modern masters
modern masters 3 – 27 july 2013 elizabeth blackadder
william johnstone
robert henderson blyth
peter mclaren
fcb cadell
david michie
stephen conroy
alberto morrocco
james cowie
graham murray
victoria crowe
sj peploe
joan eardley
sir robin philipson
sir william gillies
anne redpath
earl haig
geoff uglow
john houston
alison watt
george leslie hunter
sylvia wishart
16 Dundas Street, Edinburgh EH3 6HZ tel 0131 558 1200 email mail@scottish-gallery.co.uk web www.scottish-gallery.co.uk
Cover: James Cowie rsa (1886-1956), Tanagra out of Doors, 1940, pencil & chalk on paper, 31.5 x 25.75 cms Left: Earl Haig obe, rsa (1918-2009), Tulips in a Green Vase, c.1965, oil on canvas, 91 x 70 cms
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Foreword
For July we have not selected a theme nor restricted ourselves to the modern over the contemporary. Each work included however, standing up in its own right, can shine a little light into the shadows cast by the complexity of Scottish painting over the last seventy years or so. Painters like James Cowie, Joan Eardley and Sylvia Wishart defy the conventional wisdom about Scottish art: rather they swim in the opposite direction sharing more with European movements: Surrealism, Tachism and Intimism rather than anything Colourist. We then have four wonderful works by George Leslie Hunter, each shouting loud his credentials as a Colourist and expressionist. We can glimpse back at the mid-eighties and the arrival of two stars of recent Scottish painting: Alison Watt and Stephen Conroy. The Edinburgh School tradition is well represented by a wonderful late Redpath oil, two Gillies watercolours, one made at just eighteen and a quiet, masterful watercolour drawing by the still hugely underrated Robert Henderson Blyth. This tradition is brought up to date with works by Houston, Blackadder, Michie and Peter McLaren the most talented graduate from Edinburgh College of his era. We also celebrate Victoria Crowe with two earlier works of immense subtlety which presage her development into one our most significant, individual talents. The only rationale for a dealer’s mixed exhibition need is quality, which we believe we have garnered in quantity. guy peploe the scottish gallery
John Houston’s paint brushes. Photograph by John Mackenzie
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Elizabeth Blackadder dbe, ra, rsa, rsw (b.1931) Still Life with Indian Puppets, Fish and Shapes, 1984 watercolour & gold leaf, 60 x 98 cms signed and dated lower right provenance Private Collection
Although she did not visit Japan until 1985, this painting was made at a time when oriental art was a major influence for Elizabeth Blackadder. Completed on Japanese paper, the arrangement of objects in space has a strong affinity with Japanese painting. Inspired by the use of gold and silver in screen painting Blackadder first started to use gold paint and then gold leaf in her still lifes of the 1970s. The technique enriches the painting and adds visual variety as light reflects or is absorbed by the metallic elements. This series of works focusing on careful compositional arrangements look forward to her floral still lives where the flowers often float, perfectly spaced across the picture plane.
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Robert Henderson Blyth rsa, rw (1919-1970) Banffshire Headland, c.1955-57 ink & watercolour, 33 x 41 cms signed lower right provenance Bourne Fine Art, Edinburgh
In 1954, Blyth moved from his teaching post at Edinburgh College of Art to Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen. He was a close friend of Sir William Gillies and the two of them often travelled and worked together on the east coast of Scotland so that at times their work became quite similar, both favouring a pen and wash technique. A brilliant draughtsman, Blyth made distinctive choices on the information he would include. Here, his pen lines simply divide the work into fields and outline the fence posts in the foreground, leading the eye adeptly around the picture plane, while a drab North Sea sky and inky black water are portrayed with an expanse of grey wash.
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FCB Cadell rsa (1883-1937) Studio Interior, 130 George Street, c.1913 oil on canvas, 76 x 63.5 cms signed lower left provenance Private Collection
Cadell moved into a new studio in early 1913 at 130 George Street. Here he painted some of his most sumptuous interiors, some with the elegant figure of Miss Don Wauchop. There is sometimes a question over where the interior might be: he might paint a conversation piece, including table set for tea; sometimes there will be a mirror over the mantelpiece, sometimes a picture wherein his furniture: a white sofa, the chairs with striped fabric, a baby grand piano create the ambiance of elegance. Other times a single figure is posed in front of the mirror: William Macdonald dressed as a Matador, Peggy Macrae or a ballerina. In this picture he paints the studio itself. He still enjoys the reflections on his linoleum floor and the sparkle from his chandelier but there is no pretence: a picture is on the easel in the background, a still life with fan and fruit is indicated on the studio table. Later in the twenties when he paints his drawing room at Ainslie Place the treatment is hard-edged and colour strong and flat. The works from George Street in this short period are the pinnacle of his achievement in his early, impressionist style.
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Stephen Conroy (b.1964) Life Study III, 1987 pastel on paper, 45 x 70 cms signed lower left and signed, inscribed with the title and dated verso
Conroy graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1987 when his Degree Show caused a sensation. His ‘arrival’ represented a high-water mark in a period of enormous excitement the history of The School of Art and of Scottish painting. The painters of New Image Glasgow (Third Eye Centre, 1985) Howson, Campbell, Wiszniewski and Currie in particular were blazing a trail across the contemporary art scene, spiced with a measure of excess and machismo. In 1987 Conroy and his then girlfriend Alison Watt emerged sharing a more tonal, enigmatic vision. Conroy’s paintings evoking an Edwardian world of secret societies and arrested violence immediately made his reputation and his drawings in oil and pastel demonstrated a maturity and sophistication beyond his years. Life Study III is from this vital moment and must be one of the very best; an essay in tonal construction, true and beautiful and transcending the life room.
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James Cowie rsa (1886-1956) Tanagra out of Doors, 1940 pencil & chalk on paper, 31.5 x 25.75 cms signed lower right provenance Dr James T. Ritchie, Edinburgh
Happily Scotland has always produced painters of great talent who refuse to conform to a particular school or exist neatly in the conventional stream of the history of art. Cowie is one such. His painting was the opposite of painterly, rather carefully constructed. His drawing is precise and beautifully observed but it serves a vision entirely enigmatic. He never embraces the puns and perversities of Surrealism but his draughtsmanship rescues his work from whimsy. The Tanagra figurine, whose obscure origins must have appealed to Cowie, is posed on a wooden platform, scale as often is uncertain, in front of an extensive landscape which in 1940 must be a view from Hospitalfield House whose Victorian battlement is indicated, while a drape and a ‘postcard,’ tipped at a jaunty angle onto a wooded stand complete the visual puzzle.
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Victoria Crowe obe, dhc, frse, ma (rca), rsa, rsw (b.1945) Advent Assembly, 1991 mixed media, 80 x 99 cms signed lower left provenance Private Collection exhibited Royal Scottish Academy Annual Exhibition, Edinburgh, 1992
Advent Assembly is a complex still life composition. The assemblage of objects acts as memento mori but more a paradigm for memory: a life lived, recalled by the ephemera and trophies of its passage. The advent calendar doors are neither open nor closed; there is a small picture to the far right which might be Kittleyknowe in Winter and another picture on the left is possibly Monk’s Cottage, usually painted from the inside looking out. The flowers represent the various life cycles and the scattered objects are mysterious and familiar in equal measure. The little mirror, which casts out a blue light, gives us a glimpse into another, unknown world.
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Victoria Crowe obe, dhc, frse, ma (rca), rsa, rsw (b.1945) Painted Room with a View, 1993 mixed media, 24 x 42 cms signed lower right provenance Private Collection exhibited Mercury Gallery, 1994 illustrated p78, Victoria Crowe: Painted Insights by Victoria Crowe and Michael Walton, Antique Collectors Club, 2001
“With the William Gillies Travel Bequest from the Royal Scottish Academy, and a term’s sabbatical from Edinburgh College of Art, I eventually visited Italy in 1992. This first visit was to Tuscany and Umbria; so many aspects delighted me – the landscape, architecture, interiors, paintings and artifacts of the region – the cultural class of modern Italy with its past. Italy reaffirmed my interest in unexpected juxtapositions. Compositional devices in paintings stretched time and subverted logic. The physical reality in our world, glorified in later Renaissance art, was questioned in earlier works through symbolic use of colour, and compositional harmonies, resulting in static, highly contemplative images.”
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Joan Eardley rsa (1921-1963) Wheat, c.1962 oil on board, 45.7 x 50.8 cms signed lower left provenance The Fine Art Society, London; Aitken Dott, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh; Bourne Fine Art, Edinburgh exhibited Fine Art Society, The Modern Spirit In Scottish Painting, January – February 1978, Cat no. 81; Hatton Gallery, Every Home Should Have One, 4 November 2000 – 20 January 2001
In the final decade of Eardley’s life she travelled back and forth between Townhead in Glasgow and the fishing village of Catterline on the North-East coast of Scotland. Whereas her Townhead works were largely concerned with human subjects, it was the sea and the land that became her obsessive subject in Kincardineshire. The fields behind The Row where she lived in Catterline became the subject of a series of evocative paintings which charted the changing landscape and skies throughout the summer months. The cottage on the horizon has been identified as the artist’s last studio in Catterline, The Watch House.
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Sir William Gillies cbe, rsa, ra, pprsw (1898-1973) Old Gateway, Eyemouth, c.1950 watercolour & pencil, 25 x 35 cms signed lower left provenance Robert Lillie Collection, Edinburgh, Cat no. 63 exhibited The Scottish Gallery, Sir William Gillies, Edinburgh 6th – 27th March 1989, Cat no. 24
Old Gate, Eyemouth shows Gillies’ ability to capture beauty in the mundane. The quirky view focuses on the old stone gateway on one side of Eyemouth’s busy harbour, looking back towards the town with its colourful rooftops and Main Street. Gillies would have painted this painting en plein aire, sketching the scene in pencil first then adding watercolour.
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Sir William Gillies cbe, rsa, ra, pprsw (1898-1973) The Path by the Beeches, Haddington, 1916 watercolour, 21.5 x 27.5cms signed and dated lower right provenance Private Collection, Edinburgh
Painted shortly before Gilles enlisted for WWI when the artist was only 18. The Path by the Beeches is painted in a lyrical landscape tradition which he would leave behind at Edinburgh College of Art when he returned from the War.
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Earl Haig obe, rsa (1918-2009) Bemersyde Moss in March, c.1986 oil on canvas, 71.5 x 92 cms signed lower right provenance Private Collection, Edinburgh exhibited The Scottish Gallery, Earl Haig, 1988, Cat. No.15, The Scottish Gallery, Portrait of a Gallery, July 2010
Bemersyde Moss was a favourite subject for Haig. On his doorstep and ever changing, it is a marshy area below his family home in the Scottish Borders which inspired some of his most evocative, lyrical paintings.
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Earl Haig obe, rsa (1918-2009) Tulips in a Green Vase, c.1965 oil on canvas, 91 x 70 cms provenance The Artist’s Estate; Private Collection exhibited The Scottish Gallery, Earl Haig Memorial Exhibition, May 2011
“I start by being excited by the visual experience. I then try to realise that experience in terms of forms and shapes and colours which are related intellectually on the canvas. The approach is therefore a mixture of perception and conception. I try to go beyond the surfaces of nature, searching for rhythms which have life and movement and are to do with the spirit.”
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John Houston obe, rsa, rsw (1930-2008) Grand Canal Series Venice, c.1999 oil on canvas, 102 x 76 cms signed lower right provenance The Artist’s Estate
It might seem at first perverse to make art in Venice that describes no vista, nor architecture, nor landmark nor point of interest. Houston, however, eschews the conventional, and thereby avoids the predictable and side-steps the weight of Venice painting from Canaletto to McBey ready to overwhelm the unwary artist. Instead he sees the sparkle of light reflected from the façades of buildings in the waters of the canals. There is something of the illusory in an experience of Venice that this series captures; architecture only exists in light and add the ever changing element of water and you have addressed the paradox of the ancient half drowned city.
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John Houston obe, rsa, rsw (1930-2008) Flowers in a Room (ii), c.1967 oil on canvas, 61 x 50.5 cms signed lower right provenance The Scottish Gallery, 1968; Private Collection, Dundee
John Houston had his second Edinburgh Festival oneman show with The Scottish Gallery in 1967. The themes were birds rising, gardens, interiors and bathers. His flowers were not arranged in a conventional still life but were rather the dramatic focus in an enigmatic interior or exterior space. Like Robin Philipson he often divided the picture into sections with straight lines, here suggesting a Japanese wall of lacquer and light (19 years before his first visit to Japan).
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George Leslie Hunter (1879-1931) Stocks in a White Vase, c.1930 oil on canvas, 61 x 51 cms signed lower left provenance McLellan Galleries, Glasgow, 1951; Pearson & Westergaard, Glasgow; Private Collection, Stirling exhibited Fleming Collection, London, Leslie Hunter: A Life of Colour, October 2012 – February 2013
Hunter’s very best work in still life recalls the simple construction, brilliant colour and lively paint of Matisse. Stocks is just such a work. The flowers are distinctive double blooms forming a spike at the top of each stem, here in pink and red and they and the vase lend themselves perfectly to the painter’s energetic application and short brush strokes. This picture was owned by Ion Harrison, who was one of the most prolific and evangelical collectors of the Three (Cadell, Hunter and Peploe). His collection was exhibited at the Thistle Foundation in 1951 and he wrote a piece ‘as I remember them’ for Dr Honeyman’s Three Scottish Colourists published in the same year.
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George Leslie Hunter (1879-1931) Robinson Crusoe’s House, Lower Largo, c.1922 oil on panel, 35 x 25.5 cms signed lower left
Fife proved one of Hunter’s most productive painting grounds in the early twenties. He painted and drew the villages and harbours of the East Neuk as well the interior of the Ancient Kingdom: the mills, farms and cottages with their distinctive red pantile roofs provided inspiration. He depicted the village street at Lower largo several times, curving to its conclusion at the beach and the cottage known as Robinson Crusoe’s House; the village was home of the sailor Alexander Selkirk whose four years on a desert island inspired Daniel Defoe’s tale of 1719. The cottage sits atop the seawall and Hunter must have sat on the beach. As with the best of his work it is made with quick, decisive drawing with the brush and lyrical colour.
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George Leslie Hunter (1879-1931) Over Drumeldrie, c.1922 oil on panel, 23 x 30 cms signed lower left
East of Largo the coast road passes through a few cottages at Drumeldrie and the view north takes in the top of Largo Law, here bathed in the blue haze of a summer’s day. His patron Matthew Justice would come from Dundee to see Hunter paint the cornfields, farms and trees of the rolling countryside.
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George Leslie Hunter (1879-1931) A Paris Street, c.1924 ink & watercolour on paper, 36 x 24.25 cms signed ‘L Hunter’ lower right provenance With T & R Annan, Glasgow
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William Johnstone obe (1897-1981) Countryside in Wartime – Broomhill, 1923 oil on board, 73.7 x 63.5 cms provenance The Stafford Gallery, London; with Alex Reid & Lefevre, London exhibited South America Fine Arts, 1943; Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes, Cordoba, Argentina; Museu Nacional de Bellas Artes, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Arts Council of Great Britain, London, William Johnstone, 1981, Cat no.4 ILLUSTRATED p4, William Johnstone (1897-1981) A Centenary Celebration, 1997 Talbot Rice Gallery, curated by Duncan MacMillan Note (verso) reads that this picture was painted when the artist applied (and was rejected for) the position of war artist, 1923-24
The Countryside in Wartime, Broomhill was painted shortly after Johnstone had graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 1923. This picture was exhibited overseas in 1943 as part of a British Council Exhibition and the title was probably political propaganda. William had worked with his father during the first world war at Greenhead Farm near Selkirk; 600 acres. There were times when it was only his father and William working the land and it must have been backbreaking work – farmers were particularly patriotic and during the War the land emptied of both men and horses. This picture evokes a certain kind of dreamlike stillness; he paints the idea and memory of the landscape but this work also looks forward to his later, abstract, calligraphic works. For William Johnstone the Border Hills remained a rich source of inspiration either on a subconscious or conscious level; his understanding of the cycles of life, of death and renewal sprang from his family background in sheep farming and the landscape had an enduring fascination for him.
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Peter McLaren (b.1964) Still Life with Poppies, 1991 oil on board, 62.5 x 72.5 cms signed and titled verso provenance Private Collection, Edinburgh exhibited The Scottish Gallery, Peter McLaren, 1992
McLaren was the star graduate from Edinburgh College of Art in 1986. His degree show caused a sensation featuring oil paintings of figures on racing bikes painted in ‘action’ mode in a technique approaching performance. In this still life, a sense of movement is maintained in his use of the single sweep of a scarlet brushstroke to convey the enamelling on a teacup or the petal of a poppy, placed on a thick Redpath-like layering of black and white paint.
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David Michie obe rsa rgi frsa (b.1928) Rose Trellis, c.1994 oil on canvas, 100 x 75 cms signed lower left provenance Private Collection, Edinburgh exhibited The Scottish Gallery, David Michie – Paintings, July – August 1994, Cat no. 8
Not constricted by academic drawing, David Michie’s compositions of flora and fauna are simplified in form and often float in a space of flattened colour and pattern as in Rose Trellis. The world that the artist describes is abundant and diverse and appeals directly to our senses. Bright and bold, it is a celebration of life and colour.
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Alberto Morrocco rsa, rsw (1917-1998) Beach Scene, 1949 oil on paper, 30 x 35.5 cms
This charming beach scene was painted in 1949, the year before Morrocco took up the post of Head of Drawing and Painting at Duncan of Jordanstone School of Art in Dundee. As described by the artist to the previous owner, it depicts Morrocco’s young son Leon and friend playing on the beach. His wife Vera is seen in the top left of the scene whilst other figures are visible on the horizon, captured with slight marks of a loaded brush. Although Mediterranean in feel it is actually Balmedie Beach in Aberdeenshire, the place now synonymous with Donald Trump.
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Graham Murray (1907-1987) Interior Scene, Looking through a Doorway, c.1955 oil on canvas, 51 x 41 cms signed lower right
Graham Murray was born in Glasgow followed by training at Glasgow School of Art. After years of travel he returned to Glasgow during the war years and taught at Clydebank. It was at here he first met Stanley Spencer who had been appointed official war artist to the shipyards. They became close friends and Spencer enjoyed visiting Murray’s studio in a spacious flat in Lansdowne Crescent. This painting, with its ambiguous space, clean cut lines and strong composition is a clear homage to FCB Cadell whose interior scenes painted in Edinburgh during the 1920s had a lasting impression on the young Murray.
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SJ Peploe rsa (1871-1935) The Pink Dress: Study of a Burmese Girl, c.1925 oil on canvas, 46 x 41 cm provenance Private Collection, London
Like the girl with the pearl earring or even La Giaconda with her enigmatic smile the bust portrait of a woman with no name has become one of the great, haunting subjects of painting. That question: who is she? And how did it come about? And perhaps what was the relationship with the painter? Details now lost or forever secret lend a poignant quality to what is otherwise just a portrait. Peploe painted many such seemingly simple pictures using the models Jeannie Blyth, Peggy McRae and then in the twenties Poppy Lowe and this mysterious Burmese girl. She has the calm presence and simple attire of an Aung San Suu Kyi; delicate but confident, her image devoid of props there is nothing to distract from her gaze.
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Sir Robin Philipson pprsa, ra (1916-1992) Evening, c.1970 oil on canvas, 91.5 x 91.5 cms signed verso provenance Private Collection exhibited The Scottish Gallery, Festival Exhibition, August 1970; Edinburgh College of Art, Sir Robin Philipson Retrospective Exhibition, 1989
Philipson began to paint rose windows and ecclesiastical interiors in the early 1950s and they were to become a theme he returned to repeatedly over the next twenty years, exploring the complex relationship of colour, light and space. “What excited me most about them was their space, something you can’t really convey in representational painting. In Venice, at San Marco above all, that vast space is so beautifully lit, roundels and lancets and slits and sudden shafts of light, and seemingly endless shadows. I had this great desire to recreate all the visual aspects of these interiors simultaneously, blending the inspired and intricate rhythms of all these shapes and the richly saturated colour.”
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Anne Redpath obe, rsa, ara, arw (1895-1965) Anemones, c.1962 oil on board, 38 x 51 cms signed lower left provenance Dr Robert Lillie Collection, Cat no. 165; Private Collection, Toronto
This late still life by Anne Redpath has the qualities in her art which made her name; a strong use of colour, bold handling of paint and an understanding that a painting was to be enjoyed by both artist and viewer alike. This painting was in the collection of Dr. Robert Lillie, the great patron of post-war Scottish art, much of whose collection was bequeathed to the National Galleries of Scotland.
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Geoff Uglow (b.1978) Princes Street from Calton Hill I, c.2001 oil on board, 70 x 70 cms provenance The Artist’s Studio
After graduating from Glasgow School of Art in 2000, Geoff Uglow accepted a studio from Edinburgh City Council that looked down from the Royal Observatory on Calton Hill down on to the city. Thickly impastoed, his oil paintings capture the same view of Princes Street – identified by the ever-present clock tower of the Balmoral – at different times of day: a spontaneous reaction to the city in changing light and weather. Thick impasto heightens the momentary quality of the subject. The raw energy of Uglow’s workmanship is conveyed in the heavy, swirling daubs of paint that hang off the canvas as if he has just lifted his brush even after the paint has dried.
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Geoff Uglow (b.1978) Princes Street from Calton Hill II, c.2001 oil on board, 70 x 70 cms provenance The Artist’s Studio
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Alison Watt obe (b.1965) Portrait of Stephen Conroy, 1987 oil on canvas, 101.5 x 56 cms signed, dated and inscribed ‘Alison Watt ’87 / “Stephen Conroy” Feb ’87’
This portrait of Stephen Conroy was made in February 1987, a few months before he graduated in a frenzy of critical and commercial attention never seen before at The School of Art. Watt would experience something similar the following year. Both displayed a maturity and originality of vision as graduating artists which fully justified the extraordinary interest in them and their degree shows but one of the casualties of the moment was their own relationship. The Conroy portrait amply illustrated how Watt became the most sought after painter of the time and captures a moment in both their lives before the leap into artistic stardom. We can see in the sitter a shy young man at once confident in his attire and status but pensive: arms folded and gaze averted. The interior setting is pure Watt: cool, anodyne, tonally even, partial details suggesting much more. By the time of her 2000 exhibition at the SNGMA, Shift, which marked her as the youngest female artist to be so honoured she had abandoned the figure, but this portrait reminds us of her enormous talent as a figure painter.
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Sylvia Wishart rsa (1936-2008) The Hurricane Lamp, 1968 mixed media, 68 x 40 cms signed and dated lower right
The Hurricane Lamp was probably painted at Sylvia’s North House, her cottage on the island of Hoy at Rackwick, which she renovated from a near ruin. The house became her studio; in the foreground are her familiar everyday objects and beyond the window is the sea and headland of Orkney. The Piers Art Centre hosted a retrospective of her work in 2011 called A Lamp in the Seaward Window, the Art of Sylvia Wishart and this example follows the same theme. The image has a delicacy that she achieved by applying paint thickly then working in, scraped off, creating a subtle texture and light palette. The original frame is decorated with sgraffito and the slightly upright dimensions work perfectly in the traditional crofts of her native Orkney.
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Published by The Scottish Gallery to coincide with the exhibition modern masters 3 – 27 July 2013 Exhibition can be viewed online at www.scottish-gallery.co.uk/modernmasters ISBN: 978-1-905146-79-6 Designed by www.kennethgray.co.uk Printed by J Thomson Colour Printers All rights reserved. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced in any form by print, photocopy or by any other means, without the permission of the copyright holders and of the publishers.
16 Dundas Street, Edinburgh EH3 6HZ tel 0131 558 1200 email mail@scottish-gallery.co.uk web www.scottish-gallery.co.uk
Right: Joan Eardley rsa (1921-1963), Wheat, c.1962, oil on board, 45.7 x 50.8 cms
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