Extract from Modern Scottish Women

PAT D O U T H WA IT E 1 9 3 4 – 2 0 0 2

Born Glasgow 1934; died Dundee 2002 Pat Douthwaite was born in Glasgow in 1934, although throughout her life she gave 1939 as her birth year. Douthwaite was brought up in Paisley and began taking dance classes with Margaret Morris in 1947 where she met the artist J.D. Fergusson, Morris’s partner.

Douthwaite initially pursued dance but by the end of the 1950s she decided to become a painter. Fergusson encouraged her in this but dissuaded her from formal training, declaring ‘Go to art school? If you go to art school, you’ll never be an artist – you are an artist.’1 Leaving Scotland in 1958, Douthwaite spent time in Essex, Suffolk and London’s Soho, mixing in wide, bohemian circles which included Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, William Crozier, whom she knew from Glasgow, and a younger set from Cambridge including Peter Cook and Roger Law. It was in East Anglia that she was introduced to the illustrator Paul Hogarth whom she married in 1963. They had one son, Toby.

Hogey Bear is a portrait of Douthwaite’s husband whose affectionate nickname gives the painting its title. She noted that this painting is also a partial self-portrait, which shows her pregnant with Toby. Douthwaite cited the French artist Jean Dubuffet as an early influence and in 1960 she saw his show The Men with Beards in Paris. She was captivated by the imagery in his work but said she was too naïve to appreciate his technique.

The impression that Dubuffet made on the artist is evident in this painting through the mottled and graphic approach.

During the 1960s Douthwaite lived with her family between Cambridge and Majorca, where they bought property in Deia after 44 MODERN SCOT TISH WOMEN

Hogarth began to work with Robert Graves on book illustration. From the 1970s, separated from her husband and constantly seeking new visual inspiration, Douthwaite travelled extensively and spent time in India, Libya and Peru, but always considered Scotland her home.

She exhibited regularly in Edinburgh and London but, as a reviewer for the magazine Scottish Field noted, ‘it is here that she feels sure she belongs. Douthwaite should be warmly welcomed.’2 The artist, however, did not always feel welcome and considered herself an outsider. Her life continued on an unstable path due to brushes with poverty and personal insecurities. Douthwaite’s final move was to Dundee where she died aged sixty-seven in 2002.

Much of Douthwaite’s work explores feminine subjects but she did not identify her work as feminist. As the critic Cordelia Oliver stated, ‘Douthwaite, the raw female, remained at the centre of all her work, with all that that implied of vulnerability, unacceptable drives, emotional demands, frustrations, rages and occasional ecstasies – yet still a million miles away from “militant feminism”.’3 She had many influential supporters including Douglas Hall of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Richard Demarco and Guy Peploe of The Scottish Gallery, but she was fiercely independent as well as demanding, which often made working with her problematic. Nevertheless, Douthwaite won several Scottish Arts Council awards and had many solo exhibitions, between 1958 and 2000, including major touring shows in 1980, 1982–3 and 1988.4 The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh mounted a memorial exhibition of her work in 2005 and continues to promote her achievements. SMA

Hogey Bear, 1960 Oil on board, 120 x 133.75 cm Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

JOAN EARDLEY 1921–1963

Born Warnham, Sussex 1921; died Killearn, Stirlingshire 1963 Studied Glasgow School of Art 1940–3 and 1947–8 ( full time), 1943–4 and 1944–6 (evening classes) and Hospitalfield College of Art, Arbroath 1947 RSA Joan Eardley was born in Sussex. Her mother was Scottish, her father English. The bombing in London, where she had already briefly attended two art schools, persuaded her family (now without her father, following his death which, she learnt years later, had been a suicide) to move to Scotland in 1940.

As a nineteen-year-old student at the Glasgow School of Art, Eardley already felt drawn to impoverished parts of the city – the children and the run-down tenements. At the school she was admired by other students and by her teacher Hugh Adam Crawford; whilst there she struck up an enduring friendship with Margot Sandeman.1 Seemingly shy, she had remarkable confidence in her work, as well as a healthy degree of self-criticism. Her art was not diffident. Later in her short but prolific career she told a friend: ‘You really have to be tough for this game.’2 She was.

A spell at Hospitalfield under James Cowie in the summer of 1947 was followed by a travel scholarship tour in the late 1940s which took her to Italy and Paris (briefly). She found her main interest lay in workers and peasants, and this fascination with ‘ordinary’ people underpinned her drawings, pastels and paintings of Glasgow slum children when she came home. In Paris she felt strongly that many of the French artists found it impossible to escape the influence of heavyweights like Picasso, Léger, Braque and Rouault. She realised her work had to be distinctly her own.

46 MODERN SCOT TISH WOMEN

Neither Cubism nor Surrealism was a part of it.

Her natural bent was towards Expressionism.

Whether it was boys sitting on the curb, a girl skipping, a cityscape, landscape or seascape, direct face-to-face confrontation, and an uncanny ability to turn what she saw in front of her into paint activity, was her way. At times she came close to abstraction.

After 1954 Eardley spent much time in a remote fishing village, Catterline, on the north-east coast of Scotland. Here she was free from the feeling that the city was overcast by a kind of oppressive ceiling. In Catterline’s open air she first painted landscapes, immersing herself in long summer grasses, then salmon nets draped out to dry on the shore, and finally – since she had no previous idea how to paint it – the sea itself. Typically she did not paint wind, wave and storm at one remove. She stood on the shore so that sea and paint were scarcely separate actions. Immersion in her subject is also seen in the late work Catterline in Winter, a superb example of how she braved the weather in all conditions, in snow and moonlight if need be, in order to make a painting uncannily true to experience – to feeling as well as seeing.

Lesbian and unmarried, she kept her studio in Townhead, Glasgow, which she had taken on in about 1950, and found fresh, expressive ways of painting the children there (see fig.15).

Eardley was able to identify remarkably with these children, her chosen not given family.

But her Catterline paintings are devoid of youngsters. This two-sidedness is not simply country-versus-town. Compelling subject matter, whether a group of street-dirty city kids or a vast surging and raging winter sea, could never be still. Eardley’s art never sat still either.

Through regular participation in group

exhibitions, especially at the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA), Royal Glasgow Institute and Society of Scottish Artists, as well as a steady flow of solo exhibitions, climaxing in those held at The Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh in 1961 and at Roland, Browse and Delbanco in London in 1963, Eardley’s reputation grew and her prices increased. She was elected to full membership of the RSA shortly before her death from cancer aged forty-two. A touring memorial exhibition was staged in 1964 and a retrospective exhibition mounted by the National Galleries of Scotland in 2007–8 confirmed Eardley’s stature as one of Britain’s most original twentieth-century artists. CA

Catterline in Winter, c.1963 Oil on hardboard, 120.7 x 130.8 cm Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

N O R A H N E I L S O N G R AY 1 8 8 2 – 1 9 3 1

Born Helensburgh 1882; died Glasgow 1931 Studied The Studio, Craigendoran 1899–1900 and Glasgow School of Art 1901–6 Taught Glasgow School of Art 1906–18 RSW Gray was born in Helensburgh, second youngest of the seven children of George Gray, a Glasgow shipowner, and Nora Neilson of Falkirk. She attended a local private girls’ school then studied drawing at The Studio, Craigendoran when she also became a member of the Glasgow Society of Lady Artists. At the Glasgow School of Art (GSA) she was a contemporary of Jessie M. King and studied with Jean Delville and Paul Artot. While still a student she exhibited at the Royal Academy (RA), where she continued to show until 1926. She taught fashion design and drawing at the GSA and remained on the staff from 1906 to 1918. For a short time she also taught at St Columba’s School, Kilmacolm.

In 1907 she began to exhibit regularly at the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA). In 1910 she established a practice as a portrait painter in a studio at 141 Bath Street, Glasgow, exhibited at the Salon of the Société des Artistes Français in Paris and had her first solo exhibition at Warneuke’s Gallery, Glasgow. She painted mainly in oils but also in watercolour and in 1914 was elected a member of the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour.

In addition, her illustrations to Wordsworth’s Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood were published

by Dent in 1913.

The war years inspired some of Gray’s most powerful and important work. The Liégeois in Exile (Glasgow Life (Glasgow Museums)) painted in 1914 was exhibited at the Royal Glasgow Institute (RGI) in 1916, the RA in 52 MODERN SCOT TISH WOMEN

1917 and in Paris at the Société des Artistes Français in 1921 where it was awarded a bronze medal. For six months in 1918 she worked at the Hôpital Auxiliaire d’Armée 301 – Abbaye de Royaumont near Paris during a major German advance. The hospital was staffed and run by the Scottish Women’s Hospitals under the auspices of the French Red Cross.

Despite the exhausting work, Gray found time to paint the soldiers in the busy casualty reception area of the mediaeval cloister which she described as ‘a view of soldier patients painted from within at the time and true to fact’ (see fig.8).1 Although reserved, she held strong feminist views and did not want this painting to be acquired by the Women’s Work sub-committee of the Imperial War Museum; in 1920 the sub-committee commissioned a more formal version.

After the war, Gray returned to portraiture, producing decorative but unsentimental images of young women and children. Her paintings are characterised by unconventional placing of the figures, unusual colour schemes and shadow patterns, as in Mother and Child.

The composition is similar to The Country’s Charge, exhibited at the RA in 1915, but is a more stylised image that uses a limited palette and shadows to dramatic effect.2 In 1921 Gray became the first woman appointed to the hanging committee of the RGI. As James Shaw Simpson remarked: ‘Miss Gray is to be honoured because she has fought her own art battles, and achieved by virtue of her own compelling ability’.3 In 1923 she won the silver medal at the Société des Artistes Français for her painting Little Brother (Glasgow Life (Glasgow Museums)). In addition to exhibiting regularly at the RGI and RSA, Paris Salons and London, Gray’s work was shown in Nice, Brussels, Liège, Vienna,

Chicago and Canada and in 1926 she had a solo exhibition at Gieves Art Gallery, London. She received several public commissions and in 1924 was elected to the Society of Scottish Artists. She continued to paint watercolours, often semi-abstract views of Loch Lomond and Loch Long, that presage work done sixty years later.

At the time of her death from cancer in 1931, aged forty-eight, she was considered ‘the foremost Scottish woman painter’.4 A memorial exhibition of her work was held in the McLellan Galleries, Glasgow in 1932 and a retrospective was mounted at Dumbarton District Libraries in 1985. LA

Mother and Child, early 1920s Oil on canvas, 77.5 x 57 cm Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

D O ROT HY C A R L E TO N S MY T H 1 8 8 0 – 1 9 3 3

Born Glasgow 1880; died Cambuslang 1933 Studied Manchester School of Art 1893–7 and Glasgow School of Art 1898–1904 Taught Glasgow School of Art 1900–3 and 1914–33 Dorothy Carleton Smyth was the daughter of a jute manufacturer. She began her art studies at Manchester School of Art, but continued her training at the Glasgow School of Art (GSA) under Fra Newbery’s directorship. Her sister Olive, an artist, also attended and went on to teach at the GSA. Their sister Rose became a composer. Dorothy and her sisters lived and worked together for much of their lives.

Dorothy’s studies at the GSA included drawing, painting and stained glass, but her main interest was in theatre and costume design. She designed her own clothes and was known as a ‘dark, vivid type’ at art school.1 After graduating she spent several years working in the theatre in Stockholm, Paris and London. In 1901 she exhibited her stainedglass window Tristan and Iseult at the Glasgow International Exhibition. An anonymous lady sponsored her to travel abroad in 1903 and she spent time in Florence and Paris. The donor also paid for her membership of the Glasgow Society of Lady Artists in 1902, with whom she exhibited regularly thereafter. The following year Smyth was commissioned by the Glasgow dealer Craibe Angus and she exhibited in Turin, Cork and Budapest.

Smyth returned to the GSA to teach in 1914 eventually becoming Head of the Commercial Art Department, a position which she held until her death in 1933. She taught miniature painting and the history of costume and armour; her sister Olive taught fashion at the GSA. A reference written for Smyth by Fra Newbery notes: ‘Miss Smyth is a living force 98 MODERN SCOT TISH WOMEN

contained in a human body, whose brains and whose hands are of the finest description and which answer to each other as touch does to sensation. She is the life and light of anything we may do here as regards the art of the drama.

Her instincts are unerring, her taste pure and refined and her feelings shrink from every form of ill considered art.’2 Smyth’s Self-portrait, 1921 shows the artist at the age of forty-one in front of a framed canvas holding a palette and brush, identifying her with her profession. A pot of brushes is shown behind her alongside a gramophone, a figurine, books and a bright red patterned screen. She gives a smile to the viewer in a manner which aligns her to a certain trend in female self-portraiture, such as the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Judith Leyster’s Self-portrait, c.1630 (National Gallery of Art, Washington).3 In Leyster’s painting the artist is also shown smiling in front of her canvas, palette and brushes in hand. Self-portrait is believed to have been shown at the Royal Glasgow Institute in 1933, priced at £15; Olive Carleton Smyth presented it to Glasgow Museums in 1948.

Smyth was a successful book illustrator and broadcast art talks for children as Paint Box Pixie on the BBC. She was appointed as the successor to John Revel as Director of the GSA in 1933, and would have been the first woman to hold this position. A report from the Vacancy Committee minutes notes that: the Committee decided, unanimously, to recommend Miss D Carleton Smyth for the post of Director. They considered that her proved administrative ability, her experience in the School, her wide knowledge of Art, and her conception of the requirements and possibilities of the position, made her the most suitable selection of all the candidates considered.4

Tragically, Smyth died of a brain haemorrhage before she could take up the post. An obituary notice said: ‘The sudden death of Miss Dorothy Carleton Smyth has taken away one of Scotland’s most original and brilliant artists.’5 LL

Self-portrait, 1921 Oil on canvas, 76.8 x 68.6 cm Glasgow Life (Glasgow Museums) on behalf of Glasgow City Council