ISSU E 34 / SU MME R 2021 DIRECTOR’S NOTE
This summer, in a joyous celebration of Scottish creativity, the Fleming Collection has mounted two exhibitions at opposite ends of the country: one on the Glasgow Girls and Boys at Kirkcudbright Art Gallery and the other on the Scottish Colourists at Inverness Art Gallery and Museum. The core of both exhibitions is drawn from the Fleming Collection itself, deemed to be the finest outside public institutions, although the Kirkcudbright show also includes generous loans from the National Galleries of Scotland and private collections. This must be the first time that these two groups of artists, which between them stand as the early ‘moderns’ of Scottish art, can be seen at contemporaneous exhibitions, prompting the ambition that one day the Fleming Collection can unite both shows under the banner Scottish Painters of the Modern World 1880–1935. As the putative title suggests, this would reveal that these two generations of artists, until now seen as discrete groups, in fact embodied an arc of talent inspired by French artistic innovation. Is there a museum curator out there to run with this modest proposal?
These themed shows are the standard bearers for our Museum without Walls strategy, which plays a key role in fulfilling the Fleming Collection’s charitable goal of promoting Scottish art and creativity across the UK and beyond. Our showcasing of Scottish art also drives our acquisitions policy, which aims to fill key gaps in our historic collection as well as buying work by living artists. A few weeks before the Kirkcudbright exhibition, we acquired two rare drawings by Annie French (1872–1965), one of the brilliant circle of women artists, illustrators and designers who have become known as the Glasgow Girls. Within weeks they were hanging in the Kirkcudbright exhibition being seen by the public for the first time in over 100 years. Next year, her work will join other recently acquired paintings and drawings by Phoebe Anna Traquair and Agnes Miller Parker (see pages 28 and 31) in our next themed show, Scottish Women Artists, which, all being well, will open in summer 2022 at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich.
‘Joan Eardley’s work truly encompassed the extremes of Scotland’ This edition of Scottish Art News celebrates one of the mid-century giants of Scottish painting, Joan Eardley (1921–1963), marking the centenary of her birth. In our long-running online feature, whereby cultural figures rise to the challenge of choosing their favourite Scottish work of art, writer and broadcaster James Naughtie and actor Bill Paterson both offered insights into her rootedness as an artist. Naughtie chose an Aberdeenshire landscape, which he said ‘brings back to me all the texture of these days, rich and unchanging as the seasons’. Paterson, choosing a chalk drawing of Eardley’s tumbledown studio in Glasgow’s Townhead, wrote: ‘Very little survives of the district that she, and my mother and father, knew, but at least we have these evocative paintings of people and streets. Joan Eardley’s work truly encompassed the extremes of Scotland.’ In further thrilling news,
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the Fleming Collection’s own Eardley paintings will be on loan to an exhibition celebrating the artist’s centenary at Perth Museum and Art Gallery opening in November. As part of his homage to Eardley, Paterson wrote of an artist, Faith O’Reilly, whom he first met in France ‘a lifetime after’ his childhood days in Townhead. O’Reilly, it turned out, had been part of the colony of artists at the fishing hamlet of Catterline on the Aberdeenshire coast, which had been established by Eardley. O’Reilly had been invited there by Eardley’s disciple and muse, Lil Neilson, and stayed on and off for ten years. O’Reilly has now generously donated a group of drawings, dating from the 1960s, to the Fleming Collection. These throw fresh light on the Catterline community following Eardley’s death and connect to a fine work by Neilson in the collection. Faith O’Reilly’s gift has revealed how much there is still to discover and record about key moments and movements in Scottish art history. Another example came to light after Neil MacGregor chose Ian Hamilton Finlay’s relief carving ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’ (National Galleries of Scotland) as his favourite work of art. The carver of the relief, John Andrew, got in touch, which led to the commissioning of a series of interviews with Andrew, who is in his late eighties, conducted by scholar and writer Greg Thomas. Their conversations will in the future be an invaluable resource towards further understanding Finlay’s working methods. The needs of art education stretch across all demographics, and so we have continued our Young People’s Art Competition, originally initiated as a source of creative inspiration last year for those feeling the drain of home schooling. Winners
will be announced later this summer. On a different scale, we have also collaborated with the visual arts advocacy and training network Engage Scotland to support a project for young people who have been affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. The project will involve printmaking workshops, taking place this autumn, to be partially inspired by field trips into the Highland landscape. Nature like art has been a source of solace to many through these difficult times, as a recent visitor to see The Glasgow Girls and Boys at Kirkcudbright testified when she wrote: ‘I loved this exhibition: beautiful paintings and visiting the gallery last week felt like the first bit of normality in a very long time. It brought a tear to my eye!’ James Knox is the director of the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation The Glasgow Girls and Boys runs at Kirkcudbright Art Gallery until 12 September; The Scottish Colourists runs at Inverness Art Gallery and Museum until 28 August Read more favourite work of art choices at flemingcollection.com 1 Annie French, Two Ladies, c. 1895 © Estate of A J French / Bridgeman Images / 2020. The Fleming Collection 2 Lil Neilson, Salmon Nets Drying, c. 1969 © The Artist's Estate. The Fleming Collection 3 FCB Cadell, The Dunara Castle at Iona, c. 1929. The Fleming Collection
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