like the dry and unimaginative painting of his teacher, Francisco Pacheco, and there seems little doubt that this picture was a very deliberate showpiece for the young artist, a public demonstration of his skill and a declaration of his artistic emancipation. An Old Woman Cooking Eggs is one of a small group of paintings known as bodegones (from the Spanish bodega for a cellar or inn) which were naturalistic kitchen or tavern scenes with prominent still lifes. There were artistic precedents for such humble, low-life subjects in northern European art which Velázquez could have known through engravings. There is also a parallel in contemporary Spanish novels which frequently depicted roguish heroes in everyday settings. One of the most popular of these, Mateo Alemán’s picaresque novel Guzmán de Alfarache, recounts the adventures of a young street urchin and includes a passage describing an old woman cooking eggs. But whichever artistic or literary sources form the context for this work, it is the sheer dazzling skill of the young painter that seems to be the real subject. The composition thrusts the objects forward out of the shadow, each one demanding our attention in turn; rough and smooth, warm and cold, hard and soft, metal and earthenware, the picture is a catalogue of contrasting
textures and materials, running across the full range of our sense of touch. Velázquez would soon move permanently to Madrid as court painter to the young King Philip IV of Spain. His portraits of the royal family and other members of the Spanish court and aristocracy are renowned for their humanity and psychological insight. In this painting, the old woman and the young boy were certainly painted from life but they do not interact and are devoid of expression or emotion. The human presence here is entirely upstaged by the tour de force at the centre of the composition which is the rendering of the eggs frying in a
terracotta pot. Velázquez is said to have declared that he would rather be the first painter of common objects than the second in higher things. Illustrating his point, it could be argued that this pair of humble egg yolks, surrounded by thickening whites just starting to cook, is one of the most arresting pieces of painting in the entire collection of the Scottish National Gallery.
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23 Sir Henry Raeburn (1756–1823) Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch, about 1795
Oil on canvas, 76.2 x 63.5 cm Purchased 1949 [NG 2112] Raeburn’s striking portrait of the Reverend Robert Walker, known by its popular title of The Skating Minister, is one of the most recognisable images in the Scottish National Gallery. It is not easy to define precisely where the enduring appeal of this picture lies. There is something faintly amusing in the elegant pose of the minister as he glides forwards on the ice, seemingly lost in thought. With his calm and intelligent expression betraying just the beginnings of a smile, the subject retains the dignity of his calling albeit in an unexpected setting. But perhaps it is the simplicity of the composition, with the dark silhouette of the skater set against the frozen lake and the leaden sky, that makes for such a memorable painting. In his combination of a sporting picture with a portrait, Raeburn has managed to create an image which is both dynamic and wonderfully serene. The subject, Robert Walker, was the minister at the Canongate Kirk, a prominent Presbyterian parish church at the lower end of Edinburgh’s High Street. He was raised in Holland (where he might have first learned to skate) and he is shown wearing Dutch-style skates. Far from being an austere and remote man of the cloth, Robert Walker was an active participant in society with a lively mind and a certain sense of humour. We know that he was a member of the Edinburgh Skating Society which practised on nearby Duddingston Loch and this is the source for the traditional identification of the landscape setting which the artist evokes in a subtle range of greys and pinks. Before it became such a public and
popular image, this painting had a lengthy private life. It remained in the possession of the subject’s family well into the twentieth century and it is remarkable that the picture was virtually unknown and never reproduced until it came up for auction in 1949. Raeburn would probably be surprised at the subsequent fame and reputation of what was, for him, an atypical and informal work. The lack of any documentation about its creation, together with the fact that the format is very unusual in Raeburn’s work, has prompted some scholars to question the Scottish painter’s authorship, and it has been linked instead with a French painter, Henri-Pierre Danloux. However, the tradition in Robert Walker’s family was quite clear that the painting was by Raeburn. When Walker
died in 1808, Raeburn was named as one of the trustees of his estate so it seems likely that the artist and the minister were good friends. There is no evidence that they had skated together but the painting certainly has an intimate and affectionate quality and may well be a memento of their close acquaintance. There are plenty of indications of Raeburn’s fluid and spontaneous touch in the picture as well as some very seductive details such as the scoring left by the skates on the ice or the wonderfully assured handling of paint in Robert Walker’s features. It is a remarkable painting and, unless some as yet undiscovered document or evidence comes to light to prove otherwise, the skating minister’s position as an icon of Scottish art seems secure.
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25 Antonio Canova (1757–1822) The Three Graces, 1815–17
Marble, maximum dimensions (including base) 173 x 97.2 x 75 cm Purchased jointly with the Victoria & Albert Museum with the aid of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Art Fund, John Paul Getty II, Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza and public donations, 1994 [NG 2626]
The joint acquisition of The Three Graces by the National Galleries of Scotland and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London was a dramatic episode in our history. The sculpture was originally commissioned by John Russell, 6th Duke of Bedford and installed in a specially designed Temple adjoining the Sculpture Gallery at Woburn Abbey. When the work first came on to the market in the mid-1980s, unsuccessful efforts were made to purchase it for the nation and keep it in situ at Woburn. Later the sale of the work was agreed to the J. Paul Getty Museum in California, and it was only after a series of export bans, legal wrangles and last-minute interventions from generous donors that the necessary funds were raised to keep this great work in Britain. It is now shown in Edinburgh and London for seven years at a time. The son of a stone-cutter from Possagno, a small town in the foothills of the Dolomites, Canova went on to become the most celebrated sculptor of his age. After settling in Rome at the age of twenty-three, he developed a restrained yet vigorous neoclassical style, based on antique and Renaissance prototypes and influenced by contemporary painters, including the Scot, Gavin Hamilton. This famous sculpture of The Three Graces is widely considered to be his masterpiece. In Greek mythology, the three graces were the daughters of Zeus: Aglaia (splendour), Euphrosyne (mirth) and Thalia (youth and beauty). However, over the centuries, the group became associated with various allegorical meanings, including generosity and friendship or personifications of chastity, beauty and love. It seems likely that Canova was more interested in conveying a generalised idea of grace and elegance than in rendering any specific mythological associations.
In 1812, Canova was commissioned to produce a full-size marble group of The Three Graces by the French Empress Josephine who suggested that the subject would allow the sculptor to embody ‘three different expressions’. The Empress died before she could take delivery of her sculpture, and when the Duke of Bedford saw the work in Canova’s studio in 1814, he tried unsuccessfully to purloin the commission. The first version was claimed by Josephine’s son Eugène and is now in the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. The Duke commissioned this second version which was installed under Canova’s supervision in 1819. There is some evidence that the sculptor came to regard this group as an improvement on the earlier version. Canova was always admired for his breathtaking technical skill and for his uncanny ability to transform cold marble into the illusion of palpable, living flesh. Here, the close-knit group is a wonderfully intricate interlacing of limbs, poses and expressions in which a refined, abstract ideal is conveyed in a very sensuous, tactile form. A catalogue of the sculpture at Woburn written in 1822 describes, ‘that look of living softness … which looks as if it would yield to the touch … this great sculptor has shown the utmost delicacy and judgement’.
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30 Georges Seurat (1859–1891) Seated Nude: Study for ‘Bathers at Asnières’, 1883–4
Conté crayon on paper, 31.7 x 24.7 cm Purchased by private treaty, 1982 [D 5110] This drawing is a study for the masterpiece of Seurat’s early years, the monumental figure painting entitled Bathers at Asnières. Completed in 1884, this magisterial picture now dominates the displays of nineteenth-century art at the National Gallery in London. Seurat made a whole sequence of studies for his Bathers which depicts men relaxing on the banks of the river Seine at the Parisian suburb of Asnières. The setting and the effects of sunshine on a hazy summer’s day were developed in small oil studies which were painted in the open air at Asnières. Our drawing is one of several studies that he made for all of the main figures in the composition using models posed in his studio. Seurat is generally associated with a highly methodical approach to art, especially with regard to the rigorous ‘Pointillist’ style of painting using small dots of colours that he developed later in his career. In the Bathers, however, his
approach was more intuitive. Technical examination of the finished painting at the National Gallery in London has shown that Seurat continued to modify his ideas as the picture evolved. Our drawing seems to have been made when the work was already well under way, allowing the artist to introduce some refinements to the seated figure at the heart of his composition. In our drawing, for example, he depicts the unruly wisp of hair at the boy’s nape as well as his aquiline profile which were then added into the corresponding figure in the painting. Although this sheet is inextricably linked to the making of a painting that is now world-famous, like many of Seurat’s studies it can stand as a highly accomplished work of art in its own right. One of his contemporaries described Seurat as ‘a young man crazy about drawing’, and his highly distinctive tonal drawings have always been viewed as a major part of his achievement. Most of them date from the early 1880s when, after a brief period of study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris,
Seurat began to follow his own direction. He gradually refined his drawing technique, not only in figure studies like this one but also in tenebrous cityscapes and suburban landscapes. Typically, our study is in Conté crayon, a dark, slightly waxy crayon which is drawn on a paper with a prominent ridged texture. These materials allowed Seurat to develop very subtle but extraordinarily rich effects of tone. As with most of his drawings, the relationships of light and dark are carefully plotted so that the dark outline of the boy’s back is set against a lighter area of the background while the light on his arm is edged with a correspondingly darker tone. These shifts of tone and the lustrous, grainy effect of the crayon on textured paper lend the drawing a sense of sculptural solidity while still maintaining a soft, luminous quality. The boredom of posing as a model, evident here in the slightly slumped and languid pose, is translated by Seurat into a mood of quiet introspection and gentle melancholy.
Fig.23 | (left) Georges Seurat, Bathers at Asnières, 1884 Oil on canvas, 201 x 300 cm The National Gallery, London
Fig.24 | Georges Seurat, A Study for ‘Bathers at Asnières’, 1883–4 Oil on panel, 15.9 x 25 cm Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh [NG 2222]
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33 Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) Olive Trees, 1889
Oil on canvas, 51 x 65.2 cm Purchased 1934 [NG 1803] Vincent van Gogh’s rapid development as an artist is one of the great stories of Western European art. His career as a painter lasted a mere ten years but in that short time he evolved from an inept amateur into a truly original master. It is a story with moments of high drama, including his struggle with mental illness ending in his tragic suicide. However, Van Gogh’s paintings are neither illustrations of his turbulent life nor the results of a tortured mind. As a painter he had a very clear notion of his artistic mission; he had deeply felt views about nature and mankind and he worked with great persistence to develop approaches to drawing, colour and composition that could express what he called ‘a sincere human feeling’.
Olive Trees was painted in 1889 when Van Gogh was staying at the Asylum of SaintPaul-de-Mausole at Saint-Rémy in Provence in the south of France. The artist had been admitted to this asylum on a voluntary basis after the breakdown that he suffered in nearby Arles at the end of 1888. This was a difficult time for Van Gogh, marked by periods of lucidity and confidence which were interspersed with breakdowns and prolonged bouts of depression. When he felt able, he painted in the gardens of the asylum or in the surrounding countryside where he focused on landscapes with cypress trees, views of mountains and especially the abundant olive groves. Our painting was probably one of the earliest among a group of paintings of olive trees that he made during the summer of 1889. There is an energetic drawing made with brush and ink that depicts almost
exactly the same view, and the lively, spontaneous style of both of these works suggests that they were studies made directly in front of the motif. The simple composition is dominated by the contrast between the regular, hatched dabs of paint that animate the sloping foreground and the longer, curling brushstrokes that depict the twisted trunks of the olive trees or the swirling rhythms in the foliage. However, it is the variegated colour in this study which is most remarkable. Van Gogh skilfully captures the effect of strong light filtering through the trees and the pools of cool shadows on the earth below. He was utterly captivated by the changing colours of the olive groves. A few months earlier, on 28 April, he had written to his brother Theo: ‘if you could see the olive trees at this time of year … The old-silver and silver foliage greening up against the blue. And the orangeish ploughed soil. […] – it’s a thing of such delicacy – so refined.’ The olive groves became one of Van Gogh’s favourite subjects during his time at Saint-Rémy and he came to see the tree as being characteristic of Provence. But it was also a subject which held deeper significance for Van Gogh. The previous summer he had abandoned an attempt to paint a religious subject showing Christ on the Mount of Olives. He found it difficult to work from his imagination and he now felt that it was important to use nature as a starting point. In his paintings of olive groves he found a subject that could carry religious associations in a way that was natural and unforced. In the exaggerated brushwork and vivid colour of paintings like the Olive Trees he was able to express the underlying forces of nature that for him conveyed something passionate, super natural and eternal.
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Scottish National Portrait Gallery Face to face with Scotland, past and present
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42 Sir Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641) Princess Elizabeth and Princess Anne, Daughters of Charles I, 1637
Oil on canvas, 29.8 x 41.8 cm Purchased with the aid of the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Scottish Office and the Art Fund, 1996 [PG 3010]
The Portrait Gallery collection includes several works that illustrate the turbulent period of revolution and civil war in seventeenth-century Britain. These range from a large canvas documenting the trial and execution of King Charles I to an outstanding portrait by William Dobson of the young Prince of Wales, the future Charles II. However, this intimate study of two of the daughters of Charles I is arguably the most moving of all the Gallery’s portraits of the royal house of Stuart. As an image of childhood innocence, captured in a rapid sketch from life, it is very different from the grand, imposing royal portraits that established Van Dyck’s reputation in England and it contrasts sharply with the violence and conflict that would soon engulf this family. Van Dyck was born in Antwerp and trained in the studio of Rubens where he came to be known as his ‘best assistant’. In 1621 he was briefly in the service of James I in England but left for Italy to improve his art. He travelled widely but used Genoa as his base, and his superb painting of the Lomellini family in the Scottish National Gallery is among the most celebrated and ambitious of his portraits of wealthy patrons in that city. In 1632 he was drawn back to London by Charles I, knighted and appointed ‘Principal Painter in Ordinary to their Majesties’. In a series of vast canvases for the various royal residences he applied his brilliant command of technique to creating images of royal power, splendour and authority. Our study of the two princesses relates to a large painting of the five eldest children of Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria in the Royal Collection. With just a few masterful strokes of his brush, Van Dyck captures the soft features and
unfocused gaze of the infant Princess Anne and the caring but equally vulnerable face of her older sister Princess Elizabeth. Van Dyck often made drawings for his larger canvases, but this is the only oil study of its kind that is known from his period in England. It is possible, therefore, that it was not, as we might assume, a study to help him compose the large group portrait but a separate work, a charming souvenir that was perhaps even intended as a gift for the queen or a member of court. The later inscriptions on the study correctly identify the older girl as Princess Elizabeth but confuse Princess Anne with her brother, Henry, Duke of Gloucester. In 1637, when this sketch was made, Anne was just a few months old, and she survived a mere three years before she died of tuberculosis, so it is possible that her appearance in the picture was simply forgotten. The life of her older sister Elizabeth was also cut short. After the outbreak of the Civil War she was held captive by the Roundheads and died in 1650 aged just fifteen. Like her sister, she also suffered from tuberculosis, but tradition has it that this gentle and sensitive child never fully recovered from the news of her father’s execution.
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53 Richard Dadd (1817–1886) Sir Alexander Morison, 1852
Oil on canvas, 51.1 x 61.3 cm Purchased with the aid of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, 1984 [PG 2623]
The tragic story of the artist Richard Dadd lies behind this striking and unusual portrait. As a young man, Dadd was regarded as one of the most talented artists of his generation. After training at the Royal Academy schools, he had begun to attract attention for his imaginative pictures of historical and literary subjects, rendered in a meticulous and luminous style. But on an extended trip across Europe and the Middle East in 1842–3 he began to exhibit signs of insanity and delusional behaviour. Back in England, he murdered his father in a planned and vicious assault. He was declared insane and committed to mental institutions for the rest of his life. During almost forty-two years of confinement, Dadd continued to create art, producing a remarkable body of work which includes landscapes, shipping scenes and the fairy paintings for which he is now best known; his masterpiece, The Fairy Feller’s MasterStroke, 1855–64, now hangs in Tate Britain. Alexander Morison was one of the consultants who treated Dadd at the Bethlem Hospital in Southwark. Born in Edinburgh, Morison was a doctor who drifted into psychiatry more by chance than by design; in 1809, through the intervention of some powerful friends in London, he was appointed visiting physician to the private lunatic asylums in Surrey. Inspired by the great French psychiatrist Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol (whom he visited on several occasions), Morison became a pioneer in the treatment of mental illness. From 1823 he began a series of lectures on mental diseases, initially in Edinburgh, then in London, which were among the first to be held in Britain. Morison was a visiting consultant at the Bethlem Hospital from 1835 to 1852.
He encouraged Dadd to continue his work as an artist and appears to have collected some of his paintings and drawings. Although there are few surviving records of their professional contact, we do know that Morison described Dadd as ‘an extraordinary Artist’. This portrait, painted in the year that Morison left his post at Bethlem, was probably a commission and may have been a parting gift marking the end of the relationship between the doctor and his patient. Morison is shown against the background of his estate at Newhaven near Edinburgh; he had married a wealthy cousin and was the proud owner of several properties in and around the Scottish capital. According to Dadd’s own inscription on the back of the canvas, the background details were taken from a sketch provided by Morison’s daughter Ann. The two Newhaven fishwives in the background were perhaps based on calotypes by Hill and Adamson. Morison holds his hat and his handkerchief as if in a gesture of farewell but the stiff frontal pose, the staring eyes and sharp detailing lend an awkward quality to the work. Perhaps our knowledge of the circumstances behind its production also adds an eerie and uncomfortable edge to this haunting picture.
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59 Bill Brandt (1904–1983) Loch Slapin, Isle of Skye, 1947
Silver gelatine print, 33.7 x 29 cm Purchased 2000 [PGP 254.2]
Bill Brandt is now recognised as one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century. He is often associated with documentary images that capture the social rituals and class distinctions of a grim, depressed Britain in the 1930s and 1940s. Yet, with a sensibility formed through his exposure to innovative European photography, including early contacts with Surrealism, he had an ability to extract something fresh and strange from the most ordinary of subjects, searching out, in his own words, ‘the spell that charged the commonplace with beauty’. Brandt was born in Hamburg in 1904. His father was registered as a British subject but belonged to a family of wealthy merchant bankers based in Hamburg. Having a British father and a German mother led to a difficult upbringing for Brandt during the First World War. In 1919 he was sent to a strict Prussian boarding school and this was followed by spells of treatment for tuberculosis in Switzerland and a period of psychoanalysis in Vienna in the 1920s. Through the poet Ezra Pound he met the surrealist photographer Man Ray with whom he had a brief but important apprenticeship in Paris in 1930. He settled permanently in Britain in 1934, producing work for magazines such as Picture Post, Lilliput and Harper’s Bazaar. His first anthology of photographs was published as The English at Home in 1936 and this was followed by volumes such as A Night in London (1938) and Camera in London (1948). His haunting pictures of London in the blackout and of improvised shelters in the Underground have become iconic images of wartime Britain. Although Brandt is best known for his urban themes, his subject matter was broad and included portraits, nudes
and landscapes. In the years after the Second World War he toured Britain, gathering images of inspirational landscapes that were published as Literary Britain in 1951. He visited Scotland on several occasions, for example producing photo-essays on Edinburgh and St Andrews in 1942. Our image of a Highland cow standing on the shores of Loch Slapin was one of eight photographs of the island of Skye that Brandt published in Lilliput magazine in 1947. The view is taken across the loch to the impressive silhouette of Blaven, one of the peaks of the famous Black Cuillin mountains. This was a familiar subject in contemporary postcards, often shown as a panorama with a herd of Highland cattle in the foreground. However, Brandt translated this picturesque view into something brooding and melancholy. Adopting an unusual vertical format, he reduced the landscape to a stark pattern of black-and-white shapes, all but eliminating detail such as the cottage just visible on the distant shore. Far from being decorative, the solitary beast exudes a sense of resistance and even menace, bringing a faint echo of Picasso’s wartime imagery into the Highland setting. Brandt was not alone in seeking mood and meaning in remote, romantic locations in the postwar period but this is an extraordinarily powerful vision of an elemental and awe-inspiring landscape.
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61 John Byrne (b.1940) Self-portrait in a Flowered Jacket, 1971–3
Oil on blockboard, 147 x 91 cm Presented by the Scottish Arts Council, 1997 [PG 3068]
The Scottish artist and writer John Byrne has depicted his own likeness many times across his career. His self-portraits are diverse in style and approach, ranging from rigorous, almost academic studies to rapid caricatures; they are equally varied in mood and appearance, with his distinctive, chiselled features appearing in playful and theatrical images as well as in darker, more introspective portrayals. By its nature, self-portraiture is confessional and autobiographical but it also allows an artist to take on roles, declare allegiances and fashion identities. According to Byrne, his almost obsessive preoccupation with his own image is not about vanity: ‘I’m insatiably curious as to what we’re doing in this world … or, rather what I am doing in the world. I can’t think of a better or quicker way of getting to the “heart of the matter” … why we are on this earth.’ Byrne was born in Paisley and studied at the Glasgow School of Art. He is an acclaimed writer for the theatre and television and is well known as the author of the award-winning trilogy of plays The Slab Boys and the hugely successful t elevision series Tutti Frutti, first broadcast in 1986. As an artist, Byrne has had an uneasy relationship with the Establishment. Over the years, he has positioned himself as an outsider, following his own highly individual path and refusing to settle on any single consistent style. At the outset of his career, he adopted the invented persona of ‘Patrick’, submitting works for exhibition in London in the guise of a retired labourer turned amateur painter. Byrne found it easier to gain attention working in the manner of an untrained artist rather than as a highly talented art school graduate. However, the clear, unaffected style of so-called naïve
art suited his vision and he kept up the identity of Patrick for several years in a number of successful exhibitions. This self-portrait was begun in 1971 when Byrne had just returned from a stay in California. The picture was originally larger, with a view of the sea at Malibu in the background, but it was cut down and reworked by Byrne before it was sent to an exhibition in Zagreb in 1973. Byrne replaced what was originally a driftwood chair with a wooden box and added the decorative flowers to the jacket, taken as he recalled ‘from scraps in my collection’. There is still an American feel to the self-portrait in the macho pose, the rockstar looks and the hippy jacket. Byrne’s alter ego Patrick has ‘signed’ the picture in the graffiti on the wooden box, and his naïve style remains evident in the slightly awkward proportions as well as in the attention lavished on every detail. Indeed, the painting is in some ways a homage to the most ‘naïve’ painter of all, the French artist Henri Rousseau. In a well-known visionary self-portrait dating from 1890, Rousseau painted himself standing against a backdrop of the skyline of Paris. When Byrne’s self-portrait was acquired by the Scottish Arts Council in 1974, the artist mentioned the Rousseau as one of his sources of inspiration: ‘I wanted to produce something as solid as Rousseau’s Self-portrait, Grant Wood’s American Gothic and Dürer’s Self-portrait (the one with the corkscrew hair).’ Byrne’s work declares his affinity with ‘primitive’ visions yet it is composed with great sophistication and painted with spectacular skill. The result is one of the most compelling self-portraits in the collection, at once a serious artistic statement but also gently self-mocking and unpretentious.
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63 Ken Currie (b.1960) Three Oncologists (Professor Robert J.C. Steele, Professor Sir Alfred Cuschieri and Professor Sir David P. Lane of the Department of Surgery and Molecular Oncology, Ninewells Hospital, Dundee), 2002 Oil on canvas, 195.6 x 243.8 cm Commissioned 2002 [PG 3296] Commissioning a portrait can be an uncertain business, with the match between artist and sitter often producing unpredictable results. But when curators at the Portrait Gallery approached Ken Currie about a painting of three eminent specialists in the field of cancer research, their choice of artist was an inspired one. Currie was one of the great talents among the so-called ‘New Glasgow Boys’ who dominated Scottish art in the 1980s. Steeped in the study of the old masters, Currie’s work has ranged from frightening crowd scenes to quieter images of individual human bodies, alive and dead. He has been described as a reluctant portraitist and, although his previous work involved figurative themes, he had never
before accepted a formal portrait commission. Realising that he would not be able to paint three such busy men together, nor even have them pose for long periods, Currie made life masks of their faces to assist him with his work. However, the resulting picture goes beyond traditional notions of the portrait as a likeness and is instead an allegory of the epic quest to conquer cancer, the most widely feared of all human maladies. Currie’s painting shows three modern-day heroes, battling on our behalf on the front line between life and death. When this portrait was conceived, the three subjects were leading innovators in cancer research at the University of Dundee and its affiliated teaching hospital, Ninewells. At the centre of the painting is Sir Alfred Cuschieri, the Maltese-born pioneer of keyhole surgery.
To his left is Professor Robert Steele, renowned for his research into colorectal cancer. These two surgeons are wearing scrubs; their surgical masks are dropped to reveal their faces and the gloves on their raised hands are still blood-stained from their work in theatre. At the right, in the white coat, is Sir David Lane, best known for his role in the identification of p53, the cancer-suppressing gene that is now known as ‘the guardian of the genome’. Any medical group portrait is bound to invite comparison with the best-known precedent in art history, Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, 1632 (Mauritshuis, The Hague). Currie has adopted some of the Dutch master’s dramatic devices, including the strong lighting, the prominent hand gestures and a composition that suggests that, as spectators, we are interrupting a moment of intense concentration. But Currie’s picture is thoroughly modern and uncompromising in its conception. The design is stark and simple, with the three figures shown in a cool, bluish light against a dark background. Sir Alfred holds a medical instrument with a tiny light whose meagre illumination serves to emphasise the wall of blackness behind. The artist spent many hours in theatre observing his subjects at work. He recalled how Sir David had told him that people often imagine cancer as a ‘dark thing’ and that it was their job ‘to go in there and retrieve people from this darkness’. A curtain is drawn back and the three men seem poised to enter the pitch black beyond. The play between light and dark, reason and fear is skilfully handled by the artist; these three great men command our respect, albeit with a shudder of anxiety.
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65 Angela Palmer (b.1957) Brain of the Artist, 2012
Engraved on 16 sheets of glass, 35 x 30 x 14 cm Purchased 2013 [PG 3714]
Contemporary portraiture can take many, sometimes surprising, forms. Alongside traditional likenesses in painting and sculpture, portraits are now created in every conceivable medium, including videos, installations and digital files. When the human form can be represented, for example, in a computer-generated hologram or in an image generated from a sample of DNA, the concept of reality in portraiture can now mean much more than simply recording an individual’s features and personality. The Scottish artist Angela Palmer uses information from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans to re-create human, animal and plant forms as beautiful and ethereal sculptures. The work in our collection is essentially a self-portrait as it is based on a scan of the artist’s own brain. Using the detail of the scan as a starting point, Palmer engraved the contours of cross-sections of her brain onto sixteen individual sheets of glass which were then brought together to form a ghostly, three-dimensional image of her brain. The delicately engraved lines are only visible from certain angles so that as the viewer moves around the sculpture (which is shown on a plinth at head height) the image of the brain seems to vanish and then reappear. It is a compelling combination of science and art. Palmer’s sculpture evokes the spirit of modern medical research but also conveys the beauty and mystery of this most vital human organ. Palmer was born in Aberdeen in 1957. She enrolled at Edinburgh College of Art but chose instead to pursue a career in journalism. She returned later to the study of art at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford University and the Royal College of Art in London.
The sculptural techniques which she has developed have frequently involved collaborations with scientists, and her work has included images derived from some famous sources. One of her most acclaimed pieces maps the skull of the legendary eighteenth-century racehorse Eclipse, in ink drawings on glass. In a similar process, she also used scans to create a portrait of the well-known author Robert Harris. Perhaps her most poignant explorations of this technique were her sculptures based on scans of an Egyptian mummy in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Palmer’s ink drawings on glass revealed the underlying form of an infant boy who had lain wrapped in linen for almost 2,000 years. The human brain is probably the most complex living structure in the world. As well as storing vast quantities of information and controlling innumerable functions, it shapes who we are as individual human beings, with all our thoughts, hopes and beliefs. Brain of the Artist reduces this incredible capacity into a simple, elegant form yet it also encourages us to contemplate the enormous power of this small mass of tissue. In spite of the scientific objectivity of its source, this is an extremely intimate work of art. As the artist observes: ‘It is an extraordinary experience, staring at your brain floating in a glass chamber before you. Unlike traditional portraiture, an image of one’s brain does not depict anything recognisably “you” and yet it could not be more intensely personal.’
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66 Christian Hook (b.1971) Alan Cumming, 2014
Oil on board, 122 x 160 cm Commissioned by Sky Arts and presented in 2014 [PG 3740]
The demise of portrait painting has been predicted often since the invention of photography but the great tradition of capturing a likeness in paint is still in rude health. Even in this digital age, when we can all create and collect images of ourselves and others with astonishing ease, there remains something special about the ability of the artist to manipulate paint into a convincing portrayal of a face and to capture the aura of a sitter’s personality. The Portrait Gallery began commissioning portraits of significant figures in the 1980s and this policy has resulted in many memorable acquisitions in a wide range of media, including photography, film and video. But the time-honoured business of conjuring up an image in paint remains much in demand, both with sitters and with the public. One indication of this popularity is the interest generated by portrait painting competitions. This portrait of the actor Alan Cumming was the winning commission for the Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year competition in 2014. This demanding televised competition involved heats being held around the British Isles before a winner finally emerged and received a prestigious commission for the Portrait Gallery as a prize. The winning artist, Christian Hook, was born in Gibraltar and studied illustration at Middlesex University. He worked as an illustrator for various publishers and lectured at the Royal College of Art, before eventually taking up painting full-time. The sitter, Alan Cumming, is a highly successful Scottish actor. He studied at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow and has appeared to critical acclaim in numerous films, television programmes and plays in Scotland,
London and New York, where he now lives. He has also developed a reputation as a writer, notably with the biography published in 2014 entitled Not My Father’s Son: A Family Memoir which documents his difficult upbringing and especially his relationship with an abusive father. Cumming is now well known for his social activism and as a campaigner for gay and lesbian rights. Hook’s portrait was painted in New York while the actor was performing in a leading role in a Broadway revival of the musical Cabaret. Cumming is shown semi-naked, lying on a stage in front of a row of footlights, with a top hat nearby to evoke his current role. The kilt draped around his neck is in the tartan of the ‘Yes’ campaign which Cumming supported during the referendum on Scottish independence held in 2014. The empty honey jar is a reference to the name of a much-loved and recently deceased pet dog. Hook uses a lively, theatrical technique with broadly painted swathes of colour that appear to break up the surface like patches of collage. The resulting image is wonderfully flamboyant yet in its openness and sensuality it also manages to convey a certain vulnerability underlying the charm of this charismatic performer.
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Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art An outstanding collection of modern and contemporary art
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77 René Magritte (1898–1967) Threatening Weather (Le Temps Menaçant), 1929
Oil on canvas, 54 x 73 cm Purchased with the aid of the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Art Fund, 1995 [GMA 3887]
The Belgian Surrealist René Magritte is one of the most distinctive and popular artists of the twentieth century. Whereas many of his contemporaries set out to shock their audiences with outrageous antics and extreme behaviour, Magritte carefully developed an image of bourgeois conformity. He dressed like a banker in an anonymous suit and bowler hat, painted at his dining room table and projected an air of quiet domesticity. His artistic mission, however, remained utterly subversive. In his paintings he depicted situations that undermine our expectations of the work of art as a representation of reality. Whether it is a train emerging from a fireplace, a pair of boots sprouting human toes or an apple the size of a room, the art of Magritte takes us into an unsettling realm in which the ordinary becomes strange and the bizarre becomes familiar. Magritte was born in Brussels where, apart from a brief spell in Paris, he lived for much of his life. After training at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, he experimented with avant-garde styles, mainly variants on Futurism and Cubism. But around 1925 an encounter with the work of the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico had a decisive impact on his work, offering Magritte what he later described as ‘a new vision through which the spectator might recognise his own isolation and hear the silence of the world’. Inspired by De Chirico, he began to paint unexpected and enigmatic combinations of objects using a deadpan realist style. He also began to use words and text to disrupt the relationship between an object and its painted image, most famously in The Treachery of Images, his depiction of a pipe above the legend ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ (‘This is not a pipe’).
The Gallery of Modern Art is fortunate to have four superb paintings by Magritte. The work selected here was painted in the summer of 1929 when Magritte and his wife were staying at the Spanish fishing village of Cadaqués, where Salvador Dalí’s family had a summer house. Magritte had met Dalí in Paris earlier in the year and they admired each other’s work. Together with his friend, the poet and gallery owner Camille Goemans, the Magrittes took an apartment in Cadaqués for a month. Other acquaintances from surrealist circles came by that summer, including the poet Paul Éluard and his wife Gala who soon began an affair with Dalí that developed into a lifelong relationship. The painting Threatening Weather no doubt reflects something of the heady atmosphere of that summer in Dalí’s company in its mixture of humour, menace and eroticism. The setting is a conventional view of the bay at Cadaqués on a sparkling summer day. The clouds above have the forms of a woman’s torso, a tuba and a chair. These are all items that appear in different guises in Magritte’s works. It is difficult to resist the temptation to derive some hidden meaning or connecting narrative in this bizarre combination, but there is none to be found, and indeed Magritte would probably have chided us for trying to find one. He later observed that one of the obstacles to understanding his work is a fear of mystery: ‘People who look for symbolic meanings fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the image.’
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82 Alan Davie (1920–2014) Lush Life No.1, 1961
Oil on canvas, 213 x 173 cm Presented by the artist, 1997 [GMA 4113] Alan Davie invariably gave titles to his paintings after they were finished, often adding a playful association to his work. In this case the title Lush Life is not only appropriate for an exuberant, richly coloured picture but could equally well be applied to the artist’s long and successful career. Davie was prolific across a wide range of activities, and whether it was making a painting, playing music, writing poetry or piloting a glider, he embraced the richness of life with seemingly unbounded vigour and enthusiasm. Davie was born in Scotland and trained at Edinburgh College of Art. Although he left his native country permanently in 1948, there is a sense in which his feeling for the expressive power of colour and brushwork remained rooted in a Scottish tradition that stretches back to the nineteenth century and to artists like William McTaggart (see no.34). After serving as a gunner in the Second World War and a spell working as a jazz musician, Davie travelled widely in Europe in 1948–9. He was impressed by Surrealism and the work of artists such as Miró, Ernst and Klee, but a chance encounter in Venice with the American collector Peggy Guggenheim was a breakthrough. Guggenheim bought some of his work, introduced him to art dealers in London and encouraged his interest in recent American art including the early work of Jackson Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists. Nurtured by his love of jazz and encouraged by the methods of Surrealism, Davie developed a fluid, improvisatory form of abstraction that quickly won international acclaim in the 1950s
and 1960s. His approach was impetuous and intuitive. From the early 1950s he began to lay his boards and canvases on the floor. Film footage taken by his wife Bili shows him attacking works such as Lush Life using his whole body to create dense webs of colour with increasingly gestural sweeps of paint. Through his study of ancient cultures and an interest in Zen Buddhism he came to see the role of the artist as a medium or shaman, conjuring up images and symbols that evoke deep and mysterious forces. In Lush Life the large canvas is divided loosely into three vertical bands. A cluster of candy-coloured shapes seems to
explode outwards from the centre of the composition. From close by, the mingling of bright colours and different textures is incredibly seductive, inviting our eyes to peer into layers of paint that have been dripped, splattered and smeared over the surface. The overall effect is joyful and spontaneous, radiating an almost childlike enjoyment in the creative act. In an interview towards the end of his life, Davie described his art as ‘an urge, an intensity, a kind of sexual need … I don’t practise painting or drawing as an art, in the sense of artifice, of making an imitation of something. It’s something I do from an inner compulsion, that has to come out.’
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85 Duane Hanson (1925–1996) Tourists, 1970
Polyester resin and fibreglass, painted in oil, and mixed media; man 152 x 80.5 x 31 cm; woman 160 x 44 x 37 cm Purchased 1979 [GMA 2132]
After the Tourists were acquired in 1979 they quickly became a popular feature in the Gallery of Modern Art’s collection. Although their Florida-style clothing may be incongruous in the Edinburgh climate, this ordinary, middle-aged couple have engendered many double takes as visitors respond to the illusion of reality that the artist has crafted with meticulous attention to detail. The figures were cast from life, but for all their verisimilitude, Hanson still wanted them to be regarded as sculptures and his artistic mission went beyond mere imitation and caricature. Hanson was born in rural Minnesota in the American Midwest. His childhood interest in carving and sculpture was nurtured in formal art training at a variety of colleges across the United States and continued during a period of teaching in Germany and also back in America. In his early work he experimented with various forms of abstract sculpture, but in the 1960s he began to make socially motivated figure pieces with emotive subjects inspired, for example, by race riots and violence on the streets. He was already modelling his sculptures in polyester resin and fibreglass, but in 1967 began to cast his figures from life. He used elaborate moulding processes, painting the figures and adding real accessories to achieve the most realistic effects. His subject matter was often deliberately confrontational, with his sculptures of suicides, rape and murder victims often provoking considerable controversy. By 1970 Hanson had switched from subjects intended to shock to those documenting ordinary lower- and middle-class American types including an array of blue-collar tradesmen, overweight shoppers, sunbathers and office workers.
Encouraged by Pop Art which took its subject matter from everyday life, and influenced by the work of George Segal and Edward Kienholz who placed figures in elaborately staged settings, Hanson chose his models to suggest what he described as ‘the resignation, emptiness, and loneliness of their existence’. Whereas pop artists elevated and glamourised the ordinary, Hanson highlighted monotony and soullessness; collectively his work presents a sharp critique of a materialistic society and the legions of people who, in Hanson’s words, ‘lead lives of quiet desperation’. Tourists dates from 1970 and remains one of Hanson’s best-known works. As the couple stare at some unknown sight, we in turn become voyeurs and it is impossible not to be drawn in to examine intimate details such as the woman’s vaccination marks or the wrinkled leathery skin of the man’s face. The figures are dressed in typical holiday clothes with all the required trappings, including camera and tripod and a handbag bulging with tourist souvenirs, such as a brochure for a Florida theme park and museum tickets. The gently mocking tone here is perhaps exaggerated in our European setting as the image plays to a clichéd view of Middle America at leisure. But Hanson’s aim is humanist and sympathetic; in emphasising the vacuous and the banal and in drawing our attention to ordinary types, he repeatedly said that he was not duplicating life but ‘making a statement about human values’.
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95 Gerhard Richter (b.1932) Abstract Painting (Abstraktes Bild), 1994
Oil on canvas, 230 x 204.8 cm ARTIST ROOMS, National Galleries of Scotland and Tate. Acquired jointly through the d’Offay Donation with the aid of the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund, 2008 [AR00027] The ARTIST ROOMS collection includes an important group of paintings, sculpture and constructions by Gerhard Richter providing a fascinating encounter with the diverse and complex art of this great modern master. Richter was born in Dresden where he trained at the Academy and worked briefly as a mural painter. He moved to West Germany in 1961, just before the construction of the Berlin Wall, and enrolled in the Academy in Düsseldorf where he quickly became part of the circle of young talent that emerged there and in nearby Cologne in the 1960s. Although Richter engaged with various new tendencies including conceptual and performance art as well as Pop Art, his focus remained on the time-honoured medium of painting. Over the ensuing decades he continued a systematic and rigorous exploration of the processes of painting, generating an abundant output that can range from photographic realism to the most uncompromising abstraction and take the form of the subtlest exercises in monochrome or the most intense colour, with every variation in between. Often pitched against prevailing fashions and trends, Richter has worked to reaffirm the status and relevance of the act of painting, viewing it as ‘one of the most basic human capacities’. In 1992 he concluded an interview with the remark: ‘All I know is that painting is useful and important, like music and art in general … painting is an indispensable necessity of life.’
Many of Richter’s works of the 1960s and early 1970s were figurative, based on photographs that he had either taken himself or had found in magazines, books or the mass media. From the mid-1970s, abstract painting became more predominant although he continued to work in realist styles and to explore innovative constructions using mirrors or panes of glass. With its vibrant colour and lively surface, the painting selected here is a superb example of Richter’s production in the 1990s. As in many of his abstract pieces of this period, the picture results from an almost mechanical process that owes as much to chance as to design. Richter manipulated his oil paint with a large, broad squeegee, using this tool to add and
scrape off paint and allowing the colours to blend and smear, mix and blur in unpredictable ways as the picture evolved. The tracks of the squeegee’s blade are clearly visible in the vertical bands which move across the composition from left to right. Despite its apparent vigour and spontaneity, a picture like this will have been carefully developed through numerous successive states so that the final result is a rich amalgam of colour with previously erased layers glinting through to the final surface. The luscious greens mingling with vivid yellows, punctuated here and there by traces of blue, are vaguely suggestive of landscape elements, while the evidence of creation and destruction in the paint layers also invites parallels with organic or natural processes.
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96 Alison Watt (b.1965) Sabine, 2000
Oil on canvas, 213.5 x 213.5 cm Purchased with the Knapping Fund, 2001 [GMA 4353]
Alison Watt is one of the most distinctive and original painters active in Scotland today. This is one of a series of four paintings entitled Shift that she showed at an exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art in 2000. Partly inspired by her fascination with the sumptuous fabrics in portraits by the nineteenth-century artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, her work combines the weight and lustre of older art with the suggestive power of modern abstraction. The folds and creases of a piece of fabric are translated on to a monumental scale, creating pictorial drama from the subtlest shifts of light and the implicit movement in billowing folds and shadowy clefts. Watt was born in Greenock and studied at the Glasgow School of Art. Her early paintings were mainly portraits and figure paintings, meticulously observed and suffused with a pale luminosity. She often painted from models posing nude, either seated or reclining. Gradually, however, Watt became increasingly absorbed in the fabrics and draperies used as background props in the life-painting studio and was intrigued by the imprint left after her models had finished posing; as she recalled, ‘something beautiful was created by their leaving’. Increasingly it was the absence of the figure, or rather its implied presence, that came to dominate her work. She made paintings that juxtaposed nudes with panels of painted fabric and then, in the 2000 exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art, moved on to paintings of fabric alone. The title refers to a portrait by Ingres of Madame Philibert (Sabine) Rivière, 1806 in the Musée du Louvre in Paris. Watt’s interest in this French artist dates from a childhood visit with her father to the National Gallery in London when she was
first introduced to Ingres’s famous portrait of Madame Moitessier, 1856. It was partly through her almost obsessive study of Ingres that Watt came to realise that ‘the paintings of fabric were more sensual than the paintings of the body’. Sabine was painted over a period of eight weeks in January and February 2000. The starting point was a piece of nineteenth-century fabric chosen for its particular heft and colour and carefully positioned to create a dynamic combination of folds and tucks. Although this is an impressive rendering of the texture and feel of a piece of material, Watt has stressed that she was attracted to the sensual and evocative potential of her subject: ‘In Sabine I wanted to convey the erotic; the pleasures of seeing and touching as well as the less tangible features of fabric such as scent and sound. Subjecting the material to an intense scrutiny, translating even the smallest details and yet displacing and altering what I saw created something more than just imitation.’ As is often the case in great art, it is what is implied rather than stated that is the most powerful. By editing out the human figure, we are aware of what is missing or concealed from us. Watt’s painting is restrained and meditative yet imbued with a compelling physicality and sensuous power.
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100 Martin Creed (b.1968) Work No.975: everything is going to be alright, 2008
Blue neon, 62.5 x 1,541.6 cm Presented by the artist, 2012 (fabrication costs courtesy of the Iain Paul Fund) [GMA 5181]
Fig.34 | Martin Creed, Work No.370 Balls, 2004 Balls of various kinds Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh [GMA 4762]
Martin Creed first came to public prominence when he won the Turner Prize in 2001 with the piece entitled Work No.227: The lights going on and off. This now famous installation consists of an entirely empty gallery space that is either illuminated or thrown into darkness at five-second intervals. The theatrical nature of this piece is typical of Creed’s work. Often using everyday objects, activities and phrases, his art can be spectacular (athletes running in relay through Tate Britain) or extremely intimate (a sheet of paper crumpled into a ball). His output is diverse and embraces installation, music, film, performance, painting and photography but virtually all of it seems to have been designed to hover precariously between the profound and the banal, to offer everything or nothing at all. He assigns a number to everything he makes and, whether it is large or small, in a famous gallery or in a toilet, there is no sense of hierarchy across his work. There are many echoes of earlier artistic movements in his art – for example, when he questions the role of art or uses absurdist humour – but he manages all this with a light touch and disarming wit. Describing the origins of the dark/light opposition in Work No.227, he said that the work derived in part from an inability to choose and decide: ‘I am totally sure that I don’t know what I want.’ Work No.975: EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT is one of Creed’s best-known works. These words in large neon letters have been installed on several buildings in different social and geographical settings around the world. Context is all-important for the way that the public reacts to this piece. When, as Work No.203, it was shown on the front of an empty building in East London that had once
been a training hall for the Salvation Army, the words conveyed something upbeat and optimistic. However, on the side of a building near Times Square in New York as Work No.225, in competition with the full force of American commercial and media signage, the phrase had a quiet, almost plaintive resonance. In Edinburgh, Work No.975 is installed in bright blue neon across the façade of the Gallery of Modern Art. Visually spectacular, it is perhaps most effective during those long Scottish winter nights when the words loom unexpectedly into view across the dark gardens. It is, of course, a familiar, everyday expression offering reassurance that all will be fine but also hinting that the opposite might well turn out to be the case. So far, however, the responses to the work suggest that the message offers our public comfort and faith rather than uncertainty. Creed has said that he looks for ‘excitement, fun and joy’ in his work. He has also expressed the hope that other people will ‘find some excitement or thought or a little experience’ in the objects that he makes. It is a generous sentiment. Creed’s bold and outward-looking work emblazoned on the Gallery of Modern Art reminds us that art can be everywhere and belongs to everyone. It seems an appropriate final piece for this selection of masterworks from the National Galleries of Scotland.
236 | Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art
100 Masterpieces 5th Proof.indd 236-237
08/04/2015 13:22