modern masters viii
modern masters viii 2 august – 1 september 2018 wilhelmina barns-graham dame elizabeth blackadder fcb cadell victoria crowe alan davie kate downie sir william gillies john houston sir william mactaggart david mcclure p64 p70
bruce mclean james morrison alberto morrocco james mcintosh patrick denis peploe sj peploe sir robin philipson anne redpath james downie robertson adam bruce thomson
the scottish gallery remembers wwi by guy peploe modern scottish women: 100 years of women’s suffrage by christina jansen
Cover: Robin Philipson, Strife, 1986-87 (detail) (cat. 31) Left: Kate Downie, New Day Crossing, 2018 (detail) (cat. 12)
2 | mode r n m a s t e r s vii i
modern ma ster s viii | 3
Introduction The Scottish Gallery is delighted to present a special edition of our Modern Masters series for the Edinburgh International Festival which reflects the diverse range of artists that have graced The Gallery’s walls past and present. Highlights include the masterpiece Luxembourg Gardens by SJ Peploe which is beautifully contrasted by the much earlier example of Dean Village, Edinburgh. Breezy Day by FCB Cadell was recently acquired from the much-publicised Harrison collection and we have paintings by Elizabeth Blackadder from four different decades and unusual examples by Victoria Crowe, John Houston and Robin Philipson. We welcome back the monumental Three Sisters of Lucca by Alberto Morrocco which was the centrepiece of his Festival exhibition at The Gallery in 1986. The Gallery acknowledges that 2018 marks the centenary of the end of WWI and 100 years of women’s suffrage and to mark these special events, we have included two short chapters paying tribute to three artists who survived the War in Adam Bruce Thomson, Cadell and William Gillies as well as a short history of The Gallery’s role in supporting women artists. We have represented women artists since the 1890’s; gallery director Peter McOmish Dott (seated opposite) began a series of exhibitions curated by The Gallery which saw the inclusion of women as equals alongside their male counterparts. The Scottish Gallery is grateful to the grandson of artist Jessie Dott (1871-1930) for allowing us access to unique images of the family. CHRISTINA JANSEN The Scottish Gallery
Opposite: Peter McOmish Dott with portrait of his father, Aitken Dott, at The Scottish Gallery, 26 South Castle Street, Edinburgh, c.1891. Image courtesy of the family
4 | mode r n ma s t e r s vii i
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham CBE, HRSA, HRSW (1912-2004) 1 St Martin, Guernsey, November 5, 1951 pencil and wash on paper, 38.3 x 50.3 cms signed and dated lower left provenance The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust Inventory no.BGT1677
The drawings Wilhelmina Barns-Graham made in Italy, Switzerland and the south coast from 1951-1954 are amongst her most accomplished and make a vital contribution to the early St Ives School. Her sweeping line, restraint in colour and certainty in the information she chooses to include predict her future as an abstract painter but at this stage remain clear, poignant observations of real places and memories. St Martin is a parish on the south coast of the island where ancient fields are divided by hedgerows above cliffs and a rocky coastline.
modern ma ster s viii | 5
6 | mode r n m a s t e r s vii i
Dame Elizabeth Blackadder RA, RSA, RSW, RGI (b.1931) 2 Eabost, Skye, 1964 oil on canvas, 71 x 91.5 cms signed and dated lower left exhibited William Gillies and the Edinburgh School, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1998 provenance Private collection, London
Eabost is a crofting hamlet on the Atlantic side of Skye sitting at the middle of a wide bay with a cliff-lined promontory to the south. Blackadder made a productive visit to Skye in 1964, exhibiting several Skye works in exhibitions over the succeeding years. Her painting looks south encompassing the machair in the foreground, the simple crofts, dark sea, far land and hills beyond. Her unerring tonal construction, fine mark-making and paint quality distinguish her as the most talented follower of Gillies and an artist who will eventually exceed all her peers at the Edinburgh College of Art.
modern ma ster s viii | 7
8 | mode r n ma s t e r s vii i
Dame Elizabeth Blackadder RA, RSA, RSW, RGI (b.1931) 3 Landscape with Screen, c.1970 watercolour on paper, 15.5 x 12 cms signed lower left
modern ma ster s viii | 9
Dame Elizabeth Blackadder RA, RSA, RSW, RGI (b.1931) 4 Camelia, 1974 watercolour and pastel, 25.4 x 35.5 cms signed and dated lower right exhibited Festival exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1979, cat. 70 provenance Private collection, Edinburgh
10 | mode r n ma s t e r s vi i i
Dame Elizabeth Blackadder RA, RSA, RSW, RGI (b.1931) 5 Tortoiseshell Cat, Lilies and Iris, 1984 watercolour, 28 x 38 cms signed and dated lower left exhibited The Scottish Gallery at Duke Street, Gallery 8, London, 2017 provenance Private collection, Edinburgh
While Blackadder should be known as a painter of a diverse and original range of subjects her watercolours including flowers and a succeeding dynasty of cats have rightly formed a significant portion of her reputation. Both cat and flower are accorded the simple elegance they possess in natural abundance, unmodified by sentimentality or symbolism creating a diffident beauty which, like the cat, cares not if it pleases but pleases nonetheless.
modern ma ster s viii | 11
1 2 | mode r n ma s t e r s vi i i
Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell RSA (1883-1937) 6 Breezy Day, Iona, c.1921 oil on panel, 36.5 x 44 cms signed lower left exhibited Pictures from a Private collection, The Thistle Foundation, McLellan Galleries, Glasgow, 1951, cat. 112 provenance Major Ion R. Harrison and thence by descent
The perfect summers day is not always the best for the painter. Peploe wrote to his friend William Macdonald in 1923, “We had miserable weather in Iona this year – the worst in living memory – gales and rain the whole time. I got very little done. But this kind of weather suits Iona: the rocks and distant shores seen through falling rain, veil behind veil, take on an elusive quality, and when the light shines through on has visions of rare beauty. I think I prefer it these days to our blue skies and clear distances.” Cadell’s Breezy Day, Iona is a perfect illustration of these thoughts: the rough weather lending an urgency to the painting and the Island of Storms, on the near horizon, earning its title as Atlantic waves crash on its rocky Western side.
modern ma ster s viii | 13
1 4 | mode r n m a s t e r s vi i i
Victoria Crowe OBE, DHC, FRSE, MA(RCA), RSA, RSW (b.1945) 7 Greek Landscape, 1970 oil on board, 25.5 x 35.5 cms signed and dated lower right provenance The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh; Private collection, Edinburgh
modern ma ster s viii | 15
1 6 | mode r n ma s t e r s vi i i
Victoria Crowe OBE, DHC, FRSE, MA(RCA), RSA, RSW (b.1945) 8 Reclining Nude, 1977 oil on board, 33 x 48 cms signed lower left exhibited Victoria Crowe Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1977, cat. 61 provenance Private collection, Edinburgh
Crowe’s reclining nude was exhibited in the artist’s show with The Scottish Gallery in 1977, her third since she moved to Scotland in 1968. Her recruitment by Robin Philipson, initially on a year’s contract, was a significant coup by a Head of Painting determined to bring fresh, outside impetus and character to The College. In 1975 she received a bursary to work from the life model and Reclining Nude was one of several works arising directly from this study. She was by then living at Kittleyknowe and the winter sensibility and engagement with the lone female which became the extraordinary series of Jenny Armstrong paintings is also present in her nudes, essays in white, at once real and ethereal.
modern ma ster s viii | 17
1 8 | mode r n m a s t e r s vi i i
Alan Davie CBE, HRSA (1920-2014) 9 Abstract I, c.1948 (opposite, above) monotype, 18 x 24 cms provenance Private collection, Edinburgh 10 Abstract II, c.1948 (opposite, below) monotype, 17.5 x 30.5 cms provenance Private collection, Edinburgh
1948 was a significant year for Alan Davie as he took up a travelling scholarship, deferred for the period of War service. He travelled to Paris (where he met with William Gear) and Italy where he saw significant shows of American abstract art at the Biennale as well as Miro and Ernst in the Guggenheim gallery. Later in the year he exhibited at the Galleria Sandri, Venice and Peggy Guggenheim acquired a work for her collection, surprised to discover that Davie was “a tall Scotsman” (rather than an American). The monotypes were made in Paris at the end of the year, several which are now in the Tate Collection; Davie recalled in his journal, “The last weeks I have not been idle. I have produced some hundreds of monotypes through this wonderful medium. I have discovered so much and so rapidly my work is becoming something very strange… I am beginning to see.”
modern ma ster s viii | 19
20 | mode r n ma s t e r s vi i i
Alan Davie CBE, HRSA (1920-2014) 11 Birth of the Gobbleme, 1969 watercolour, 55 x 76 cms signed and dated upper right provenance Private collection, USA
modern ma ster s viii | 21
2 2 | mode r n ma s t e r s vi i i
Kate Downie RSA, PPSSA (b.1958) 12 New Day Crossing, 2018 oil on canvas, 100 x 100 cms signed lower right exhibited From the Sublime to the Concrete, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2018, ex. cat
The Queensferry Crossing: A Facebook Tale Posted on Facebook in early February 2018: “A strange and exciting request: does anyone know a lorry driver who might be willing to take me as a passenger across the Queensferry Crossing? I am making crossing studies for my next series of paintings but need a higher viewpoint than from a mere car. I would be happy to swap an etching or print for the privilege of a high moving viewpoint of the bridge.” This simple post was shared nine times and within an hour I had the ‘friend of a friend’ who ran logistics for freight transport across Europe, mostly between Italy and Scotland, making it happen. Three days later I was on an Italian lorry driven by a delightful Romanian, crossing the new bridge at 20 miles per hour, about 12 feet above the road surface with an excellent view, drawing fast and filming all the while with an iPhone taped to the windscreen. Sometimes the best implementation of fresh work happens fast and with proper intensity. And so it is with the crossing drawings of the new bridge. Is it trickier to draw than the other bridges? I think so: more elusive, less bridge, more crossing. It is unexpectedly graceful and certainly not a place to linger on. It’s all about the journey. Kate Downie, April 2018
modern ma ster s viii | 23
2 4 | mode r n m a s t e r s vi i i
Sir William Gillies CBE, RSA, RA, PPRSW (1898-1973) 13 Meldon Hills, 1956 pencil and watercolour, 24 x 35 cms signed and dated lower left exhibited Nature and Imagination, Perth Museum and Art Gallery, Perth, 2005 provenance The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh; Ewan Mundy Fine Art, Glasgow; Private collection, Perthshire
modern ma ster s viii | 25
26 | mode r n ma s t e r s vi i i
Sir William Gillies CBE, RSA, RA, PPRSW (1898-1973) 14 Near Burnhouse, 1958 watercolour, 25 x 35 cms signed and dated lower left provenance The Scottish Gallery; Private collection, Edinburgh
Gillies’ most favoured Borders stream was the Gala Water which rises in the Moorfoot hills and disgorges into the Tweed below Abbotsford, a few miles west of Melrose. In the eighteenth-Century Gala Dale was entirely pastoral but in the proceeding decades numerous plantations arose as ornament and protection for the mansions that were built along the water, including Burnhouse Park, a solid Georgian house hidden in trees to the south of the river. Gillies has made his sketch on a perfect summer’s day with scudding clouds over the peaceful, winding course of the river.
modern ma ster s viii | 27
2 8 | mode r n m a s t e r s vi i i
John Houston OBE, RSA, RSW, RGI (1930-2008) 15 Flowers and Village, 1959 oil on canvas, 72 x 62 cms signed and dated lower left exhibited John Houston Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1960 provenance Private collection, Edinburgh
modern ma ster s viii | 29
3 0 | mode r n ma s t e r s vi i i
John Houston OBE, RSA, RSW, RGI (1930-2008) 16 Kilconquhar, Evening, c.1960 oil on canvas, 100 x 126 cms signed lower right exhibited John Houston Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1960 provenance Private collection, USA
Kilconquhar is a parish and village in central Fife. Its castle has an illustrious history, its 12th century Chatelaine losing her husband in the Crusades at Acre, remarrying Robert de Brus and siring the future King Robert the Bruce. The church, dating from 1818 has an unusually high tower, a distinctive landmark seen across the summer fields as the heat of the day declines. Houston, based in Edinburgh was born in Buckhaven and was deeply familiar with the rural byways of the county which provided his most significant early landscape subjects: birds rising, suns setting, buildings shimmering, painted with an energy and rich impasto he carried through his professional life.
modern ma ster s viii | 31
3 2 | mode r n ma s t e r s vi i i
John Houston OBE, RSA, RSW, RGI (1930-2008) 17 Nude, 1976 pencil and watercolour, 24 x 17 cms signed and dated lower right provenance Private collection, Perthshire
modern ma ster s viii | 33
John Houston OBE, RSA, RSW, RGI (1930-2008) 18 Path Through the Cornfields, Fife II, 1997 oil on board, 23 x 31 cms signed lower left exhibited Festival Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1997 provenance Private collection, Aberdeenshire
3 4 | mode r n ma s t e r s vi i i
Sir William MacTaggart PPRSA, RA, RSW (1903-1981) 19 The Harbour, c.1963 oil on board, 51 x 62 cms signed lower right exhibition Christmas Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1963, cat. 12 provenance Private collection, Edinburgh
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.
modern ma ster s viii | 35
3 6 | mode r n ma s t e r s vi i i
David McClure RSA RSW RGI (1926-1998) 20 Window in Fife, c.1955 oil on board, 39 x 50 cms signed lower left provenance Private collection, Edinburgh
David McClure worked with Anne Redpath and Hamish Reid on a trip to Fife in 1955 and her influence is then evident in the work of both younger painters. His simplified forms in Window in Fife, the brilliant use of white in the construction of his composition and rich impasto all chime with Redpath of the fifties. The composition, looking from a window, and including a still life content in the foreground is a typical Edinburgh School motif used by MacTaggart, Gillies, Maxwell and Henderson Blyth.
modern ma ster s viii | 37
3 8 | mode r n m a s t e r s vi i i
Bruce McLean (b.1944) 21 Vertical Dusk, 1991 screenprint, edition 31/60, 153 x 115.5 cms signed lower right provenance Private collection, Edinburgh
Bruce Mclean’s exhibition for The Edinburgh Festival in 1988 with the Scottish Gallery included a performance, painted ceramics, paintings on canvas (whose scale necessitated the enlargement of the Gallery entrance in George Street) acrylic paintings on photographic paper and screen prints. Born in 1944 he was tutored at the Glasgow School of Art and then moved to London where at St Martins and then The Slade he inspired generations of artists to express themselves out with the confines of traditional practice. A carefree, instinctual form of expression cannot disguise his own innate sense of colour and design which underpins the action of the performance in all media.
modern ma ster s viii | 39
40 | mode r n m a s t e r s vi i i
James Morrison RSA, RSW (b.1932) 22 From Balgove, 27.xii.1995 oil on panel, 100 x 150 cms signed and dated lower right exhibited The Scottish Gallery at London Contemporary Art Fair, Business Design Centre, London, 1997 provenance Private collection, London
James Morrison’s view north across the Montrose basin towards the foothills of the Grampians is one of his finest Angus landscapes, monumental plein air works which chronical the seasons and are deeply imbued with the history of the land. The road, which curves down the gentle hill, is unpassable with new snow whose brilliant glow lends sharp relief to the halfburied fence-posts and gate. The storm has passed to the North leaving a cold, still clarity to the aspect, a day for the farmers to tend to their beasts, clear the roads and light the fire.
modern ma ster s viii | 4 1
42 | mode r n m a s t e r s vi i i
Alberto Morrocco OBE, RSA, RSW, RGI (1917-1998) 23 Three Sisters of Lucca, 1986 oil on canvas, 127 x 133 cms signed and dated lower right exhibited Festival Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1986 illustrated Alberto Morrocco by Victoria Keller and Clara Young, Atelier Books, 1993, p.84 provenance Private collection, Edinburgh
Alberto Morrocco’s Three Sisters of Lucca was the centrepiece for his seminal exhibition with us for the Edinburgh Festival in 1986. Morrocco had emerged as a brilliant colourist in the years after setting aside the burden of his duties as Head of Drawing and Painting at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in 1982. He had lifelong filled sketchbooks with colour notes and drawings and had a mind full of ideas. His early academic training and debts to Cowie, Robert Sivell and the Quattrocento were abandoned in favour of direct painting with the brush, brilliant unmodulated colour and picture designs which came directly from the conceit of the subject. The Three Sisters work is monumental in scale, clearly based on a sketch and memory, the cool interior behind a sun-drenched façade, the stylised women, doves and compotier with single pear is pure, joyous Morrocco.
modern ma ster s viii | 4 3
4 4 | mode r n m a s t e r s vi i i
James McIntosh Patrick OBE, RSA (1907-1998) 24 Gannochy Bridge, Edzell, 1941 oil on board, 44 x 60 cms signed and dated centre provenance Robertson & Bruce Ltd, Fine Art Dealers, Dundee; Private collection, Edinburgh
Gannochy Bridge by Edzell depicts the eighteenth bridge over the river North Esk. It is a complex landscape including the far distant river, the wooded approach to the far-side of the bridge and the vertiginous drop to the dark dell below. Both the far and near landscapes have their repoussoir trees, the latter a sapling clinging to the grassy verge above the drop. Approaching the bridge is a horse-drawn cart, its blue cover a strong, balancing colour note. McIntosh Patrick was celebrated as a brilliant, realist painter and follower of Ruskin for whom the imprecation to ‘paint every blade of grass’ was understood, his skills honed as an etcher before he turned to the landscape of Angus as his chief subject. In wintry subjects such as his famous Ettrick Shepherd his debt to Breughel is clearly acknowledged and in Gannochy Bridge the complexity of his landscape has a renaissance origin but the soft, ruralism of the scene is more reminiscent of John Constable.
modern ma ster s viii | 45
46 | mode r n ma s t e r s vi i i
Denis Peploe RSA (1914-1993) 25 Jura, c.1970 oil on panel, 23 x 27 cms signed lower right provenance Private collection, Edinburgh
Jura is so often seen in images from afar, the Paps providing the distinctive feature on a far horizon. On a perfect summer day the light gives sharp relief near and far. Peploe, like his father before him, uses a pochard painting box which allows the artist to travel to remote and wild spots with only a rucksack for a studio.
modern ma ster s viii | 47
48 | mode r n ma s t e r s vi i i
SJ Peploe RSA (1871-1935) 26 Dean Village, Edinburgh, 1902 oil on board, 23.5 x 15.5 cms signed lower right provenance Ian MacNicol, Glasgow; The Hon. James Bruce, thence by descent exhibited Peploe Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1947, cat. 39
The Dean Village sits on the Water of Leith, once driving a succession of ten mills, a solid medieval settlement today quiet in the shadow of Telford’s eponymous bridge, studios and apartments now occupying the original mills and warehouses. In 1902 it would still have been heavily occupied and Peploe with his customary deliberate skill has described washing in the foreground, looking over a low bridge up towards the spire of the Dean Parish church. Peploe’s early panel landscapes were invariably made en plein air, using one of several painting boxes.
modern ma ster s viii | 4 9
5 0 | mode r n ma s t e r s vi i i
SJ Peploe RSA (1871-1935) 27 Luxembourg Gardens, Paris, c.1910 oil on panel, 27 x 35 cms signed lower right illustrated S.J. Peploe by Guy Peploe, Lund Humphries, 2012, p.101 provenance The Artist’s Family and thence by descent
Peploe moved to Paris in the spring of 1910, as the city was recovering from the catastrophic flooding in January. The unhealthiness of the city was no doubt a good reason for Sam and Margaret, then heavily pregnant with their first child, to move to Royan in the Charante where Willy was born in August. The panels (all acquired from the Paris American Art Co. in Montparnasse) which the artist painted in the summer and autumn are full of optimism reflecting his happiness and perhaps a sense of liberation in his final commitment to wife and family. This energy and freedom is also tangible in the works made in Paris on the family’s return to the tiny studio apartment at 278 Ble Raspail. Long considered to be the south of France but now positively identified as The Luxembourg Gardens our painting is one of the most powerful examples of Peploe’s short, Fauvist period: the time is dusk, the sky a livid yellow but the sense of heat is palpable as figures sit in the shade of the dramatic canopy of the palms; in the background high trees partially mask the profile of the palace roof. Luxembourg Gardens, Paris is painted with strong, directional marks, its angularities, brilliant colour and rich impasto are strong statements of confidence from an artist entirely at one with himself and his objectives.
modern ma ster s viii | 51
5 2 | mode r n ma s t e r s vi i i
Sir Robin Philipson PPRSA, RA, HRA, RSW, RGI (1916-1992) 28 Still Life with Coffee Pot, c.1955 watercolour, 30 x 57 cms signed lower right provenance The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh
modern ma ster s viii | 53
Sir Robin Philipson PPRSA, RA, HRA, RSW, RGI (1916-1992) 29 Women Observed, 1977 watercolour, 30 x 22 cms signed and inscribed with message verso provenance Private collection, Edinburgh
5 4 | mode r n m a s t e r s vi i i
Sir Robin Philipson PPRSA, RA, HRA, RSW, RGI (1916-1992) 30 Horse Fallen, 1982 oil on board, 38 x 38 cms signed verso exhibited Robin Philipson Exhibition, The Macaulay Gallery, Stenton, 1982, cat. 8 provenance Private collection, Edinburgh
Robin Philipson used his beguiling abilities as a technician, colourist and designer of a painting to present conflict, violence, sexual menace or subjugation as compelling, morally ambiguous dramas which puts him quite at odds with most of his peers and students at Edinburgh College of Art. Only his star student John Bellany, who became a close friend after not inconsiderably strife, addressed similarly powerful imagery. His Horse Fallen of 1982 depicts a dying horse on a battlefield, innocent, powerful but laid low, while a blindfold, naked man stands tethered awaiting his fate to the side.
modern ma ster s viii | 55
5 6 | mode r n ma s t e r s vi i i
Sir Robin Philipson PPRSA, RA, HRA, RSW, RGI (1916-1992) 31 Strife, 1986-87 oil on board and Japanese paper, 123 x 90 cms signed and dated verso provenance Private collection, Newcastle illustrated Robin Philipson by Elizabeth Cumming, Samson & Co., 2018
modern ma ster s viii | 57
5 8 | mode r n m a s t e r s vi i i
Anne Redpath OBE, RSA, ARA, RWA (1895-1965) 32 Roses, c.1963 oil on canvas, 50 x 60 cms signed lower left exhibited Christmas Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1963, cat. 23
The later flower paintings of Anne Redpath, worked in full impasto, sometimes low in tone but often as here in Roses, in glorious colour are a distinct advance from the paler more restrained works of the fifties. Her early death in 1965 at the peak of her powers aged just seventy begs the question of what more she might have achieved.
modern ma ster s viii | 59
6 0 | mode r n ma s t e r s vi i i
James Downie Robertson MBE, RSA, RSW, RGI, PAI (1931-2010) 33 Garden in Snow mixed media, 73 x 99 cms signed lower right, titled verso
James Robertson was a painter’s painter whose consistent, inspired response to the Scottish landscape was more influential than many of his more celebrated peers at The Glasgow School of Art. Using collage and mixed media, like both Barbara Rae and Duncan Shanks, he developed an abstract language to create paintings which capture real experience, evocations of time and place, moments of weather transformation which are both beautiful and heartfelt. Garden in Snow is an essay in winter colour, the garden gripped by snow, raw but reasserting its familiarity.
modern ma ster s viii | 61
62 | mode r n m a s t e r s vi i i
Adam Bruce Thomson OBE, RSA, PPRSW (1885-1976) 34 Reconstruction of Demolished Bridge near Conde, France, c.1918 wash drawing, 22.5 x 24 cms signed lower left exhibited Painting the Century, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2013, cat. 20 provenance The Artist’s Estate
modern ma ster s viii | 63
Adam Bruce Thomson was not an official War artist but as a second Lieutenant with the Royal Engineers seeing action at Arras and Mons from late 1915 he made a few sketches when he had the chance and subsequently worked a number up into lithographs. He married Jessie Hyslop on April 15th 1918 as an act of optimism; two of her brothers were already dead and one mortally damaged. Bruce Thomson survived the war until armistice and quietly resumed his position at Edinburgh College of Art to dedicate a long productive life to family and making art.
Adam Bruce Thomson OBE, RSA, PPRSW (1885-1976) 35 Royal Engineers Constructing a Suspension Bridge, 1919 lithograph, 26 x 16 cms signed lower right exhibited Painting the Century, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2013, cat. 18 provenance The Artist’s Estate
64 | mode r n ma s t e r s vi i i
The Scottish Gallery remembers WWI On the 28th of July 1914, the day War was declared, The Scottish Gallery invoiced Dr. Marr of Greenlaw, Berwickshire for the purchase of Companions by William McTaggart for £157 and ten shillings, the equivalent of around £45,000 today. Life goes on after all and War was declared on a wave of patriotism and optimism.
A reading of the subsequent months’ entries in The Gallery day book give an occasional insight into the early days of the War; a room at 26 South Castle Street is rented to the YMCA as a distribution point (for donations) at the nominal rent of £1.00 per month. A reference is made to the status of a painting by Robert Hope donated for the Belgian Relief Fund. The commercial activity focusses on works going off to regional salerooms: Curr & Dewar in Dundee, and Dowell’s in Edinburgh, and there is activity with works consigned or handled on a joint commission basis with Colnagi & Obach in London, Connell & Co and George Davidson Ltd in Glasgow. On a more optimistic note in July 1915 six works are consigned to The Gallery
by SJ Peploe, now living in India Street with his wife and two boys, two of Crawford, four of Cassis and one is sold, for £25, less 25% commission. The balance is however returned to the artist unsold in early October. Six more are consigned in November, including three flower paintings, but one is immediately passed on to Alexander Reid in Glasgow and the rest returned the following August. In January 1917, Peploe writes to FCB Cadell in the trenches, clearly feeling confined by the War, joking with his friend that he must surely give up ‘flake white’ because of the expense and that ‘is it not quite unnecessary for a colourist?’ He wrote again in August after Cadell has been wounded and is recuperating in Rouen, wishing him a
modern ma ster s viii | 65
Above: C F Partoon Photographers, Dundee, William Gillies in military uniform, photograph, c.1917. Royal Scottish Academy of Art & Architecture (William Gillies Bequest) Left: FCB Cadell, Self-Portrait, c.1914 (detail) (in the collection of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh)
In January 1917, Peploe writes to FCB Cadell in the trenches, clearly feeling confined by the War, joking with his friend that he must surely give up ‘flake white’
‘slow recovery’ and looking forward to revisiting the Hebrides to recover ‘lost virtues’ and how they must all go together to Iona next summer. At The Gallery a brisk trade in James Lawton Wingate continues with an exhibition in March promoted jointly with George Davidson of Glasgow. As is typical with the picture selling world there are prominent repeat purchasers, like Hugh Stoddard of East Lothian. On October 12, 1916, William Boyd of Broughty Ferry buys Macrihannish Bay by McTaggart for £1,000 but he has deferred payment until the following July and consigns a higher value of works by McTaggart and Hague School painters for sale. Clearly the partners are having to be creative to make significant sales. At the end of
6 6 | mode r n ma s t e r s vi i i
Adam Bruce Thomson Royal Engineers Constructing a Suspension Bridge, lithograph, 26 x 16 cms (cat. 35)
the year McTaggart’s Stormy Day, Mull of Kintyre is sold but this time with the arrangement that the purchaser has two months to pay and can swap the picture for others of similar value within two years. Collectors like Jack Blyth of Kirkcaldy, who ended up with eighty-four Peploes but began with a passion for McTaggart, and William Burrell, who acquired Hutton Castle in Berwickshire in 1916, were identifying buying opportunities and ‘good’ prices. It was a conservative, perhaps safer policy which sustained the Gallery in these difficult years: McTaggart, Wingate, Wintour, the later work of The Glasgow Boys and European works by Monticelli, Blommers, Israels and Maris. Business was patchy, but the occasional major sale can be attributed to the partners’ reputations and ability to ‘keep up appearances’ in otherwise straightened times. In March
1918 James Howden Hume, owner of the great Engineering company still trading today as James Howden, bought McTaggart’s Among the Bents, 1898 for the equivalent today of £500,000. The Scottish virtues of hard work and enterprise in the territories of engineering and shipping could pay dividends in a war economy. A month or so before the War ended James Wright, who would go on to persuade the R & A to bring The Open to Carnoustie and was responsible for remodelling the fiendish finish to the golf course, bought another McTaggart for the same figure as Howden Hume, this time agreeing to pay by instalment over two years at 5% interest! Cadell was typical of most artists to survive The War: he chose to face down whatever trauma he had suffered by ‘moving on’, by refusing to be defined by the experiences and by seeking the redemptive comfort of art and hard work to rebuild his life. Adam Bruce Thomson, who
modern ma ster s viii | 67
joined up with friends from the College, many of whom would not return, like Walter Hyslop whose sister he would marry, dedicated a long, productive life to art, a way to both escape and rationalise the past and memorialise those who had been less fortunate on the battlefield. William Gillies was called up in April 1917, after two terms of the first year of his Diploma course at Edinburgh College of Art. His time in France saw him twice wounded, wounds which most likely saved him from the fate of so much of his battalion of the Scottish Rifles when in 1918 they lost over three-quarters of its number. Cadell had volunteered as an enlisted soldier, albeit in a Saville Row tailored uniform, and his drawings of 1915, published for the War effort as Jack & Tommy, were gentle observations, well short of satire but thoroughly from the perspective of the common soldier rather than the staff officer. Whether by the end of the War
he could have been so gentle again is a moot point. Andrew McPherson in his book William Gillies (yet unpublished) identifies Gillies elusive character and traits of self-sufficiency and his loyalty to a non-hierarchical band of colleagues at Edinburgh College of Art as arising from his War experience when the only comfort was the idea of home and your comrades around you. It is always an intriguing question to ask: will great artists always out? Or do we lose talent to discouragement and accident in the random nature of life? What is certain is that the flower of a generation of creative talent died on Flanders fields and that art would never be the same. Survivor guilt and anger manifested itself in the work of war artists like Nevinson and Orpen but it was to the Germans, the defeated, that art provided the most visceral expression of loss and rage in the work of Beckman, Dix and George Grosz. English painters like Glyn
Adam Bruce Thomson, Reconstruction of Demolished Bridge near Conde, France, wash drawing, 22.5 x 24 cms (cat. 34)
6 8 | mode r n m a s t e r s vi i i
Post War: Recovery and remembrance Cadell is supposed to have been the first of the two artists to have visited Iona and there are many works that date from before the First War. Peploe wrote to Cadell from Edinburgh when Cadell was at the Western Front, giving him the gossip and looking forward to the end of the war and a trip to the islands, to Iona, to somehow rediscover their innocence. Their visits did not always coincide but each made an annual pilgrimage to the island for the rest of their lives, experiences valuable to them as artists and friends.
FCB Cadell, Breezy Day, Iona, oil on panel, 36.5 x 44 cms (cat. 6)
modern ma ster s viii | 69
Robert Graves (1895-1985) Served as captain for the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers.
A Pinch of Salt by Robert Graves (written on August 14th 1916) When a dream is born in you With a sudden clamorous pain, When you know the dream is true And lovely, with no flaw nor stain, O then, be careful, or with sudden clutch You’ll hurt the delicate thing you prize so much.
Philpot and Edward Burra did expose the underbelly of the roaring twenties while Dreams are like a bird that mocks, others like Stanley Spencer Flirting the feathers of his tail. tried to find a new vocabulary When you seize at the salt-box, to describe the physical Over the hedge you’ll see him sail: and spiritual aftermath. Old birds are neither caught with salt nor chaff: Scotland, whose families They watch you from the apple bough, and laugh. suffered disproportionately, saw a denuded countryside Poet, never chase the dream, change forever and an era Laugh yourself, and turn away, of depression and hunger Mask your hunger; let it seem marches and emigration. Small matter if he come or stay, In literature new ideas of But when he nestles in your hand at last, nationalism emerged in the Close up your fingers tight and hold him fast. poetry of MacDiarmid and writers such as Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Neil Gunn approached issues such as women’s liberation, socialism and land reform but in art the emphasis was alternatives to the Academies while Peploe and on the regenerative possibilities with sporadic Cadell, both paragons of modernism, moved political engagement or social commentary. towards a romantic lyricism and structured In art what Simon Martin refers to as ‘the clarity respectively. What is clear is that there return to order’ in his chapter in Aftermath, is no dominant movement in the post-War the catalogue for the Tate exhibition this year, art world, but neither would anything ever begins to hold sway. Braque, Derain and Picasso be the same. The enormous contribution of turn away from cubism to the human figure and women was recognised in universal suffrage in Germany Neue Sachlichkeit counterbalances and women artists had new freedoms to work, Dada and expressionism. In his essay ‘Going escaping their roles as mistresses, models Modern and being British’ (Weekend Review, 1932) and muses to make real contributions to 20th Paul Nash sought to reconcile and an emergent Century art. neo-romanticism began to characterise much younger artists. In Scotland groups such as the GUY PEPLOE Society of Eight and Edinburgh Group sought The Scottish Gallery
7 0 | mode r n m a s t e r s vi i i
Modern Scottish Women 100 Years of Women’s Suffrage Many observers of the art world have remarked at how male-dominated it seems. No named artists survive from pre-antiquity, and few, all male, from classical times. When Vasari published his Lives of the Artists in 1550, recognised as the first work of art history, women were left unnoticed.
In the modern period, we have new measures of visibility: inclusions in collections and exhibitions and statistics about popularity in an era when we consume art like any other commodity. In the last hundred years, as impediments were removed, many social pressures persisted and we have to congratulate many of the great women artists of the last century on their dedication and perseverance as well as their genius. In the generally strong area of Modern British art sculptors like Barbara Hepworth still lags behind Henry Moore. In the second rank however Elisabeth Frink competes well with Lynn Chadwick, Anthony Caro and Michael Ayrton. The painters are even further behind however – or, in the logic of a potential investor, the women have more potential. While Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon occupy an international stratosphere, permanently in the top ten, painters like Prunella Clough, Joan Eardley and Anne Redpath are well adrift of the values achieved by William Scott,
Patrick Caulfield or Ivon Hitchens. While the marketplace is one measure the museum sector is another and in Edinburgh, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art has gone some way to addressing the historic deficit, with Alice Strang’s exhibition Modern Scottish Women: Painters and Sculptors 1885–1965 (2015–2016). The Scottish Gallery has been a champion of women artists consistently for decades, not to fulfil any quota or gender equality ‘policy’ – we have championed women because the work was valid. The journey for women has not been easy and The Gallery has championed exceptional women artists who in turn paved the way for future generations. In the first half of the last century, art education was in effect only available to the upper classes, and a career as an artist was routinely curtailed for women, by marriage and children. By the mid to late 19th century, more women from the middle classes were entering art schools; needlework, pottery, still life drawing and painting, in particular
modern ma ster s viii | 71
Art Studies League–Still Life Class, New York, c.1885 This rare photograph of a New York art studio gives us a unique insight into how a woman’s art class would have looked like during the 19th century. Very few women from this period would have had the opportunity to enter into formal art education. Photo: private collection
7 2 | mode r n m a s t e r s vi i i
Bessie MacNicol (1869-1904) First known woman with proven commercial success shown in The Scottish Gallery, 1896. Trained at Glasgow School of Art and part of the Glasgow Style. Photo: Artist’s Footsteps, Dumfries and Galloway Council
Jessie Dott (1871-1930) Niece of Peter McOmish Dott, senior partner of The Scottish Gallery 1890-1915 (see page 73). Image courtesy of the artist’s estate
Jessie Dott, New Haven Children, 1897, watercolour. Private collection
modern ma ster s viii | 73
In 1896, Peter McOmish Dott (pictured, watercolour were considered appropriate page 2) held its first Annual Exhibition of selected mediums for women. artists which included paintings by Farquharson, Although women artists had been associated with the RSW (1891) and the SSA (1876) from Lawton Wingate, Paton Reid, Ramsay, Bessie the beginning, and although a Glasgow Society MacNicol, Archibald Kay, Alexander Roche and others. Bessie MacNicol appears to be of Lady Artists had been formed in 1882, many talented women artists continued to find it our first confirmed commercial success by a difficult to have the opportunity to exhibit their female artist; our daybooks only reveal what work due to overt male prejudice. It was not we sold from this period which is dominated by male artists. When Bessie MacNicol died until 1938 that the RSA elected its first female Associate and the first elected female painter to prematurely at the age of 34 from eclampsia in 1904, her obituaries become an Academician spoke of Scotland’s loss was Anne Redpath in ‘of a potentially brilliant 1952. It was against such The journey for women has not been a milieu that the Scottish easy and The Gallery has championed painter… ‘worthy to Society of Women Artists exceptional women artists who in turn rank with the best of her artist sons’. Jessie Dott was founded in 1924, paved the way for future generations. (c.1871-1935) was the striking a blow for the niece of Peter McOmish feminist cause – and Dott (1856-1934) who for the advancement of was the senior partner in The Gallery from women in the arts in Scotland and providing a much needed platform and forum for applied 1890-1915. Her father and grandfather had been artists and in the photograph of her opposite, arts. she is seated in front of her easel aged around The SSWA’s exhibition moved to the sixteen with her younger sister sitting in the National Gallery in 1941 where it exhibited annually until 1944; and since 1945, when foreground. She wanted to be an artist. Jessie Anne Redpath was President, works were Dott would have had direct access to the firm and no doubt she would have applied pressure shown at the RSA. The Scottish Society of painters in Watercolour has a pedigree dating for women to be allowed to rent rooms and from its foundation in 1876. It staged its first exhibit and sell work and she certainly would have pushed for women to be represented public exhibition in 1879 in rented premises alongside men in selected exhibitions. In the in Glasgow. The first elected President was Francis Powell RSW who was already a member early 20th century, Jessie Dott became one of of the RWS. Today, the membership of over 120 the founding members of the Scottish Society of Women Artists such was her determination is replete with the names of painters who have international reputation in Scotland, Britain for women artists to have a voice and platform for their work in Scotland. and beyond.
modern ma ster s viii | 75
Anne Redpath (1895-1965) The artist is seated front left, Edinburgh College of Art, 1915. Image courtesy of the artist’s estate
Post WWI, radical social change took in international painting by moving towards an place and art education became more readily undefined picture space in which her flowers and vases merge into backgrounds built up available to those from different classes and with the vigour and élan of Nicolas de Staël or backgrounds, but women artists still struggled to survive. In these decades, a succession of Antoni Tàpies. During WWII, Miss Proudfoot, the sister great women artists have underpinned our programme, supported by many dozens of of George Proudfoot took The Gallery through some difficult years and she was succeeded by others, many showing multiple times. Anne Redpath, in particular, was outward in her her sister-in-law, the young French-born widow gaze, partly because of the necessity to make of George. Many of our existing male artists had her way as a professional artist while mother enlisted which left the rosta of artists available to three young boys through the difficult war very thin; Miss Proudfoot showed the best of emerging artists from years, living back in the London and Scotland Borders after more than and blended the French ten years in France. In Post WWI, radical social change school with Scottish the war’s aftermath took place and art education became contemporary artists. her star rose rapidly; more readily available to those from She ran a comprehensive the beginning of the different classes and backgrounds programme of solo Edinburgh International and mixed exhibitions Festival and the wealth of exclusively of Scottish exhibiting opportunities that emerged in the fifties in Edinburgh, Women Artists (November 1941, 1942, 1943) and regularly showed women artists as the London, and Bristol, as well as with the Arts Council of Great Britain, saw Redpath in the norm rather than the exception. A number of established Polish artists were stationed in vanguard. She was the direct descendant of the Scottish Colourists, Peploe in particular, as she Scotland and The Scottish Gallery gave them a demonstrated her extraordinary facility, colour platform to exhibit including Aleksander Zyw and Josef Herman. Mrs Jadwiga Walker, an artist sense and unerring choice of subject. Latterly her curiosity and adventure found painterly commissioned by the Polish Army as an official fulfilment in long trips to continental Europe, War artist, was given an exhibition of drawings initially back to the France she knew so well of the Armoured forces in October 1944. After the war, Joan Eardley found from the twenties, but then to Spain, Venice, Portugal and the Canaries. This adventure opportunities unavailable to a previous generation in the fifties and sixties, not least was always put to good use, with sketchbooks with The Scottish Gallery, and in the more than filled and objects found and brought back to the studio to enrich her iconography. In later fifty years since her death we have continued to represent her estate and promote her years she was able to respond to developments
7 6 | mode r n m a s t e r s vi i i
Joan Eardley sketching on the street, Townhead, c.1955. Photo by Audrey Walker
Kate Downie sketching by the new bridge, August 2017.
national and international reputation. Her only Series and further significant travel to Italy in commissioned work is the portrait of (Gallery 1955 highlighted her strong draughtsmanship. Director 1952-1975) Bill Macaulay’s children. She divided her time between St Andrews and St Ives from 1960 and produced various The power of her work to engage and move significant series of the viewer is undimmed; abstract works from the her twin subjects of geometric to the more Glasgow and Catterline Dame Elizabeth Blackadder, Victoria organic. are now rediscovered Crowe, Kate Downie and Alison Watt Over the last forty by new generations, her have emerged as four of Scotland’s most years or so, Dame poignant story retold eloquent and significant painters Elizabeth Blackadder, and better understood. Victoria Crowe, Kate Another powerful woman Downie and Alison artist to emerge after WWII was Wilhelmina Barns-Graham who was Watt have emerged as four of Scotland’s born in St Andrews and attended Edinburgh most eloquent and significant painters, their work fresh, original and widely appreciated. College of Art 1932-37. She moved to St Ives in the 1940s, where she joined the artist societies Blackadder, well known in the capital through her membership of the Royal Academy, was a of Newlyn, St Ives and Penwith and became friends with Nicholson, Hepworth and Gabo. senior tutor at Edinburgh College of Art and A trip to Switzerland in 1948 inspired her Glacier has been lauded with honours, degrees and
modern ma ster s viii | 7 7
Victoria Crowe in her Edinburgh studio, June 2018. Photo by Kenneth Gray
retrospectives. Her painting in watercolour and oil and her prodigious oeuvre of printmaking are marked by a restraint and delicacy which still deliver arresting strength. Victoria Crowe, who came to Edinburgh from London in the late sixties, like the other two has found inspiration in travel (she has a second home in Venice), but much of her inspiration is internal, or springs from text and ephemera, nature and the built environment. Her sensitivity to time of day, to texture and to surface has led to a layered approach in picturemaking unique in contemporary practice, which has brought her wide and deep appreciation. She is our Edinburgh International Festival exhibitor this year and she also has a portrait Retrospective Beyond Likeness at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Born in North Carolina, Kate Downie studied at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen
before travel and residencies took her to the United States, England, Amsterdam and Paris. Downie is one of the most subtle and persuasive colourists of her generation and she will only add to her palette from real experience. This gives her work a truth and authority, a right to transport us to the unfamiliar or provide an urgent reminder of where we have also been. Alison Watt is no longer represented by The Scottish Gallery but her first solo exhibition was with us in 1990. Women now dominate many aspects of the visual arts and we are proud to be part of a legacy of equal opportunity; the success of The Gallery has always been built on a quality platform for art in all its forms. CHRISTINA JANSEN The Scottish Gallery
7 8 | mode r n ma s t e r s vi i i
BUY FROM US SELL WITH US
modern ma ster s viii | 79
NEXT VALUATION DAYS 8TH AND 10TH NOVEMBER 2018 • PLEASE ENQUIRE • The Scottish Gallery offers a comprehensive and discreet service to those seeking advice on valuation or wishing to sell works of art. Sometimes it will be our advice to seek an appraisal with an auctioneer but these days the costs of conducting business at auction, particularly for a potential vendor, are such that today the Gallery option is much more attractive. How much better to have an entirely private arrangement with The Scottish Gallery who will take every consideration into account and charge considerably less for so doing. Do get in touch for a free appraisal and advice from Guy Peploe, Tommy Zyw and Christina Jansen, who between them have over sixty years of experience of the market to draw on.
8 0 | mode r n m a s t e r s vi i i
Published by The Scottish Gallery to coincide with the exhibition modern masters viii 2 August – 1 September 2018 Exhibition can be viewed online at www.scottish-gallery.co.uk/modernmasters ISBN: 978-1-910267-85-1 Designed by www.kennethgray.co.uk Photography by John McKenzie Printed by J Thomson Colour Printers, Glasgow 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.
Right: Bruce McLean, Vertical Dusk, 1991 (detail) (cat. 21)