Modern Masters 180th Anniversary Edition by The Scottish Gallery

MODERN MASTERS 180th Anniversary Edition

MODERN MASTERS 180th Anniversary Edition 6–29 January 2022

From left: Tommy Zyw, Director; Christina Jansen, Managing Director; Guy Peploe, Non-executive Director; Chris Brickley, Senior Picture Specialist. Photograph by Ian Georgeson

An Independent History | Celebrating 180 Years of Art by Christina Jansen, The Managing Director

We open 2022 with a Modern Masters 180th anniversary edition to complement our contemporary programme. Modern Masters has become the perfect vehicle to celebrate our history, rediscover artists and highlight current talent. This edition also pays tribute to Guy Peploe, who has recently taken up an nonexecutive role and has made an outstanding contribution to The Scottish Gallery. He has been with ‘the firm’ for nearly four decades. We have included several vintage essays, alongside his perceptive picture notes and obituary for Dame Elizabeth Blackadder. There are few art historians with Guy’s ability to communicate in a personal, academic, poetic and meaningful way. This January we welcome Chris Brickley to The Gallery as our new Senior Picture Specialist. With over 25 years’ experience in the arts, most recently as Head of Pictures and Senior Auctioneer for Bonhams in Scotland, and with a PhD in Scottish Art, he says: ‘I am thrilled to be joining such a prestigious institution as The Scottish Gallery, at such an exciting juncture for the business. I’m also looking forward to using my knowledge and experience in a different environment.’ Chris has contributed throughout this edition, including a new biographical essay on the Scottish Colourist George Leslie Hunter to accompany an exceptional collection of pictures. All of the artists included in this catalogue represent our history and commitment to contemporary art. We are and always have been

an evolving, human business – we understand the life of an artist, and over 180 years The Gallery has supported hundreds of artists and in this way alone has quietly made a significant contribution to Scottish culture. Last year, we celebrated the centenary of the birth of Joan Eardley and, despite the pandemic, many hundreds of visitors patiently queued outside The Gallery, a visit akin to a personal pilgrimage – she has a universal appeal which grows each year. As we had hoped from the huge publicity generated, and from our preeminent position as her and the estate’s representative, three lovely examples newly-consigned are available for sale in the catalogue. We also include the work of several artists associated with the North East: Ian Fleming, Donald Morison Buyers, Barbara Balmer and Frances Walker. The wide group of artists who constitute The Edinburgh School are well-represented in our exhibition, and we have significant consignments of work by Anne Redpath, Sir William MacTaggart, Sir Robin Philipson, Dame Elizabeth Blackadder and John Houston. Modern Masters has never attempted to be a survey, but rather to look at individual works, their unique contributions to the sum of Scottish painting and – along the way – to present artists whose work deserves to be reappraised. Just as history is brought to life in the detail of primary sources, so the contemplation of a work of art can provide an insight into its time and continued relevance. As ever, we look forward to welcoming you to The Scottish Gallery online, and in person.

The Scottish Gallery window display at 26 South Castle Street, c.1951.

Modern Masters 180th Anniversary Edition

Barbara Balmer (1929–2017) Mardi Barrie (1930–2004) Dame Elizabeth Blackadder (1931–2021) Donald Morison Buyers (1930–2003) Victoria Crowe (b.1945) Joan Eardley (1921–1963) Ian Fleming (1906–1994) Masayuki Hara (b.1956) John Houston (1930–2008) George Leslie Hunter (1877–1931) Jack Knox (1936–2015) Sir William MacTaggart (1903–1981) William McTaggart (1835–1910) James Morrison (1932–2020) Alberto Morrocco (1917–1998) Denis Peploe (1914–1993)

8 12 18 24 26 30 38 44 50 54 66 68 70 72 78 84

Sir Robin Philipson (1916–1992) Anne Redpath (1895–1965) Tom Scott (1854–1927) Sylvia von Hartmann (b.1942) Frances Walker (b.1930) James Watt (b.1931)

90 96 106 108 114 120

A private view at The Scottish Gallery, Castle Street, c.1978.

Barbara Balmer RSA, RSW, RGI (1929–2017)

Barbara Balmer studied at Edinburgh College of Art after the Second World War and subsequently enjoyed a travelling scholarship to France and Spain and a further trip to Italy with a group led by Douglas Percy Bliss. She married the artist and graphic designer George Mackie and they spent many years in Aberdeen where Balmer lectured at Gray’s School of Art between 1970 and 1980. She exhibited in Edinburgh with The Gallery having one-person shows in 1975, 1980, 1985 and 1988. In 1995 Aberdeen Art Gallery held a retrospective of her work which travelled to Dundee, Lincoln and Coventry. Latterly the family was based in Stamford in Lincolnshire spending the summers in Tuscany. Her artistic interests included the early Italian primitives, Stanley Spencer, Giorgio Morandi and the Edinburgh painter Cecile Walton, but her individual take on landscape and still life was purely her own. An intense, personal vision of landscape and the natural world is translated into ethereal interior/exterior paintings and still life, sharply in focus but soft in tone, graphically sophisticated but enigmatic. Her works are held in many private and public collections including The Scottish National Portrait Gallery, The Royal Collection and Perth, Dundee and Lincoln Art Galleries.

Barbara Balmer in her studio, c.1988.

Pictorialist, stylist, classicist, modernist. She is all of these things and more. Instantly recognisable at 50 yards. Gentle like a dove. Feminine, if the expression is excusable, but tough in discipline, draughtsmanship and the sense of the fitness of things she brings together. I am reminded of Saladin’s scimitar scything silk. Landscape and interiors veiled in pink and lilac mist. Skies showering confetti instead of snow. Breezes are zephyrs. Beds invite the rapture of sleep. Intimate portraits beguile. She is the sorcerer and illusionist, yet the world she makes is real. W. Gordon Smith Quote from The Scotsman obituary by Tom and Pam Wilson, January 2018

This joyful spring watercolour composition has been carefully arranged like a stage set by the artist. The mahogany table top is upturned, allowing for a strong horizontal pictorial line which offsets the solid graphic lines of a white jug holding a crown of cascading flowers. The key colour notes are yellow, pink and red and the petals have been delicately exaggerated to amplify their natural beauty.

Barbara Balmer RSA, RSW, RGI (1929–2017) 1. Still Life with Red Tulips and Daffodils, 1977 watercolour, 48.5 x 37 cm signed and dated lower right

Mardi Barrie RSW (1930–2004)

Mardi Barrie was an exact contemporary of Elizabeth Blackadder and John Houston and, like Houston, she came from Fife and attended Edinburgh College of Art from 1948. She went on to teach at Broughton School in Edinburgh. She exhibited widely, including latterly with the Bruton Gallery and the Thackeray in London as well as one–person and group shows with The Scottish Gallery. Like so many Edinburgh Diplomates she owes something to William Gillies, in particular his later oils when he employed a palette knife. Also, like Gillies, she eschewed strong colour, preferring earth tones, her work inhabiting a stygian world of dusk and shadow. Her landscape routinely misses out the horizon, her subject as much in the landscape as of it. In this she is allied to painters such as Peter Lanyon, Ivon Hitchens and William Burns in Scotland, the abstract a means to address the natural world and a rich impasto and paint surface the plastic equivalent of the textures of the landscape.

Mardi Barrie, c.1980. Photograph by Robert Mabon

Kirkcaldy-born, educated at the University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh College of Art. Barrie’s work is distinctive, original and often imposing in scale, using monumental forms to great effect. She generally favoured landscape, coastal scenes and cityscapes, often devoid of human content, and rendered these in a tonal palette. Paint is applied liberally, with a knife, and picture titles are often allusive or oblique rather than specific to a particular location. As more celebrated Scottish landscape painters of her era tended to align themselves to a geographical area eg Eardley (whose Catterline palette was so influential, as here), Houston, Morrison, this may in part account for Barrie being under-appreciated in the market. She had a studio in the West End of Edinburgh, and exhibited regularly from 1960.

Mardi Barrie RSW (1930–2004) 2. South, South West, c.1979 acrylic on board, 70 x 93 cm signed lower right EXHIBITED Some Recent Paintings Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1979, cat. 26 PROVENANCE The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation, London, no. 262

Mardi Barrie’s landscape paintings are instantly recognisable. She sketched on the spot, and then worked up compositions in her Melville Street studio using a knife and generous impasto. This example is stark and very Scottish, although the sky retains a semblance of warmth, and shares aspects in common with (the early work of) James Morrison, Donald Buyers and Perpetua Pope. Even when painting on a small scale Barrie’s work is of depth and substance, judiciously placing monumental forms in space to create a harmonious composition.

Mardi Barrie RSW (1930–2004) 3. Simply Winter Sunset, c.1985–90 mixed media on board, 28 x 34 cm signed lower left

Remembering Dame Elizabeth Blackadder DBE, RA, RSA, HRSW, RGI (1931–2021) by Guy Peploe

Dame Elizabeth Blackadder DBE, RA, RSA, HRSW, RGI, Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a with a long list of Honorary Degrees. She was the first woman to be elected to both the Royal Academy in London and the Royal Scottish Academy. Honoured with a retrospective exhibition, organised by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 2000, and an early monograph published by Judith Bumpus. In 1999 her biography was written by Professor Duncan Macmillan, and another book on her printmaking was published by Chris Allan in 2003. She held regular solo exhibitions in London and Edinburgh, with The Mercury Gallery and The Scottish Gallery, and was included in all the significant surveys of British Art over the last forty or so years. She was also Painter and Limner to Her Majesty the Queen in Scotland. Anyone who had the privilege to know Elizabeth knew that she was a modest, shy person, with no time for ego or competition. She was the antithesis of the painter as ‘peacock’, craving admiration, continually referring to himself in the third person. To herself she was

John Houston and Elizabeth Blackadder, 1954.

never Dame Elizabeth Blackadder, and did not see herself as a public figure. I recall picking up a watercolour from her, at home, and noticing that she had absentmindedly signed Elizabeth Houston, perhaps having just paid the fish-man. Her assertiveness was instead contained in her art – its originality, subtlety, and strength a match for anything else hung on the line in the RSA Annual show, or any Museum. We can set false modesty aside; she was a great artist. And it is worth reflecting on how this was manifest. There is a particular quality about every mark she made: in a sketchbook, on a sheet of watercolour paper, the first essay on a newly primed canvas, or the final mark when the painting suggested itself as finished. Distinctive and beautiful marks; perfectly balanced modulated colour. And her greatness was not confined to her technique; she had plenty to say. Her choices of subjects were always original. She worked in the traditional territory of landscape and still life, her inheritance from Gillies and The Edinburgh School, but she subverted conventional beauty and found a new way of seeing – a block of uniform forestry on a dark hillside would make a Blackadder subject, rather than the repoussoir trees and classical vistas of Claude and Constable. In the studio, when painting flowers: irises, and tulips from the garden, she was not a careful illustrator. Quick, light energetic pencil drawing would precede the sumptuous watercolour. As her painting developed, she was far from satisfied by a tried formula; in the fifties and sixties she used plenty of impasto – and typically a brilliant deployment of white – enlivened with jewel-like colour. These paintings have links with British Pop Art, but also with European tachism, with de Stael and Tàpies.

In the eighties and beyond, the oriental made its entrance and works in both oil and watercolour of enigmatic, exotic, and mundane objects, often combined with flowers, demonstrate her perfect sense of design in their placement in her composition. As a teacher at Edinburgh College of Art, she is not remembered as a dedicated didact, but many hundreds of students will have benefited from her quiet counsel and by the dedication of her professional example: making art, what MacTaggart called “The good habit,” was as much about hard work as inspiration. There was no complacency in her own practice, and this is perfectly exemplified by her commitment to printmaking, with trying all print media and working with creative technicians and artists. Her screen prints and lithographs of flowers, made at the Glasgow Print Studio, helped inform and enhance her approach to watercolour back in the studio. At home she was usually to be found in her studio, or studios: watercolours made in the room to the right at the front of the house, her oil painting studio to the left; gracious when interrupted, but always anxious to get back. Throughout her life travel was a vital ingredient of her art, inspiring new subjects, and providing material to be brought home and included in studio compositions. Her first visit to Japan, with John, was in 1985, and the toys, wrappers, kimonos, lacquer boxes and so on which came

home with her were put to good use. Japanese garden design, the interior/exterior relationship of architecture, the temple building profile – a pool of koi carp. Her own aesthetic met with the orient and the collision was gentle and creative. In Europe, in some of the great and lesser cities, where Michelin-starred restaurants were booked in advance of the holidays with friends (which she and John enjoyed so much) she always took time to walk and scout for subjects A hoopoe over the midday quiet of St Emillion, the little chug chug ferry crossing the Venetian lagoon – these were her subjects – always surprising and original, appealing to her, when only she could see the charm and truths to be revealed. In Edinburgh, in the Autumn, a cat would bring in a leaf which would be quietly taken to the studio to become a subject, or the bold outline of a Galia melon from Waitrose would anchor a table-top still life composition. What might be her artistic legacy? Well, there is much to come, and her and John’s generosity in planning will ensure a long productive future. But, beyond any memorialization, her great bequest is the personal one: the gift of her work, the opportunity for an individual to stand in front of one of her paintings, wherever it is found, and let the satisfaction of its rightness work a strange alchemy which leaves the viewer a better more fulfilled person.

Elizabeth Blackadder in her studio, c.1980.

Elizabeth Blackadder in her studio, 2010.

Blackadder’s pen and wash drawings are alone sufficient to secure her reputation as one of the greatest post-war Scottish artists. Based on acute observation, instinctive choices of detail combining ‘dry’ application of tonal washes and delicate line, they are immensely visually satisfying. She admired Robert Henderson Blyth, whose own wash-drawings provide the closest comparison and, like all her brilliant generation, something is owed to William Gillies, at least in her choice of subject: such charms revealed from the mundane. Brittany was a favourite destination for Elizabeth and her husband John Houston; the clarity of the light and unspoilt character of the coast and hinterland drawing them back.

Elizabeth Blackadder DBE, RA, RSA, HRSW, RGI (1931–2021) 4. Church in Brittany, 1963 pencil, ink and wash, 49.5 x 68.5 cm signed lower right

There is an alternative biography for Elizabeth Blackadder marked in cat dynasties. In the early seventies an elegant Abyssinian moved subtly camouflaged through Blackadder’s still life and interiors. Here he is caught in action, the impossibly fine features in sharp focus, the soft body rendered beautifully in rubbed pastel. This is not a preparatory drawing, it is the artist expressing her love for the animal: its lithe, imperious independence.

Elizabeth Blackadder DBE, RA, RSA, HRSW, RGI (1931–2021) 5. Prowling Cat, 1973 pastel drawing, 30 x 44 cm signed and dated lower right EXHIBITED Christmas Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1973, cat. 11 PROVENANCE Private collection, Edinburgh

Donald Morison Buyers RSW (1930–2003)

Donald Buyers was born in 1930 in Aberdeen where he attended the Grammar School and then Gray’s School of Art, after which he assisted his tutor Robert Sivell in the murals at the University Union in Schoolhill. His was a quiet life, well-lived, throughout which family and painting were his twin loves. A honeymoon in Paris turned into an extended stay and the School of Paris was always present in his work. Back in Aberdeen he began to teach in schools: Robert Gordon’s, and eventually as a visiting lecturer at Gray’s, but he never stopped working and exhibiting. Autumn is a heartfelt response to a deeply familiar landscape and depicts the hills and valley floor of Royal Deeside. His work owes much to the Modern British period, to Nash, Christopher Wood, Gillies and perhaps Robert Henderson Blyth, who was by then living in Aberdeen.

Donald Morison Buyers RSW (1930–2003) 6. Autumn, 1972 oil on board, 52 x 75 cm signed and dated lower left

The ABBO Group. Eric Auld, Bill Baxter, Bill Ord and Donald Buyers at the opening of the first McLellan exhibition, 1960.

Victoria Crowe OBE, DHC, FRSE, MA(RCA), RSA, RSW (b.1945)

Victoria Crowe studied at Kingston School of Art from 1961–65 and at the Royal College of Art, London, from 1965–68. At her postgraduate show, she was invited by Sir Robin Philipson to teach at Edinburgh College of Art. For thirty years she worked as a part-time lecturer in the School of Drawing and Painting while developing her own artistic practice. She lives and works in West Linton, Edinburgh, and Venice. Her first one-person exhibition, after leaving the Royal College of Art, was in London and she has subsequently gone on to have over fifty solo shows. Victoria Crowe’s first solo exhibition at The Scottish Gallery was in 1970. In August 2018, The Scottish National Portrait Gallery held a retrospective exhibition of Victoria Crowe’s portraits, Beyond Likeness. In 2019, The City Art Centre honoured Victoria Crowe’s career with a four floor retrospective, 50 Years of Painting. Her retrospective enjoyed a record number of visitors and embraced every aspect of Crowe’s ouevre and featured over 150 artworks. The Gallery hosted a complementary exhibition in September 2019, 50 Years: Drawing & Thinking, which examined her studio practice. Victoria Crowe is a member of the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) and the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolours (RSW). In 2000, her exhibition A Shepherd’s Life, consisting of work selected from the 1970s and 80s, was one of the National Galleries of Scotland’s Millennium exhibitions. The exhibition toured Scotland and was re-gathered in 2009 for a three-month exhibition at the Fleming Collection, London. Victoria was awarded an OBE for Services to Art

Victoria Crowe, c.1972. Photograph by Michael Walton MBE

in 2004 and, from 2004–2007, she was appointed Senior Visiting Scholar at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. The resulting work, Plant Memory, was exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy in 2007 and subsequently toured Scotland. In 2009, she received an Honorary Degree from The University of Aberdeen and in 2010 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 2013, Dovecot Studios wove a large-scale tapestry of Victoria’s painting Large Tree Group. This collaborative tapestry was acquired for the National Museums Scotland. In 2015, Victoria was an invited artist-inresidence at Dumfries House and in 2016 a group of works by the artist was acquired by the National Galleries of Scotland. Victoria was commissioned by the Worshipful Company of Leathersellers in 2014 to design a forty-metre tapestry for their new hall in the city of London, which took over three years to weave and was installed in January 2017. Dovecot Studios has recently worked with Victoria Crowe to produce a new tapestry inspired by a detail from her painting Twilight, Venice, 2014. The new tapestry, Richer Twilight, Venice was completed and unveiled in September 2019. In 2021, Another Time, Another Place, comprising twelve paintings by Victoria Crowe which inspired twelve poems by Christine De Luca to form a beautiful conversation between an artist and a poet, was met with great critical acclaim. Her work is held in numerous public and private collections worldwide.

In the morning the storm has abated but a brooding sky remains, dark above the billows of new snow in the garden. The shrubs have disappeared, humps under the soft blanket above, while the trees at the boundary are half buried, their upper branches a defiant crackle against the light. The garden is a place of culture and control but Crowe understands that in mid-winter its boundaries are blurred as the elements hold sway, a paradigm for the painter who must assert the particular quality of place but reflect ever-changing character in her painterly response.

Victoria Crowe OBE, DHC, FRSE, MA(RCA), RSA, RSW (b.1945) 7. Snow Blown Garden, c.1985 oil on canvas, 98 x 112 cm signed lower right, signed and inscribed verso EXHIBITED Victoria Crowe, Paintings and Watercolours, Thackeray Gallery, London, 1985

Joan Eardley RSA (1921–1963)

In 2021, The Scottish Gallery celebrated the centenary of the birth of Joan Eardley. Her stature as an artist of international significance is assured and her work continues to draw a personal, emotional response from those who care to look. Throughout her short, prolific life she was attracted by the real and the raw: in Italy and France she avoided the guidebook recommendations; it was the beggars in St Mark’s Square that instigated an ambitiouslyscaled painting, the impoverished and old provided her sitters and a tumbledown farm with an ox and a stack of maize appealed more than the cathedrals and castles of France. In Glasgow she chose to place herself amongst the poverty, the street urchins comfortable in her benign, eccentric presence – what an anthropologist would call ‘participant observation’. But for Eardley there was no distinction between herself and her subject, and this full inhabitation lends an extraordinary truth and poignancy to her

streets and kids. Only in Catterline did nature impose itself and she battled with the elements to respond in kind, that same power seen in the boiling seas and storms which battered the little hamlet for half the year. In the summers she sat amongst the grasses and hedgerows, and got down by the drying nets and boats being repaired and painted, as close to nature and the way of life of the families who made their lives in that harsh place as she could. The paintings are romantic, but it is not the romance of Turner or Wordsworth but something more earthy, understood through suffering and privation, monumental images of nature’s power to destroy and regenerate. In the last year of her life, having just turned forty, she sacrificed herself for work as she felt the cancer grow in her and the urgency in the painting is palpable, as much as the generosity of her spirit.

The Scottish Gallery, Joan Eardley publications, 2013–2021.

Joan Eardley spent almost six months in Italy in 1947–48 making several trips into the countryside in the Emilia Romagna. The landscape is rolling, with hill towns and mixed farms which still practised ploughing with bulls and oxen. There are drawings of the beasts and one directly preparatory for this work is held by Aberdeen Art Gallery and it is likely this work was exhibited with the Italian drawings and oil paintings at the Glasgow School of Art in 1949. The paintings would have been made back in Glasgow from the drawings. This work was acquired by the family of the present owners near this time, at least before 1953 and most likely from the SSA in 1950 or 1951. Eardley was attracted to realism in the sense of real communities and individuals; she would have been familiar with both European realist painters such as Courbet, Millet and of course

Joan Eardley RSA (1921–1963) 8. Team of Oxen Ploughing, c.1949–52 oil on canvas, 39 x 91 cm signed lower right PROVENANCE Private collection, Caithness

the magic realism of Van Gogh, but also with The Glasgow Boys working at Cockburnspath and Kirkcudbright. In Scotland she worked on Arran and at Clydebank and of course her great subjects of Townhead and Catterline were ahead of her. But Oxen Ploughing is an ambitious, early subject painting which looks forward to the coming years. The sky is dark over the hills beyond the fields, in the middle ground a medieval farm sits in the lee of a grove of trees while the entire width of the foreground is occupied with the team of four oxen, the plough and the woman leading. A tall man encourages the team from the rear. This vision would not have changed for a thousand years but is handled without sentimentality, the painting constructed with colour, tone, mass and line not carefully, but bold: the work of an artist confident in her own approach and abilities.

In 1946 Joan Eardley accepted a commission to undertake a mural painting at Sincil Bank Secondary Modern Girls School in Lincoln. The mural does not survive, but family correspondence attests to a busy time working with senior girls on the mural, but the final result was not to the artist’s satisfaction. She did have time to go out and do some drawing and painting in gouache, and this windmill will belong to this trip. Like all her work in front of the subject it is quick, rough and true to the place and conditions. A low sun casts a dirty light through a haze and the ramshackle mill has the romantic charm of the ruin.

Joan Eardley RSA (1921–1963) 9. Windmill, c.1946 mixed media on paper, 24 x 41 cm signed lower right PROVENANCE Private collection, Perthshire

Joan Eardley’s niece Anne Morrison has identified this drawing as the west rather than east coast, likely the Clyde. It depicts a pair of light Clyde puffers in a harbour at low tide; the boats have keels but are designed to rest happily on sand or mud. Eardley painted similar subjects in Arbroath when she attended Hospitalfield House as an art student. Her drawing is characteristically free and direct but more complete than most drawings, the dirty orange of the hulls glowing in the encroaching dusk and strong inky strokes used to describe the architecture of the harbour.

Joan Eardley RSA (1921–1963) 10. Two Puffers, c.1950 mixed media on paper, 25 x 18 cm signed lower left PROVENANCE Private collection, Perthshire

Ian Fleming RSA, RSW (1906–1994)

Ian Fleming was born in Glasgow in 1906 and studied at Glasgow School of Art during the 1920s. He began printmaking at art school, where his skill was quickly noticed, Glasgow Art Gallery buying two prints whilst he was still a student. He joined the staff at Glasgow School of Art in 1931 and soon met the Edinburgh-based printmaker William Wilson through their mutual acquaintance Adam Bruce Thomson. Wilson and Fleming struck up an important friendship, sharing views on printmaking technique and subjects, their influence on each other was of mutual benefit to both their practices. During his time at Glasgow School of Art Fleming painted a portrait of the two Roberts – Colquhoun and Macbryde – who were his students at the time (alongside a young Joan Eardley). During the War, Fleming served first as a reserve policeman before joining the Pioneer Corps seeing action in France, the Low Countries and Germany. He left the Army in 1946 as an Acting Major and returned briefly to Glasgow before taking up the position of Warden at Hospitalfield near Arbroath, succeeding the artist, James Cowie. The fishing towns of Angus and Kincardineshire were to be his inspiration for many paintings of this period in which he celebrated the colour, forms and architecture of the working harbour communities. In 1954, he relocated to Aberdeen as Principal of Gray’s School of Art but continued to pursue his painting practice alongside his academic commitments. He was elected a full Academician of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1956, and by the time of his death was the longest-established member. After retiring in 1971 he was one of the founding members, including Frances Walker (p. 114) of Peacock Printmakers in Aberdeen.

Ian Fleming at his desk at Gray’s School of Art. Photograph RGU Art and Heritage

Right: Ian Fleming, Harbour Mist, 1978 (cat. 12) (detail)

Auchmithie is a small fishing village in Angus, three miles northeast of Arbroath. The town is perched on a high red sandstone cliff above a shingle beach. In this painting, dating from the early 1950s, Fleming finds his subject at the periphery of the village, the receding cliffside sheds and cottages providing exciting formal relationships. The circular lifebuoy, a recurring motif in Fleming’s work, is captured with one swift brush load of white paint, a visual device balancing the predominantly angular composition.

Ian Fleming RSA, RSW (1906–1994) 11. Auchmithie, c.1953 oil on board, 40 x 76 cm signed lower right, signed and title inscribed verso EXHIBITED Annual Exhibition, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh 1980/81, cat. 80

The term haar is a word commonly associated with lands bordering the North Sea, primarily eastern Scotland, and this delicate tonal painting depicts the cold sea fog which makes its mystical appearance throughout the spring and summer. Harbour Mist depicts a seawall and town with the morning sun hovering in the opaque atmosphere.

Ian Fleming RSA, RSW (1906–1994) 12. Harbour Mist, 1978 oil on board, 52 x 64 cm signed lower right, signed and title inscribed verso EXHIBITED Annual Exhibition, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh 1979, cat. 176

Masayuki Hara (b.1956)

Japanese artist Masayuki graduated from Tama Art University in 1979 and has since exhibited regularly in Tokyo and in New York. He moved to Britain in 1998 and has been living and working in Scotland since 2005. In the hands of Masayuki Hara the subject, rural and suburban, is realised in atomic detail. He works in a European tradition of trompe l’oeil adopted by American artists in the sixties and fully expressed in Japan and China in more recent times. His beautiful small panels demonstrate an extraordinary commitment to a particular subject which has won his attention – perhaps a fleeting light effect or a ripple on still water – then painstakingly and lovingly transformed into art. Super-realist painting implies a huge commitment to the subject. Banality is deliberate in as much early photorealist painting but for the realist looking at landscape the sublime must be present, the fleeting captured in forensic detail. In Hara's work, his painting is an extraordinary achievement that persists in the memory, containing ideas of journey, home and melancholy and renewal.

If I went to the Alps in search of beautiful and magnificent landscapes, then after my first strong impression has subsided, would I still want to portray them? Landscape paintings, each like a beautifully decorated chocolate box, are definitely picturesque and they can be seen in museums around the world, but it may no longer be necessary to search for he picturesque. Drawing everyday scenery is, think, similar to when a poet writes haiku. A sympathy of each other’s memories is created between the picture and the viewer, a world of images spreads wider and deeper, then eventually, meanings are created in the landscape. The landscape paintings I pursue may be associated with the haiku world. Masayuki Hara, 2020

Masayuki Hara near Dawyck, Scottish Borders, 2020.

Thin Ice Day and Cramond Old Bridge by Masayuki Hara are supreme examples of hyperreal landscape painting – a Japanese master applying his extraordinary skill and commitment to quiet, Edinburgh backwater subjects. The verisimilitude is remarkable, and surely John Ruskin would approve of the consistency of the application, but Masayuki has of course edited as much as copied his chosen subject, because nature can be composed, content can be adjusted to make the best balance of shape, pattern and colour; we do not contemplate reality (which can be no more than sensory experience distilled into memory) but the artist’s artifice – a sort of parallel universe in arrested time. It is necessary for hyper-reality to be utterly still and its contemplation can only be achieved in a moment of equivalent stillness, the time we can comfortably hold our breath, but the ripples on the canal will always be the same and the lichen marks on the stone parapet of Cramond Old Bridge are immutable.

Masayuki Hara (b.1956) 13. Thin Ice Day, 2021 oil on board, 53 x 35 cm signed lower right PROVENANCE The artist’s studio

Masayuki Hara (b.1956) 14. Cramond Old Bridge, 2021 oil on board, 40.5 x 60 cm signed lower right PROVENANCE The artist’s studio

John Houston OBE, RSA, RSW, RGI (1930–2008) by Guy Peploe

John Houston was brought up in Buckhaven in Fife and the ever-changing light over the Forth estuary and fields falling away to the shoreline were the backdrop to an idyllic childhood of horse fairs, golf, football and eventually the inspiration to be a painter. Houston was drawn into the fold of Edinburgh College of Art and became as prodigious and natural a painter as his mentor William Gillies. He travelled widely, making exhibitions after trips to Europe, Japan and America, always with his wife and soulmate Elizabeth Blackadder. But like any great landscape painter there was a particular, deep engagement with one subject and Houston studied the Forth in all conditions with oil, watercolour, pastel and monotype. He could not recall when he started to paint the views north, from the south of the river, from the beaches of East Lothian to the Paps of Fife or in wild or obscure weather when the view is often anchored by the hard profile of the Bass Rock. Houston was ten times a solo exhibitor at The Edinburgh International Festival, between 1961 and his last show in 2008. He was an expressionist who could also evoke the subtle, particular character of place, but as with The Festival his vision and ambition always looked outward.

Houston chooses to portray the extremities of the day at the extremities of the land. His theme is the bizarre chemistry of elemental conflict: a snowstorm at sea; the setting sun sinking apparently into the ocean with an almost audible hiss. Iain Gale in Scotland on Sunday, 10.viii.1997 For John Houston the distinctive profile of the Bass Rock (seen on following page) is an anchor for his expressionism, keeping it real and located. It appears in all media, seen in all seasons, weathers and times of day, as did Mt Sainte-Victoire for Cézanne. Here a livid hue reveals the shape of the rock as dirty weather and dusk combine, the last light catching the rivulets running across the beach in the foreground.

John Houston and Elizabeth Blackadder, c.1985.

John Houston OBE, RSA, RSW, RGI (1930–2008) 15. Bass Rock, 1980 watercolour, 18.5 x 29 cm signed and dated lower right PROVENANCE Private collection, North Berwick

John Houston OBE, RSA, RSW, RGI (1930–2008) 16. Sun, Sea and Sky, 2004 watercolour, 14 x 18 cm signed lower left PROVENANCE Private collection, Larbert

George Leslie Hunter (1877–1931) by Chris Brickley

At his best, Leslie Hunter is one of Scotland’s most original artists of the 20th Century. Like his friend, and fellow Colourist, SJ Peploe, Hunter is now best-known as a painter of still life – a theme which they introduced into Modern British Art in the early 1900s. Their reputation as masters of colour, who rearranged favoured studio props, flowers and fruit into unique, timeless essays in modernism, ensures their international following today. These paintings have a universal appeal. However, there is much more to Hunter. A closer study of his oeuvre reveals that the landscapes he produced during his most productive periods in the 1920s – Fife, Loch Lomond, or in the south of France, are pioneering. A personal favourite is the series of small plein air panels of Venice in 1922. Here we see the mature artist, buoyed by the support of a cohort of private patrons and two premier commercial galleries, producing fresh and forward-looking work. While much of his output was in oils, Hunter was also an excellent draughtsman who mastered watercolour, pastel and ink. He even found time to turn to etching. Part of the reason for Hunter’s success as an artist, and as a modernist, was his world view. Born in Rothesay in 1877, he emigrated to California as a teenager and became a professional illustrator. Disaster struck in 1906 when an earthquake in San Francisco destroyed his artworks, and so much more, spurring the family to return to Scotland. He lived with his mother in Glasgow until her death in 1913, continuing to produce illustrations such as a charming Clyde Coast steamer for the Scots Pictorial. Alexander Reid gave him his first exhibitions, in 1913 and 1916, largely comprising still life displaying rich colour and dark backgrounds in the Dutch manner. These

sold well. However, even then his manner was singular – painterly, vigorous and fluid. Just before the war, there were short trips to northern France where his palette lightened considerably and his work is bold and experimental. France was to be a constant source of renewal and inspiration, as it was for the other Colourists and the Glasgow Boys before them. 1919 saw his first visit to Fife, and much work in watercolour which suited his free, instinctive style. Largo, St Monans, Lundin Links, Ceres

and Drumeldrie were his preferred spots as he relished the unique light and bright, breezy weather of the Kingdom. Reid’s sales, and loyal collectors such as Matthew Justice and William McInnes, funded a sketching tour to France and Italy in 1922 where small oils painted directly onto unprimed panels were particularly fine, with a light spontaneous touch. The following year was key, with an exhibition alongside Peploe and Cadell at the Leicester Galleries in London where The Times observed ‘Mr Hunter loves paint and the fatness of paint. He loads it on lusciously… his still life paintings are strong and simple in design and gorgeous in colour… his firm taste and mastery of colour’. Hunter, though, was a fragile personality and despite the high quality of his work, and wider recognition, a breakdown ensued. Fife, and the support of his closest friends, beckoned and for the next three years he worked in Scotland. By 1924, Hunter boasted a joint contract with Aitken Dott in Edinburgh, and Reid in Glasgow. This guaranteed income, and successful exhibitions, saw his star at its zenith. There was another London show with Peploe and Fergusson, both of whom he had known in Paris since 1910, and an exhibition in the city at Galerie Barbazanges in June ’24 featuring the four artists later to be known as the Scottish Colourists. That year he was also at Loch Lomond, engaged on significant paintings of houseboats at Balloch. He was, though, becoming less prolific and his dealers’ contracts were adjusted to reflect the increasingly precarious nature of his lifestyle and mental health. Later in 1926, he headed to the South of France and was reinvigorated by Antibes, Marseille, Cassis and Nice. Here, he would meet with Peploe and Fergusson. He also began to work on the spot in pastel and ink – light

and dextrous streetscapes and corner cafes, promenading figures and busy harbours. These were easy to send home, popular with his dealers and sold well. They were also very much his own work, original and vibrant. The mature stage of his career reveals an indebtedness to Matisse, who had replaced Cézanne as inspiration during his formative stages. Peploe himself favourably compared Hunter to the former. There was a New York exhibition in 1929, which was well-received, and he was moving between Glasgow and the auberge La Colombe d’Or in St Paul de Vence. By 1931, Hunter was in London, again utilising the ink and crayon medium which had been such a success. It suited his rather reduced means and peripatetic life to be working on paper. However, views of Hyde Park, some featuring the dashing figure of RB Cunninghame Graham on horseback, were excellent. There was also a series of theatre designs for The Evergreen. To many, though, Hunter’s renown rests with the still life genre, and that is where he makes his greatest contribution. As with Peploe, he favoured pink roses which the market still prizes most highly. Otherwise, their approaches and styles differ dramatically. Hunter is instinctive and painterly, vigorous and free. He often worked straight onto unprimed board, with the composition charted quickly in ink or pencil. He was not afraid to leave areas of the board untouched, or scraped back, with thick impasto to counterbalance. Colour is used in bold planes, or mixed on the brush and applied with verve and surety, lifting the areas of white or tonal drapery. He often employed a bright blue fabric backdrop, sometimes revelled in reflections off varnished mahogany. Some of the later works show thinly-applied, almost liquid pigment.

The East Neuk of Fife has a unique quality of light and dry, breezy weather, and Hunter's work in the Kingdom was of a consistently high quality. From his first visit, in 1919, and again through the early ’20s, his relaxed style and liberated palette reflect the inspiration he found in the fishing ports or farm towns inland. Working on the quayside, he would swiftly chart a composition in pencil and/or ink, and then apply washes and planes of watercolour augmented by highlights of pure colour. It is an approach which found favour with successors such as William Gillies and Joan Eardley. This drawing is from a strong series of larger-format works on paper, capturing the bustle and vigour of harbours at Anstruther or St Monans.

George Leslie Hunter (1877–1931) 17. Harbour Scene, Largo, c.1919 watercolour and pencil, 44 x 54.5 cm signed lower left EXHIBITED Three Scottish Colourists Exhibition, The Scottish Arts Council, 1970, cat. 42

Before the Scottish Colourists, there was no sustained tradition of still life painting in British art. Stuart Park had paved the way in the 1880s, with his sumptuous rose studies, but in the work of Hunter and Peploe in particular the theme was fully explored after 1900. Hunter was an instinctive artist, restless and experimental. However, once he moved beyond the early Dutch-style works, rich in colour and with dark backgrounds, his oeuvre developed rapidly. Although their approaches were very different, Hunter and Peploe each had favoured motifs and studio props which they employed in endless variations – here we see the pale green/ blue panelled door that Hunter often used as a backdrop. He liked anemones, with their small highly-coloured blooms, shown here in a familiar blue vase. His style is bold, and painterly,

George Leslie Hunter (1877–1931) 18. Anemones, c.1925 oil on board, 45.5 x 38 cm signed lower left EXHIBITED Alex, Reid & Lefevre Ltd, Glasgow PROVENANCE Private collection, Kent

with thick impasto. His still life work is bright, appealing and timeless. He’s a Modernist, and as such he does not seek to slavishly imitate nature – it’s artifice, an arrangement of forms in space depicted in planes and daubs of colour. He uses devices to create depth in a consciously shallow picture space – the arc of table, the angled knife and bananas accentuate the illusion of depth. Likewise, the heft and shade of those Cézanne-esque apples in the foreground. Hunter’s small group of loyal patrons sought to expand his fanbase by inviting him to soirees, but rather than court favour he would seize table displays set for dinner and get to work, ignoring the guests. This fine and characteristic example is classic Leslie Hunter – recognisable at twenty paces.

Although widely-travelled on the continent, Hunter had a close association with the Kingdom of Fife, particularly after the war. Aside from still life, Hunter's other preoccupation was with landscape painting, and capturing the fleeting effects of light and weather came easily to him. In fluid, free ink and watercolour, he depicted the fishing town of Largo with succinct relish and here we see the nets drying on geometrical posts, a stolid Fife house and red pantiled cottage. The unusual viewpoint allows him to lead us over the sea dyke to the lush coastal vegetation and bright summer skies. The Fife works found a ready market, appealing beyond his steady patrons in Dundee and Glasgow.

George Leslie Hunter (1877–1931) 19. Drying the Nets, c.1920 watercolour and pencil, 40.8 x 52.5 cm signed lower right EXHIBITED The Fine Art Society Ltd, London, 1971

This highly-worked pen and ink study is of a type that Hunter would create on his walks in Fife – in this case, probably around the mill in the pretty village of Ceres near Cupar. On occasion, these pocket-sketchbook pages would be worked up into oils. Hunter’s spontaneous approach and easy style was well-suited to working en plein air.

George Leslie Hunter (1877–1931) 20. Fife Landscape, c.1920 ink drawing, 11.5 x 16.5 cm PROVENANCE Collection of Dr TJ Honeyman; Private collection, Fife

Hunter made several sketching trips and extended visits to Fife c.1919, and 1922–23. He had spent more time on the east coast to recover from a breakdown suffered after his first London show in 1923 (with Peploe and Cadell), and his work was selling well. Having secured a joint contract with Aitken Dott in Edinburgh and Alex Reid in Glasgow from April 1924, he was in fine fettle and enjoyed the constant support of friends like Matthew Justice of Dundee. A key group exhibition of the artists now known as the four Scottish Colourists had been held in Paris in June ’24, whereupon a French critic noted ‘Hunter does not paint for the present but for the future’. Thereafter, the artist spent three years in Scotland consolidating what he had learned and painting well. Hunter’s series of standard-sized oil panels of Largo harbour

in summer are some of his most distinctive and successful works, proving enduringly popular on the market. As with Cadell at the North End of Iona, Hunter focused on a specific location and relished these arrangements of quayside/ headland/fishing and rowing boats, all subject to the fleeting vagaries of the elements (although Cadell preferred ‘Scottish weather’ to summer skies and calm sea). Tides can be shown high or low, and on occasion the quay can be seen crowded with figures. The present picture is on a larger format perhaps to better reflect the stormy seas and muted palette, while the boats strain at their moorings. A vigorous and imposing painting by an artist working at the peak of his powers, it reveals varied brushwork and liberal use of impasto.

George Leslie Hunter (1877–1931) 21. Storm, Lower Largo, Fife, 1925 oil on canvas, 50 x 60.5 cm signed lower right EXHIBITED The Fine Art Society Ltd, London, 1971; The Scottish Gallery & Ewan Mundy Fine Art Ltd, Duke Street, London, 2018 PROVENANCE Private collection, Oxfordshire

Jack Knox RSA, RSW, RGI (1936–2015)

Born Kirkintilloch. Glasgow School of Art 1953–57; studied in Paris under André Lhote in 1958. An exhibition of American Abstract Expressionism in Brussels in 1959 resonated with him, but Knox’s work of the ’60s is widely experimental and compelling. Through series such as San Romano he uses a language of motifs, symbols, geometry and collage to create frieze-like canvases, often on a large scale. These can be meticulously-observed, and sometimes cluttered, or more gestural in form akin to the work of the Cobra group. By the 1970s Knox had developed into one of the most distinctive Scottish artists of the period, his seeminglysimple still life and landscape themes articulated through monumental forms and favoured motifs such as chairs, pears, coffee pots and birds. His work consistently displays a mastery of colour and tone. Our example, a powerful, spare arrangement relates to Swing Stool and Windmill, Poem for Kyle in the collection of the University of Dundee (Knox taught at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, 1965–81). Jack Knox in his studio, 1983.

Jack Knox RSA, RSW, RGI (1936–2015) 22. Swing and Stool Poem for Kyle, 1967 acrylic on canvas, 112.5 x 214 cm signed lower right EXHIBITED 1st Edinburgh Open 100, Richard Demarco Gallery at David Hume Tower, Edinburgh, 1967, cat. 825; Jack Knox – Paintings and Drawings 1960–83, Scottish Arts Council exhibition, Third Eye Centre, Glasgow, 1983 PROVENANCE The estate of the artist James Morrison

Sir William MacTaggart PPRSA, RA, RSW (1903–1981)

William MacTaggart met the young Norwegian curator Fanny Aavatsmark in 1934, when she accompanied a Munch exhibition to Edinburgh, and they married in 1937. His subsequent visits to Norway and Denmark produced new subjects; dark forests, rustic churches but most of all the dusk harbour scenes and seascapes which helped cement his reputation as an expressionist painter. He worked extensively in the region of Telemark, painting at Hidra, but our painting is likely to be of Dragar in Denmark, twelve miles from Copenhagen; a similar work in the Fife Council collections bearing this title. MacTaggart held his first one-man show in Scotland at The Scottish Gallery in 1929, continuing The Gallery’s relationship with his family that had started with his grandfather in the 19th century (see cat. 24).

Sir William MacTaggart PPRSA, RA, RSW (1903–1981) 23. The Harbour, 1963 oil on board, 51 x 62 cm signed lower right EXHIBITED Christmas Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1963, cat. 12; Modern Masters VIII, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2018, cat. 19 PROVENANCE Private collection, Oxfordshire

William McTaggart RSA, RSW (1835–1910)

William McTaggart began his artistic life as a genre painter and finished as an impressionist concerned chiefly with landscape (of Argyll, Kintyre, the Angus coast, Forth estuary and Midlothian). He was prolific and ambitious, and painted in oil and watercolour in both minute and monumental scale. Becoming one of Scotland’s most celebrated landscape painters, McTaggart’s paintings are typified by loose, energetic brushwork and a deep concern for the effects of light, creating powerful and enduring images of Scotland. Born at Aros in Kintyre in 1835, he became apprenticed to the Glasgow apothecary Dr John Buchanan at the age of 12 before moving to Edinburgh at the age of 16. He entered the Trustees Academy in Edinburgh in 1852 and studied under Robert Scott Lauder. At the Trustees Academy he won various awards, and as a student he developed a career in portraiture and Pre-Raphaelite genre painting, travelling to England and Ireland to complete commissions. During this time McTaggart became a regular exhibitor at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh and the Royal Academy in London. The Scottish Gallery was McTaggart’s main dealer in his lifetime, selling many of his greatest works to the likes

of Robert Wemyss Honeyman and Andrew Carnegie. His commercial relationship with The Scottish Gallery was of paramount importance, to both, for over fifty years. Even during the Second World War, his paintings, glazed and in magnificent swept and gilded frames, hung on the staircase at 26 South Castle Street, and had to be removed to safety overnight for fear of German bombing.

William McTaggart painting at Machrihanish, 1898.

William McTaggart RSA, RSW (1835–1910) 24. Breaking Waves, c.1890 oil on canvas, 56 x 84 cm signed lower right PROVENANCE The collection of J.N. Kyd; The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh; The estate of the artist James Morrison

James Morrison RSA, RSW (1932–2020) by Guy Peploe

James Morrison sadly passed away in 2020. He was a great painter and a huge part of The Scottish Gallery for more than sixty years, the last thirty under an exclusive arrangement. His kindness, generosity and loyalty made him a hugely rewarding friend, and it has been a privilege to represent one of Scotland’s most distinctive and brilliant painters. Born in Glasgow in 1932, Morrison studied at Glasgow School of Art from 1950–4. After a brief spell in Catterline in the early 1960s, Morrison settled in Montrose in 1965, joining the staff of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee the same year. He resigned from The College in 1987 to paint full-time, and since then his work has been exclusively available through The Scottish Gallery. Whole-heartedly a landscape painter, his main working areas were the lush, highly managed farmland around his home in Angus and the rugged wildness of west coast

Assynt. As well as Scotland, Morrison had extended painting trips to Africa, France, and Canada, including three trips to the Arctic in the 1990s. A suite of his Arctic paintings was recently acquired and exhibited as part of a major exhibition, Among the Polar Ice, at The McManus in Dundee (September 2019 – March 2020). James Morrison first exhibited with The Gallery in the fifties. His most recent exhibition, From Angus to the Arctic (January 2020), was his twenty-fifth solo show with The Scottish Gallery. In 2021, the filmmaker Anthony Baxter released a full-length feature film Eye of the Storm, which sensitively examined the life and work of James Morrison and has received wide critical acclaim. The Gallery is hosting a Memorial Exhibition in June 2022 alongside a new hardback publication to celebrate the artist’s life and work.

James Morrison painting in Angus, c.1973.

James Morrison did not object to being categorised as a realist painter. His desire to be true to the place he worked, the landscape as it was presented to him in front of a primed board or sheet of watercolour paper, was consistent. But he was never a slavish recorder of detail. Indeed much of his realism is suggested, infilled by the stimulated senses and brain of the viewer from the brilliantly selected marks the artist has made on his board. In the seventies there was seldom an attempt to paint a cloud; his horizon is often high and format attenuated, his landscape is wide and linear and texture is as important as atmosphere. In Farmland the land is a harsh, muddy reality, the foreground receding in rutted tracks towards a low farm building sheltering behind woodland.

James Morrison RSA, RSW (1932–2020) 25. Farmland, c.1965 ink and conté, 25.5 x 53 cm

The mansion house and golf club at Letham Grange near Arbroath have been abandoned for a number of years, but would never have been of interest to Morrison. In February 2009, he made this snowscape, a beautiful, deceptively simple view across fields to low hills on the horizon. There is recorded a sense of utter stillness; snow might fall, but softly, undisturbed by wind; the sky contains no weather system, clouds are far away and high. The storm has passed and it is the moment of chill stasis that has inspired the artist to unpack his easel, paints and board and share a moment of quiet contemplation.

James Morrison RSA, RSW (1932–2020) 26. Letham Grange, Winter, 15.ii.2009 oil on board, 102 x 152 cm signed and dated lower right

Alberto Morrocco OBE, FRSA, FRSE, RSW, RP, RGI, LLD (1917–1998)

A Joyous Expression by Guy Peploe, 2017 In the Edinburgh Festival exhibition of 2017, The Gallery marked the centenary of the birth of Alberto Morrocco, one of the dominant figures in the Scottish artworld in the second half of the 20th Century. His personality, described ‘in a few words’ by his friend David McClure in his introduction to our retrospective of 1990 Paintings from the Artist’s Studio, was full of ‘abundance, energy, intelligence and generosity of spirit.’ McClure went on write “Alberto painted as an Italian operatic tenor sings that is with a passionate theatricality and always con brio.” There was something exotic about his rich voice, rolling ‘rs’, never far from laughter, but the accent, difficult for many to place, (Italian?) was pure Aberdonian. He had a commanding, Picasso-like presence to which all naturally gravitated, but he had none of the entitlement or arrogance which sometimes accompanies such a talent. Morrocco was born in Aberdeen of Italian parents in December 1917, the elder of two boys. He attended Gray’s School of Art from the prodigious age of fourteen, tutored by James Cowie and Robert Sivell, and won the Carnegie and Brough travelling scholarships. Before his travels in 1939 in France and Switzerland, he assisted Sivell on the murals at the Aberdeen Students Union on Schoolhill, whose fate to this day remains uncertain. His natural ability to draw was honed working in the life room and supported by his tutors, both of whom had come north from the Glasgow School of Art and were admirers of the Italian Quattrocento (although Cowie pursued a highly individual, poetic

surrealism). Throughout his professional life Morrocco carried a belief in the importance of preparatory drawing and structured composition. Only in the last fifteen years of his life, after his retirement from College commitments, when the work began to pour out with a joy and urgency hitherto suppressed, did he begin to paint directly and with brilliant colour in a full expression of his joyous outlook. This is not to say that his work had been constrained or conventional: his subject matter varied from the domestic interior, landscape, imaginings of Italian life, still life and many commissioned portraits. He took some pride in this breadth and by extension every aspect of his life: food, entertainment and social life, and the interior splendour of his home at Binrock, was an expression of an open, Renaissance figure. After War service (he was initially treated as a potential enemy alien and interned in Edinburgh Castle) he became involved in the medical illustration of the monumental Lockhart’s Anatomy, eventually published by Faber & Faber in 1959, before returning to Italy to complete his travelling scholarship. On his return, he was appointed Head of Drawing and Painting at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, where he would remain for the next thirty years. He married Vera Mercer in 1941, and three children followed; Leonardo, Lorenzo and finally Anna-Lisa in 1960. Further mural commissions, portrait commissions, professional appointments and honours followed along with exhibitions in many venues, including with The Scottish Gallery

Alberto Morrocco, c.1980. Photograph by Robert Mabon

for the first time in 1957. He was always attentive to his role in Dundee, appointing talented tutors to work with him including McClure, Peter Collins, Jack Knox and James Morrison. James McIntosh Patrick was a demanding colleague with whom lively disagreement kept everyone alert. Morrison recalled that on one occasion all the staff were invited into Alberto’s studio, where a sumptuous buffet was laid out, and the Head invited all to join him in celebrating Leonardo da Vinci’s birthday. It is thirty years since his triumphant Festival exhibition at The Scottish Gallery which included seventy-one new oil paintings completed in eighteen months, a period in which he had also completed portraits of three university principals. Alice Bain wrote an insightful introduction, “Alberto Morrocco paints in a room with Venetian blinds. He has no need of the view of the humpbacked railway bridge across the Tay. Morrocco painted a beach full of blue umbrellas – a hot bustling Lido near Genoa. The landscape of Scotland with its soft hills and mists and damp green is not Morrocco’s scene. He is a man of Mediterranean blues and though he spends most of his time out of the heat, at home in Scotland, his recent work is full of it… his senses have remained true to his southern origins.” In 1993, The City of Dundee produced his retrospective exhibition, curated by Clara Young and Victoria Keller, on which occasion a book was published to include a lengthy interview with the artist. He recalled looking at Matisse and accepted that in pursuit of colour form had to be sacrificed; this idea reached fruition in his studio after a visit to Tunisia in 1984, seeing the Berber women in the markets in brilliant coloured drapes against black skin and he began to push colour to ‘the absolute limit of intensity within its range.’ He also began to paint his subject (often imaginary) ‘in a frontal light which doesn’t have any strong cast shadow – so you were getting full value

Alberto Morrocco’s Dundee studio. Photograph by John McKenzie

of any colour the subject.’ In her introduction to the book Victoria Keller sums up by placing Morrocco in a graphic tradition derived from his admiration of the Renaissance masters through the guidance of early tutors rather than the belle peinture which so influenced both the Scottish Colourists and Edinburgh School. Indeed, he is one of the youngest artists to be included in the British Realism exhibition soon to open at The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. His late flowering as a colourist has parallels in late Titian and Monet and can be ascribed to the liberty of removal from responsibility to his students, a re-engagement with his Italian character and his admiration for Matisse. At the end, he perhaps felt an urgency and that he had earned the liberty to work alla prima, his mind’s eye filled with a thousand sketches, brimming with ideas and variations on his favourite, lifelong themes. His final show with The Scottish Gallery was also on the occasion of the Edinburgh Festival in 1996, and in his introduction Professor John Morrison identified the three dominant subjects: clowns, still life and beaches. He notes how the three are not distinct: a harlequin figure stands by a still life table, a circus tent sits on a beach so that “… the life of the circus invades and colludes in the generation of a vibrant, exuberant celebration of the good things in life.” And later “The ordinary, a boy eating a watermelon or showing off his fresh-caught fish is transformed into luxury, calm and voluptuous pleasure. It is this frank revelling in pleasure which gives the paintings their power. They have a tactile, physical sensuality which glorifies in the diversity and bounty of the world.” Morrison produces an eloquent discourse on the relationship between seen reality and picture making, and finishes with Paul Klee’s quote “Art does not reproduce what we see. It makes us see.” Today his work is prized in many collections.

This monumental painting is a significant work from the last decade of the artist’s life when he worked direct, alla prima, deploying a life of experience as a painter and draughtsman without hesitation. His palette is pushed to a new key of brightness; the Intimistes, Picasso and Matisse are all celebrated. His subject is a flattened studio interior in which a large painting is ranged against a patterned backdrop, which might itself be a larger canvas. The painting, within Morrocco’s painting, itself contains (a painted) sunflower and the titular clown’s head. The table top still life in the foreground could either be a part of the painting behind or a three dimensional arrangement in front. The sophisticated pictorial relationships are subsidiary to the sumptuous colour and patterns, which make a decorative tour de force.

Alberto Morrocco OBE, FRSA, FRSE, RSW, RP, RGI, LLD (1917–1998) 27. Still Life with Head of a Clown, 1987 oil on canvas, 76.2 x 152.4 cm signed and dated upper right EXHIBITED Festival Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1987, cat. 3; Thompsons Gallery, London PROVENANCE Private collection, London

Denis Peploe RSA (1914–1993)

Denis Peploe was born in 1914, the second son of the celebrated Scottish Colourist S. J. Peploe. Denis Peploe enrolled at Edinburgh College of Art at the age of seventeen, where he was a contemporary of Wilhelmina BarnsGraham and Margaret Mellis. He won postdiploma scholarships to Paris and Florence, and took advantage of the opportunity to travel extensively in Spain, Italy and Yugoslavia. He first exhibited at The Scottish Gallery in 1947, to critical acclaim. The Glasgow Herald critic responded to the exhibition, saying he was “an artist born fully armed”; and The Bulletin critic wrote: “the general impression of the exhibition is that we have in Denis Peploe a vital and adventurous painter”. Reviewers never avoided mention of his father, and though one couldn’t confuse their work there were similarities in

their approaches: each picture was a response to a particular subject, either intellectual or emotional. Guy Peploe explains: ‘While he was intimately exposed to the mainstream of European art he remained better defined as an artist who responded directly to his subject, en plein air or in the studio. Here the challenge was a live model, or the intellectual exercise of reinvigorating the still life subject. His work remained free of political or art-world references but was at the same time formed by the century of modernism, the times of unprecedented turmoil and change to which he belonged. His response was to cleave to the idea that art was important, even redemptive, and that it could somehow describe a better, or more vital place.’

Denis Peploe, c.1990. Photograph by Carol Gordon

A jug of roses, fully modelled with a palette knife, three shells and a plate with three mussels. The canvas is square, but the painting divides it into three horizontal bands: green, blue and green. Do we see the blue as a picture within a picture? Is there a space defined by the low band as foreground on which a ‘real’ rose rests? Peploe plays with spatial reality but at the same time allows his rich colour palette and sculptural manipulation of the oil paint to provide sensory satisfaction.

Denis Peploe RSA (1914–1993) 28. Still Life with Mussels, c.1985 oil on canvas, 71 x 71 cm signed lower right PROVENANCE Private collection, USA

Denis Peploe RSA (1914–1993) 29. Northern Cliffs, c.1979 oil on board, 33 x 40.5 cm signed lower right, titled verso EXHIBITED Denis Peploe, Oil Paintings, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1988, cat. 45 PROVENANCE Private collection, Edinburgh

Sir Robin Philipson PPRSA, RA, FRSE, RSW (1916–1992)

The Academic and the Romantic Dr Elizabeth Cumming, in her introduction to his Centenary exhibition with The Scottish Gallery, March 2016

To meet Sir Robin Philipson was to encounter a man of charm and distinction, dressed slightly self-consciously in a bowtie and either a dapper, sometimes striped, jacket or else one splattered in paint. Conversation could range widely, revealing his interest in poetry as much as the visual arts to which he was making such a vital contribution. He can be considered to have been the most successful figure in Edinburgh’s art establishment in the third quarter of the twentieth century. Early on he had been elected a member of the Society of Scottish Artists and the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour and in later life many honours would be bestowed on him. But it was as President of the Royal Scottish Academy for a full decade from 1973 that he made a deep mark in art officialdom, opening up new avenues and introducing its student exhibitions which continue to this day. As Head of the School of Drawing and Painting at the art college he maintained the ideals of the post-war Edinburgh School so concerned with expressive colour to which in temperament he was ideally suited: as an Edinburgh student in the late 1930s, his teachers had included William MacTaggart, Anne Redpath and John Maxwell. After the war Philipson became fascinated by the uncompromising expressionism of European painters, most famously Oskar Kokoschka. Although attracted to British abstraction and the inherent value of paint, he soon began

to explore raw personal experience through developing specific themes which could combine aggression and violence with lyricism. This formed the bedrock of his career. Several paintings from these series from the 1950s to the 1980s (cockfights, cathedral interiors, the Crucifixion, war imagery, women and animals, poppies) demonstrate a mature commitment to the pictorial: abstraction, where present, never dislodges representation of the world about us. He explores the human condition in many of his key academic paintings, tackling brutalism head on. These paintings, informed by what war can do and constructed with passion, are never easy but have an important niche within British art. Man’s inhumanity to man was explored in another key series, Humankind, where political and resultant emotional values are played out. These major works were the result of constantly rethinking the delicate balance between the empirical and the intuitive – a balance which is Scottish in its essence. At the same time, Philipson was one of the most lyrical painters of his generation, producing canvases which can convey the purest forms of beauty via traditional subjects and at times extraordinary colour choices. With his sensitive, serious temperament Philipson was a romantic but his work is essentially academic: apart from a commitment to subject matter, the potential and values of materials were important to him as to generations before him. For a period in the

Robin Philipson in his studio, 1970.

late 1950s he was one of the artists whose prints came off the St James Square presses of Harley Brothers, while as Head of Drawing and Painting he made sure that Edinburgh’s students had the opportunity to take printmaking as a final year diploma subject. His form of expressionism certainly gave him a lifelong commitment to the intrinsic values of art materials, sometimes straying from a standard oils palette. He experimented with help from the local paint manufacturer Craig & Rose who mixed a ‘Philipson blue’ for him as well as suggesting he use vinyl toluene to attach gold leaf – with the vinyl itself then becoming a common binding agent in his paint. However we see his art, its free handling, its meaningful decorative values and its sometimes dark subjects, it remains a serious investigation of life. For him, the production of art was essential but brave. He once spoke of the dread of starting a studio day, of the waiting easel – but then good art is never an easy business. Dr Elizabeth Cumming Robin Philipson by Dr Elizabeth Cumming was published in 2017 by Sansom & Co.

Sir Robin Philipson PPRSA, RA, FRSE, RSW (1916–1992) 30. Blue Rose Window, c.1961 oil on canvas, 70 x 90 cm signed upper right EXHIBITED Robin Philipson Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1961

Sir Robin Philipson PPRSA, RA, FRSE, RSW (1916–1992) 31. The Eternal II, 1978 watercolour, 67.5 x 67.5 cm inscribed with title and artist’s name on label verso PROVENANCE Private collection, London

Anne Redpath OBE, RSA, ARA, RWA (1895–1965)

Blue Sky on a Grey Day by Patrick Bourne, July 2015 Anne Redpath’s death in an Edinburgh nursing home at the age of sixty-nine was a shock to her family, friends, fellow artists and the wider public. When I was researching my biography of her almost a quarter of a century later, there was still a sense of loss felt by the people I interviewed. Although she had been unwell for the last decade of her life, her work was still developing and she had earlier that year had an exhibition of Venetian subjects at Lefevre in London that had sold out by the second day. So it was felt that it was a career as well as a life cut short. And yet with the perspective that over half a century gives, Redpath’s career as an artist now seems remarkably full and complete. From the time of her return from France with her young family in 1932, when she committed to full-time painting, her stylistic and technical development was relentless. There was a constant quest for a fresh vocabulary to describe new subject matter. She avoided that bane of the history of painting in Scotland, and admittedly of other Schools, of artists sitting back when they have developed a successful style and popular format. Her intellectual curiosity was never satisfied and she was always open to the ideas of other, often younger, artists – the Action Painting of Jackson Pollock and the Tachisme of Antoni Tàpies were strong influences in her final years. Both artists had rejected subject for complete abstraction which Redpath never did. She used the subject matter of her painting as a departure point, often abstracted but always anchored by the seen object.

Anne Redpath in her Edinburgh studio, 1960.

Redpath was quite sure that her artistic sensitivity came from her father who was an innovative designer of tweed in the Border town of Hawick. However her ambition to go to art school was only acceded to by her parents if she also took a teacher training course. Riskily she decided to attend the two courses concurrently in Edinburgh. The level of her aptitude and determination can be gauged by her being the sole recipient of a travelling scholarship in 1919 from Edinburgh College of Art whilst also successfully completing the teaching course at Moray House. She made full use of her scholarship, visiting Brussels, Bruges and Paris before moving on to Italy where she encountered her main influences. Tellingly her copy of the angel in Botticelli’s Madonna of the Magnificat in the Uffizi is less of a copy than her own interpretation of the study of the youthful figure – it is more Redpath than Botticelli. Unwavering independence is the constant characteristic of Redpath both as a painter and as a person. Her portrait of her husband the architect James ‘Jim’ Michie, painted in 1920, the year of their marriage, is an impressively subtle and considered study of his character as well as his appearance. Redpath painted occasional portraits throughout her career but they are always of people close to her and she never appears to have considered portrait painting as a source of income. It is well known that Redpath put her career on hold whilst she was bringing up her three sons, initially in St Omer in Northern France where her husband was an architect for the War Graves

Commission. It was close to what had been the Western Front only three years before and the landscape as well as the local people would still have shown the scars. When they moved to Cap d’Ail on the French Riviera in 1925 it must have been an uplifting experience for the whole family. Anne produced enough paintings to stage an exhibition in nearby St Raphael in 1928. The work was mainly in watercolour and has affinities both in handling and in the subject matter of harbours and buildings with what Charles Rennie Mackintosh was producing nearby in PortVendres. It is tantalising to imagine they met although there is no record of it. When Jim’s job as the in-house architect to an American businessman came to an end in 1934, Anne and the boys returned to the Borders and Jim moved to the south of England. Although contact was maintained until Jim’s death in 1959 they never again lived together as a family. Anne now needed to provide for her family and from this point on she devoted herself to painting. Much of her work at the outset was of Border villages such as Wilton Dean and Trow Mill and she painted trees in farmland which have a new vigour and dynamism giving a sense of renewed purpose. But the Border landscape did not satisfy her for long. Through the rest of the 1930s and into the 1940s, Redpath produced a series of ever more ambitious and sophisticated still lifes and domestic interiors that culminated in The Indian Rug (or Red Slippers) of 1942 (SNGMA, Edinburgh). Matisse is the most obvious source of inspiration for these works but as in all stages of her career Redpath retains her own voice. She has by this stage become a painter who can orchestrate and balance complex compositions painted with an extreme sensitivity for surface texture. Only Sir William Gillies at that time comes anywhere near to matching her as a still life painter in Scotland. In the 1940s, Redpath started to travel further afield again, initially only to the Isle of Skye in 1942 and 1946. The gouache of Loch Snizort with its singing blues of the water and distant hills, and the informal composition,

reflect the enjoyable, relaxed mood of the trip she made to the island with her son David, his future wife Eileen and Anne’s friend Katie Horsman the potter. Paintings from her month-long stay on Skye formed the core of Redpath’s first solo show in Scotland at the Gordon Small gallery on Princes Street in March 1947. The pictures sold well and this enabled her to plan a trip abroad for the first time since her return from France in 1934. She travelled alone to Paris and then on to Menton on the Italian border, twenty miles from where she once lived. Street in Menton is a product of this trip and it gives a palpable sense of the artist’s familiarity with, and affinity for the place. When Redpath returned to Scotland her sketches and studies of Menton were used to create the large oil Window in Menton (Fleming-Wyfold Collection) with the figure of her daughter-in-law Eileen in the foreground. This painting is her chef-d’oeuvre of the late 1940s just as Red Slippers is of the beginning of that decade. The artistic stimulus that came from her stay in Menton encouraged her to make many more European trips in the following years, firstly to Spain and then to Brittany, Portugal, Corsica, The Canary Islands and finally to Amsterdam and then Venice. Each new landscape and culture that Redpath encountered changed and informed not only the landscapes and architectural subjects she produced but also everything she painted thereafter including her still lifes. In Corsica in 1954 and in Gran Canaria in 1959 she experienced harsh sun-bleached hillsides where in the resulting paintings the houses appear as though they grow out of the hills giving them a ‘buttress-like presence’. Simultaneously she suggests erosion, decay and permanence. The effect that the landscape of Gran Canaria had on her palette is well illustrated by two paintings. The dark tar-like background of Still Life with Flowers with the rich colours of the flowers set against has parallels with the dark volcanic sand of Boats on the Shore, Canary Islands against which the colourful boats

resonate. It seems unlikely that she could have painted the still life if she had not been to the Canary Islands two years before. Apart from painting coastal scenes and hillside villages in continental Europe, the other subject that consistently attracted her was church architecture, usually the interiors. She herself was not a church-goer but she enjoyed the exoticism and richness of Baroque ornament in the churches of Catholic countries on the Mediterranean. They constituted a sharp contrast to her strict Presbyterian upbringing in the Borders. Her father’s obituary in the local newspaper The Hawick Express records rather tellingly that ‘logic was more native to him than feeling’; his daughter spent much of her life acting out the opposite. There were also practical reasons for painting the interiors of churches. Firstly they were cool, whereas outside Redpath was troubled by the heat as she got older, but also when she painted in the street she was constantly disturbed by inquisitive children and it was not in her nature to ignore them. Redpath had a happy and fruitful working relationship with The Scottish Gallery following her first exhibition there in 1950. And it was through this association that she was taken on two years later by Reid and Lefevre in London. There, and through her regularly showing at the Royal Academy in London, Redpath came to the attention of some of the most respected art critics of the day, most notably Eric Newton and Terence Mullaly. The former, reviewing the RA Summer Exhibition in 1948 in the Sunday Times, felt that in comparison with the rest of the paintings ‘… Anne Redpath’s still lifes stand out like patches of blue sky on a grey day’. In 1961, Terence Mullaly wrote in the Daily Telegraph, again in a review of the Summer Show, ‘There are many possible justifications for the RA’s vast and unwieldy anthology. One of the most cogent is satisfied if it contains even one really exceptional work. This year there are eight of them, two by William MacTaggart and six by Anne Redpath.’ In 2015, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art staged their exhibition of Modern

Scottish Women Painters and Sculptors 1885–1965. The cut-off point was consciously chosen for the year of Anne Redpath’s death. She herself changed her position about women exhibiting collectively. In the 1940s, she was President of the Society of Scottish Women Artists but in later years she told Sidney Goodsir Smith the idea of womens’ exhibitions was as silly ‘as would be a special exhibition by men over six feet tall taking size fourteen shoes!’ This volte face was justifiable by how much easier it had got for women in the intervening years to be accepted in the male-dominated exhibitions. Joan Eardley and Anne Redpath in Scotland and Barbara Hepworth and Laura Knight were in the vanguard of this advance. Anne Redpath was the first woman painter to be elected to full membership of RSA and in 1960 the first since the war to be made an ARA. But for all her achievements her reputation over fifty years after her death is not as substantial as it should be. Her paintings convey visual pleasure in her surroundings without political, social or ironic comment. That is not in tune with our times. But Anne Redpath’s vision was original, innovative and life affirming. Those are lasting qualities.

Anne Redpath visited Spain in 1949, also the year she moved to Edinburgh. To date her work had been pale, chalky and tonal, but this sketching trip helped to awaken her palette and herald the powerful colour she employed in the early-mid 1950s. She was particularly adept at capturing architectural forms, and here we see a clutch of silhouetted figures on a wet corner beneath a lattice of whitewashed walls and the warm mauve tones of the tiled roofs and shadows. The more timeless, regular planes and geometry of the domestic buildings contrasts with the rigid, darker form of the warehouse backdrop. The tonal composition is lifted greatly by the highlights of pure, bright colour she employs – the red drape in the window, and blue washing on the line.

Anne Redpath OBE, RSA, ARA, RWA (1895–1965) 32. Rainy Day, Cuenca, Spain, c.1949 gouache, 39 x 28 cm signed lower left PROVENANCE Sixth Laird of Bardrochat; Tom Bell Fine Art, Troon

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Anne Redpath’s later work tends to be more expressive, with broader handling and increased use of impasto. Often, the paint is applied using a palette knife rather than a brush. Instead of placing still life arrangements on a tabletop, for example, as she did earlier in her career, the single motif can be presented (as in this case) within a broadly-applied and fairly uniform painted surround. She feels no obligation to contrive pictorial space or perspective and, thus, the viewer is focused entirely on the chosen motif- here, a favourite painted jug and mixed blooms, rendered in pleasingly gentle ‘boudoir’ colours. The composition is purely chosen and intended as a decorative whole, for its own sake.

Anne Redpath OBE, RSA, ARA, RWA (1895–1965) 33. Flowers in a Jug, c.1964 oil on canvas, 60 x 50 cm signed lower right EXHIBITED Anne Redpath Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1965, cat. 43; The Scottish Gallery & Ewan Mundy Fine Art Ltd, Duke Street, London, 2018 PROVENANCE Private collection, Oxfordshire

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This picture bears an interesting comparison with the previous work (Flowers in a Jug, cat. 33). Of a similar date, late in the artist’s career, this composition is painted in an even more broad and expressive manner. The thick pigment is applied by various means (other than a brush) in slashing diagonals, controlled and yet whorling around the small flowers and neutral jug placed off-centre. The effect is powerful, and betrays the sturm und drang manifest in some of Redpath’s late work. The dramatic energy of the technique is echoed in the rich, sombre colours of the background which had become a signature of her late period- cobalt blue and earthy russet brown. The blooms themselves are rendered as the visual high-points, in yellow, mauve and white, and appear at odds with the style and tone of the work.

Anne Redpath OBE, RSA, ARA, RWA (1895–1965) 34. African Violets, c.1965 oil on board, 40 x 60 cm signed lower left EXHIBITED Stone Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne; Cyril Gerber Fine Art, Glasgow PROVENANCE Private collection, Hertfordshire

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Tom Scott RSA, RSW (1854–1927)

Tom Scott was a Scottish painter known for his watercolours of Selkirk and the Scottish Borders. Born 1854 in Selkirk, he became an artist who specialised in watercolours and dedicated his practice to depicting the landscapes, unique architecture and cultural history of Selkirk and the Scottish borderlands. Scott exhibited over 160 works at the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh over the course of 50 years. As a teenager, the artist William Johnstone (1897–1981) had been encouraged and instructed by Tom Scott. Tom Scott was a superb watercolour painter and master of the Border landscape, colourful, irascible and occasionally monumentally drunk, Scott nevertheless held a passionate commitment to the idea that art exists in the service of truth; that it is not for the faint-hearted, but makes great demands on those who would serve it. One practical demonstration of this that Johnstone remembered vividly was seeing him paint a landscape, completely absorbed, though it was so cold that the water for his paints froze in the jar. His was an example that Johnstone never forgot and he never wavered himself from the same dedication. Professor Duncan Macmillan William Johnstone, Marchlands, The Scottish Gallery, 2012

Tom Scott RSA, RSW (1854–1927). Image courtesy of Clapperton Studios Photographic Archive

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Tom Scott RSA, RSW (1854–1927) 35. Morning Star, c.1917 grisaille, 34.5 x 55 cm signed lower right

Morning Star is a highly technically accomplished monochromatic watercolour painting, also known as a grisaille. Tom Scott had a particularly close affinity with the landscape around Selkirk, Yarrow, Ettrickbridge and Bowhill – he understood the land and would have known the local farms, farmworkers and livestock which belonged to each steading. In this painting, he has captured the clarity of a late winter morning with a single star high in the sky. All is still. There are two sets of shire horses huddled close in the fields ahead, with a flock of geese passing on the right as smoke rises from the chimney.

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Sylvia von Hartmann RSW (b.1942)

Von Hartmann works exclusively on paper in water-based media and wax crayon and also specialises in printmaking. Her imagery is highly personal, a psychological iconography which must remain obscured; her forms, motifs, script, flora and architecture are revealed in a folk tale with no beginning or end. Revealed as they float past on a liquid surface, or retreat, detail rubbed back like the surface of an ancient sampler. Her colour is dark and intense, and a sense of fun is often present in the juxtaposition of her painted ingredients. Sylvia von Hartmann was born in Hamburg, Germany; she studied at the Werkkunstschule, before attending Edinburgh College of Art (1963–66). She taught at Coventry College of Art but has spent most of her life as a practising artist in Scotland and was made a member of the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour in 1983. In 1982 we celebrated her wax paintings, drawings and prints from 1962-1982. In 1984 she exhibited Proverbs and Valentines which included decorated furniture and an embroidered patchwork bedspread. Her last solo was held in 2002. Public Collections include: Scottish Arts Council National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh City Art Centre, Edinburgh Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums

Sylvia von Hartman, April 2021. Photograph by Dennis Conaghan

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To this artist, a leaf is not just a leaf or an apple: to her, they are passionately specific, particular, and forever part of the time, day, and place with which she associates them, the emotions with which she invests them, They are entries in her diary. Some diaries have been written in code for intimacy’s sake. Sylvia von Hartmann’s method of composing her pictures is itself a kind of code to preserve secrets, to protect, to only partly reveal. The way she makes her pictures is not some coolly contrived technique. It is integral to the character of her work. She uses gouache – opaque watercolour – and over it she works with pigmented wax. This wax, of German manufacture, is today made especially for her. She then draws through the wax surfaces and veilings with a razor blade and an old steel gramophone. She is therefore on the one hand covering over, and on the other, disclosing, taking away surface, and working down from one image to another, as she chooses. In this way, a final picture can contain completely invisible or only partly visible earlier states, all of which, she feels, are necessary in the passage of the picture’s making, but known only to her memory of them. Extract from Leaves in a Metaphoric Garden by Christopher Andreae, 1993

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Holyrood Abbey is a ruin situated at the edge of Holyrood Park in Edinburgh. The abbey was founded in 1128 by David I of Scotland. During the 15th century, the abbey guesthouse was developed into a royal residence, and after the Scottish Reformation the Palace of Holyrood House was expanded further. The abbey was used as a parish church until the 17th century, and has been ruined since the 1760s. The remaining walls of the abbey lie adjacent to the palace, at the eastern end of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. Abbey Fragments is part of a series von Hartmann undertook in the early 1990s. She had special access to Holyrood Abbey and gardens, which is not too far from where she

Sylvia von Hartmann RSW (b.1942) 36. Abbey Fragments, 1992 mixed media on board, 29 x 42 cm signed and dated lower left

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lives in the Old Town. She made drawings of the abbey carvings and recorded the plants and flowers in the gardens alongside other items she would find, such as human bones. Sylvia often received gifts from the staff – such as the blue egg and feather which she has incorporated into this painting. The overall effect is a reliquary; the bones, carvings and objects laid out as ancient relics in remembrance of the place, time and season.

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The natural world is of seminal importance to Sylvia. It inspires her award-winning paintings, found in numerous collections including the Queen’s. It informs favourite folk art motifs – stylised birds, fish, leaves, butterflies – which proliferate on hand-painted furniture, cushions, table linen and tiles… She lives in a close off Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, one of the capital’s most coveted addresses. Sylvia moved to her cottage in 1991 which has a fairy-tale quality behind a jumble of overflowing plant tubs. From the outside the cottage is steeped in Scottish history; inside, Sylvia’s Germanic roots take over. Born in Hamburg, she was raised by a family with noble forebears and her childhood

Sylvia von Hartmann RSW (b.1942) 37. Rhododendron House, 1991 watercolour and pencil, 38 x 48 cm signed upper right PROVENANCE Private collection, Edinburgh

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was immersed in the kind of arts and crafts which German offspring take for granted. ‘Everything has to be home-made. If you want a Mother’s Day card, you pick some flowers and press them. You cut your own Advent calendar. At Easter, you paint real eggs.’ The incising technique is one that she habitually uses in her watercolours, where she covers selected areas of the completed picture with wax, polishes the surface, then cuts texture into it. Equally, she injects colour and texture into every aspect of her home. Her home is her canvas. Extract from Home is Where the Art is by Aileen Little, 1998

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Frances Walker CBE, RSA, RSW (b.1930)

Frances Walker gave an interview to Studio International after she was awarded the Churchill Award in 2014 in which she looked back at her long life as an artist and teacher. She mused, without any sense of rancour, that her many younger artist friends enjoyed opportunities and freedoms which her generation’s hard work and sacrifice had enabled. She was born in Kirkcaldy in 1930 and attended Edinburgh College of Art immediately after the War. Gillies and his simple exhortation to ‘go out and look at the landscape’ was influential and Walker’s ability to read and edit the landscape, to make a viewer see something afresh, through her eyes, is perhaps something she shares with her first tutor. Her subsequent choices to teach in the Outer Isles before coming to Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen in the late 50s were key in shaping her vision: a sharp edged, sparse, remote landscape required her to hone her extraordinary abilities to organise visual information on the sheet, her

drawing deft and incisive – nothing extraneous or indulgent. Walker has visited and lived on several Scottish islands throughout her career and since 1979 her alternative home has been a small thatched cottage on Tiree. Looking out across the Atlantic it is not perhaps surprising that Walker eventually sought out the extreme iteration of the harsh, edge of the world in the shape of Iceland, Greenland, Svalbard and then The Antarctic in 2007. The monumental panoramas eventually bequeathed to Dundee’s McManus Gallery may never be equalled as evocations of the last wilderness on earth. Her work hangs in public and private collections worldwide; including those of HM Queen Elizabeth and HRH the Duke of Edinburgh. Her 80th birthday was celebrated by Aberdeen Art Gallery who staged a major retrospective of her work. The Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh celebrated Walker’s 90th birthday with a retrospective exhibition in 2021.

Frances Walker working with an etching tool on prepared steel plate, Orkney, c.1981.

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This stylish screenprint from 1979 attests to Walker’s sophistication as an image maker. She has been a lifelong printmaker, always alongside her painting, and perhaps has allowed a playful, experimental side to emerge in her prints. Finnish Interior has strong links to British Pop Art where texture and pattern combine with architectural lines and enigmatic detail, such as the plug and flex and unidentifiable wallmounted objects.

Frances Walker CBE, RSA, RSW (b.1930) 38. Finnish Interior, 1979 screenprint, 49 x 60 cm, Artist Proof signed and dated lower right, inscribed with title lower centre EXHIBITED Society of Scottish Artists 85th Annual Exhibition, 1979

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For the landscape painter trees in winter, without their clothes, provide a stark and compelling subject. The branches are black against the light of an afternoon sky but the freshly ploughed field and bright spring flowers herald a shift in season.

Frances Walker CBE, RSA, RSW (b.1930) 39. Trees and Ploughed Fields, 1970s oil on board, 56 x 76 cm signed lower right

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James Watt RGI (b.1931)

My paintings have always been a reflection of my lifestyle. The magic of the sea, ships and shore together with the drama of a northern sky in all its moods and variations have been a constant source of wonder and inspiration throughout my career. James Watt, The Clyde, An Artist’s River, 2013 James Watt was born in Port Glasgow in 1931. His father was a riveter and from an early age he was immersed in the life of the docks. He trained at Glasgow School of Art from 1950 to 1954 under David Donaldson, with fellow students including James Morrison (whose collection this painting is from) and Alasdair Gray. Like many artists his inspiration came from the life around him and the dockyards and shipping of the River Clyde. Much of the heavy industry has now declined, and Watt’s paintings capture a moment of history now lost to time. His contribution to Scottish art was acknowledged at a major retrospective exhibition at The Beacon Arts Centre in Greenock in 2013, celebrating one of Scotland’s finest maritime painters.

James Watt painting, c.1960.

James Watt RGI (b.1931) 40. Colonsay and Ardfern, c.1960 oil on canvas, 34 x 90 cm signed lower right EXHIBITED Post War Scottish Masters, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2011 PROVENANCE The estate of the artist James Morrison

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A selection of publications from The Gallery’s Modern Masters Series

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Celebrating 180 Years of Art Join Us Online This January

11th January 5pm | 20 mins

An Illustrated History of The Scottish Gallery Christina Jansen

12th January 11am | 15 mins

The Edinburgh School Tommy Zyw

12th January 5pm | 20 mins

My Father, Denis Peploe Guy Peploe

13th January 5pm | 15 mins

The Scottish Colourists I George Leslie Hunter Chris Brickley

18th January 6pm | 15 mins

Dame Elizabeth Blackadder (1931–2021) Guy Peploe

19th January 2pm | 20 mins

Modern Masters I Women Christina Jansen

19th January 5pm | 15 mins

The Landscape Tradition Chris Brickley

20th January 11am | 15 mins

The North East Tommy Zyw

26th January 2–5pm

ART APPRAISAL DAY ONLINE AND IN PERSON Chris Brickley, Guy Peploe, Tommy Zyw

Book Online I scottish-gallery.co.uk/events

The Scottish Gallery I Independent Since 1842 123

Published by The Scottish Gallery to coincide with the exhibition Modern Masters 180th Anniversary Edition 6–29 January 2022 Exhibition can be viewed online at www.scottish-gallery.co.uk/modernmasters The Scottish Gallery thank Dr Elizabeth Cumming, Patrick Bourne and Professor Duncan Macmillan for their written contributions. ISBN: 978-1-912900-44-2 Produced by The Scottish Gallery Designed by Kenneth Gray Photography by John McKenzie Printed by Pureprint Group 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. All essays and picture notes copyright The Scottish Gallery.

Cover: Ian Fleming, Auchmithie, c.1953, oil on board, 40 x 76 cm (cat. 11) (detail) Inside front cover: Detail from John Houston’s studio, 2011. Inside back cover: Detail from Dame Elizabeth Blackadder’s studio, 2011.

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