Modern Masters Women | August 2020 | The Scottish Gallery by The Scottish Gallery

MODERN MASTERS WOMEN

MODERN MASTERS WOMEN 30 JULY â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 29 AUGUST 2020

Barbara Balmer (1929–2017)

Elizabeth Blackadder (b.1931)

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912–2004)

Victoria Crowe (b.1945)

Mardi Barrie (1930–2004)

Bet Low (1924–2007)

Contemporary Art From Scotland 1981–82 UK Touring exhibition which was organised, produced and published by The Scottish Gallery Photographs by Robert Mabon; Victoria Crowe portrait by Jessie Ann Matthew

Frances Walker (b.1930)

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FOREWORD

As the world’s largest cultural festival has been cancelled for the first time since it began in 1947, our response is to give Edinburgh an exhibition worthy of a Festival, complete with a Festival programme of online events. The Scottish Gallery is an historical business which has endured, much because it has always been able to respond to world events, not retreat. We are taking this moment to reflect on one key area of our history and review one hundred and twenty-five years of exhibiting women artists as we present Modern Masters Women. This continues the spirit of our Modern Masters series and allows us to celebrate the pioneering, persistent, creative women artists at the end of the 19th century, and all the curators, gallerists and individual talents who have contributed to the equality enjoyed today in the cultural realm. Women artists have always produced art which bears the trace of their experiences and personal expression, of equal merit to any male counterpart. However, the professional occupation was male dominated and women’s art was for the most part, perceived as amateur. In the 20th century, talented, educated women began to question the social and artistic constraints placed on them and began to break free from conventional thinking. In today’s art world there is a reduced sense of male advantage over women and the need for positive discrimination has fallen away as women are regarded as vital contributors to the art world. Modern Masters Women goes some way to explain how women artists entered the establishment of Aitken Dott and how our independent gallery made it normal for women artists to have a career after their fine art training. We have exhibited hundreds of women artists, in many disciplines. The various Women’s Guilds and associations had done much to help confidence and provide a platform for women but commercial and critical success in the wider art world would provide a real measure of gender equality. Galleries are tastemakers: championing and funding artists,

introducing them to collectors. The Scottish Gallery provided women with an opportunity to exhibit work in the cut and thrust of the commercial world amongst their peers and the possibility of a solo exhibition presented the ultimate opportunity for artists to fully express their ideas, artistic practice and personal expression. Modern Masters Women is not a survey exhibition and the Directors issue a blanket apology for omitting a legion of talented women artists. It is a tantalising glimpse of something remarkable: the astonishing achievements of Scottish trained and based artists. Included are the best known of each generation and several less familiar, ripe for rediscovery. In the contemporary field are senior figures, mid-career and emerging artists, hopefully demonstrating our long-term commitment to nurturing talent. The Scottish Gallery has reached out in a spirit of collaboration to celebrate Modern Masters Women. We may not be able to welcome the same visitor numbers in The Gallery this August but we aim to bring people together online. Our 10-minute lecture programme, Meet the Artist and online support material is an opportunity to hear different views around our central subject with insights from our artists, numerous curators, art historians and institutions. The Scottish Gallery would like to thank all the artists for their contributions and looks forward to sharing with you their wonderful work, insights and genius. We would like to thank Iain Barnet and Elizabeth Cumming for their complementary essays on the following pages. Special mention goes to my fellow Directors Tommy Zyw and Guy Peploe for their outstanding support during a period of challenging, remote teamwork. Christina Jansen

MODERN MASTERS WOMEN CELEBRATING 125 YEARS OF WOMEN ARTISTS

Some 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 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 National Galleries of Scotland 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 championed women because the work was valid. The journey for women has not been easy and The Gallery has represented 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 watercolour were considered appropriate mediums for women. Women artists had been associated with the RSW (1891) and the SSA (1876) from the beginning, and although a Glasgow Society of Lady Artists had been formed in 1882, many talented women artists continued to find it difficult to have the opportunity to exhibit their work due to overt male prejudice. It was not until 1938 that the RSA elected its first female Associate and the first elected female painter to become an Academician was Anne Redpath in 1952. It was against such a milieu that the Scottish Society of Women Artists was founded in 1924, striking a blow for the feminist cause – and for the advancement of women in the arts in Scotland and providing a much-needed platform and forum for applied arts. The SSWA’s exhibition moved to the National Gallery in 1941

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Still Life Class, New York, c.1885 This rare photograph of a still life painting class in New York conveys the formality of a womanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s art education in the late 19th century. Photo: private collection

Bessie MacNicol (1869–1904) First known woman with proven commercial success shown in The Scottish Gallery, 1897. Trained at Glasgow School of Art. Photo: Artist’s Footsteps, Dumfries and Galloway Council

Peter McOmish Dott (1856–1934)

Jessie Dott (1871–1930)

Peter McOmish Dott with portrait of his father, Aitken Dott (founders of The Scottish Gallery), 26 South Castle Street, Edinburgh, c.1891.

Niece of Peter McOmish Dott, senior partner of The Scottish Gallery 1890–1915 (see opposite).

Image courtesy of the family

Image courtesy of the artist’s estate

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where it exhibited annually until 1944; and since 1945, when Anne Redpath was President, works were shown at the RSA. The Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour has a pedigree dating from its foundation in 1876. It staged its first public exhibition in 1879 in rented premises in Glasgow. The first elected President was Francis Powell RSW who was already a member of the RWS. Today, the membership of over 120 is replete with the names of painters of international reputations. In 1897, Peter McOmish Dott (pictured opposite) inaugurated The Scottish Gallery as part of Aitken Dott & Son and held the first Annual Exhibition of selected artists which included paintings by Farquharson, Lawton Wingate, Paton Reid, Ramsay, Bessie MacNicol, Archibald Kay, Alexander Roche and others. Bessie MacNicol appears to be our first confirmed commercial success by a female artist; our daybooks only reveal what we sold from this period which is dominated by male artists. When Bessie MacNicol died prematurely at the age of 34 from eclampsia in 1904, her obituaries spoke of Scotland’s loss ‘of a potentially brilliant painter… ‘worthy to rank with the best of her artist sons’. Jessie Dott (1871–1930) was the niece of Peter McOmish Dott (1856–1934) who was the senior partner in The Gallery from 1890–1915. Her father and grandfather had been artists and in the photograph of her opposite, she is seated in front of her easel aged around sixteen with her younger sister sitting in the foreground. She wanted to be an artist. Jessie Dott would have had direct access to the firm and no doubt she would have applied pressure for women to be allowed to rent rooms and exhibit and sell work and she certainly would have pushed for women to be represented alongside men in selected exhibitions. In the early 20th century, Jessie Dott became one of the founding members of the Scottish Society of Women Artists such was her determination for women artists to have a voice and platform for their work in Scotland. Post WWI, radical social change took place and art education became more readily available to those from different classes and backgrounds, but women artists still struggled to survive. In these decades, a succession of great women artists have underpinned our programme, supported by many

dozens of others, many showing multiple times. Anne Redpath, in particular, was outward in her gaze, partly because of the necessity to make her way as a professional artist while mother to three young boys through the difficult war years, living back in the Borders after more than ten years in France. In the war’s aftermath her star rose rapidly; the beginning of the Edinburgh International Festival and the wealth of exhibiting opportunities that emerged in the 50s in Edinburgh, London, and Bristol, as well as with the Arts Council of Great Britain, saw Redpath in the vanguard. She was the direct descendant of the Scottish Colourists, Peploe in particular, as she demonstrated her extraordinary facility, colour sense and unerring choice of subject. Latterly her curiosity and adventure found painterly fulfilment in long trips to continental Europe, initially back to the France she knew so well from the 20s, but then to Spain, Venice, Portugal and the Canaries. This adventure was always put to good use, with sketchbooks filled and objects found and brought back to the studio to enrich her iconography. In later years she was able to respond to developments in international painting by moving towards an undefined picture space in which her flowers and vases merge into backgrounds built up with the vigour and élan of Nicolas de Staël or Antoni Tàpies. During WWII, Miss Proudfoot, the sister of George Proudfoot (who directed The Gallery from 1915–1940) took The Gallery through some difficult years and she was succeeded by her sister-in-law, the young French-born widow of George. Many of our existing male artists had enlisted which left the rosta of artists available very thin; Miss Proudfoot showed the best of emerging artists from London and Scotland and blended the French school with Scottish contemporary artists. She ran a programme of solo and mixed exhibitions exclusively of Scottish Women Artists (November 1941, 1942, 1943) and regularly showed women artists as the norm rather than the exception. A number of established Polish artists were stationed in Scotland and The Scottish Gallery gave them a platform to exhibit including Aleksander Zyw and Josef Herman. Mrs Jadwiga Walker, an artist commissioned by the Polish Army

Anne Redpath (1895â&#x20AC;&#x201C;1965) The Artist is seated front left, Edinburgh College of Art, 1915. Image courtesy of the Artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s estate

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as an official War artist, was given an exhibition of drawings of the Armoured forces in October 1944. When Alice Strang curated Modern Scottish Women: Painters & Sculptors 1885-1965, at the National Galleries of Scotland in 2015, she stated that ‘Amongst Scotland’s private galleries, The Scottish Gallery, established in Edinburgh in 1897 as part of ‘Gilders, Framers and Artists’ Colourmen business Aitken Dott & Son, did most to promote

The power of her work to engage and move the viewer is undimmed; her twin subjects of Glasgow and Catterline are continually rediscovered by new generations, her poignant story retold and better understood. Another powerful woman artist to emerge after WWII was Wilhelmina Barns-Graham who was born in St Andrews and attended Edinburgh College of Art 1932–37. She moved to St Ives in the 1940s and

the work of Scottish women artists.’ The post-war Renaissance in the arts was led by Edinburgh, with the first International Festival held in 1947. The Scottish Gallery recognised the importance of August in the exhibition programme with women included in Festival exhibitions from the start. Joan Eardley found opportunities unavailable to a previous generation in the 50s and 60s, not least with The Scottish Gallery, and in the more than fifty years since her death we have continued to represent her estate and promote her national and international reputation. Her only commissioned work is the portrait of the five children of The Gallery’s senior partner Bill Macaulay, illustrated above.

became friends with Nicholson, Hepworth and Gabo. A trip to Switzerland in 1949 inspired her Glacier Series and further significant travel to Italy in 1955 highlighted her strong draughtsmanship. She divided her time between St Andrews and St Ives from 1960 and produced various significant series of abstract works from the geometric to the more organic. Pat Douthwaite was born in Glasgow in 1934. She studied mime and modern dance with Margaret Morris, whose husband, J.D. Fergusson, encouraged her to paint. This important influence apart, she was self-taught. She is regarded as an outsider artist and was a true bohemian whose work is distinctive and unsettling. Over the last forty years or so, Dame Elizabeth Blackadder,

Joan Eardley, The Macaulay Children, c.1957, commissioned by William Macaulay, Director of The Scottish Gallery. Private collection, Edinburgh

Victoria Crowe in her Edinburgh studio, June 2018. Photograph by Kenneth Gray

Frances Walker, Victoria Crowe and Kate Downie have emerged as four of Scotlandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most eloquent and significant painters, their work fresh, original and widely appreciated. Blackadder, well known in the capital through her membership of the Royal Academy, was a senior tutor at Edinburgh College of Art and has been lauded with honours, degrees and 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. A contemporary of Blackadder at Edinburgh was Frances Walker who is recognised as a significant contributor to Scottish visual culture and an inspiration to succeeding generations of students and young women artists.

Victoria Crowe, who came to Edinburgh from London in the late 60s, like the other two has found inspiration in travel (until recently Crowe had a second home and studio 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 picture making unique in contemporary practice, which has brought her wide and deep appreciation. In 2019, The City Art Centre honoured her career with a four-floor retrospective 50 Years of Painting, which enjoyed record visitor numbers. Born in North Carolina, Kate Downie studied at Grayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s School of Art in Aberdeen before travel and residencies took

MODERN MASTERS WOMEN

Kate Downie drawing under The Queensferry Crossing, August 2017.

Hannah Mooney in Donegal, 2017.

her to the United States, England, Amsterdam and Paris. Katie Downie is one of the most distinctive artists of her generation. Her curiosity and thirst for travel, her collaborative spirit and fascination with engineering form part of her original, artistic identity. Christine McArthur has an instinctive sense of design and has a craftsmanship approach to fine art, allying herself with the dominantly female fine art and craft tradition which includes The Four, Phoebe Traquair and Jessie King. The sensitivity of watercolour is explored by Claire Harkess with her powerful and sensitive images of the natural world and Angie Lewin and Emily Sutton enjoy the traditions and compositional importance of

still life painting. Hannah Mooney graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2017. She currently works in two distinct subjects; still life and the landscape and in both she is an instinctive, natural painter deeply concerned with the matiĂ¨re and traditional composition. The success of The Gallery has been built on championing original, inspiring art in all its forms and women now dominate many aspects of the visual arts. We are proud to be part of a legacy of equal opportunity. Christina Jansen

THE VIEW FROM HERE

‘The students work hard, the ladies are intelligent, and I think quite justify the increased facilities given them under the new rules. The men on the whole, are not strong; they lack the initiative and artistic insight.’ 1906 ‘…the men were told “in the plainest terms that they were slackers” and that the women were walking away with the prizes.’ 19111 The standard narrative in relation to women artists is that they have, until very recently, been widely disadvantaged by their gender. Yet, although this is undoubtedly true, it has never been universal, as the two quotes above illustrate. They are taken from a recent monograph, the first to be published, on the painter and etcher Madeline Green (1884– 1947) who attended the Royal Academy schools in London from 1906–1911. The first extract is from, newly elected Royal Academician, George Clausen’s report as a visiting tutor and, clearly, he was much impressed by the women, in stark contrast to the men. The second is from a review entitled RA Schools – Success of Women Students published in The Queen in response to Prize Night at the RA schools in 1911. Whilst a student, Green was awarded a silver and bronze medal, and among her female contemporaries other awards were won, including two gold medals (the first to be awarded to women), notable achievements considering female students made up only a third of the total intake of male students. At the same period, The Scottish Gallery, at its then premises in South Castle Street, also had a comparably enlightened attitude to women painters (but without the corresponding disparagement of the men!). The first (recorded) solo exhibition by a woman held at the Gallery was in 1903; work by landscape painter, Mary G.W. Wilson. Other women followed quickly on, with solo exhibitions held with Emily Murray Paterson, RSW; Kate Cameron, RSW, RE; Amy Dalzell, RSW; and Agnes Morrison Cadell.

Between 1920 and 1970 numerous noteworthy female painters held solo exhibitions with The Gallery; Kate Cameron, Winifred Nicholson, Cecile Walton, Mary Armour, Penelope Beaton, Cathleen Mann, Margaret Thomas, Perpetua Pope, Frances Thwaites, Margaret Hislop, Margaret Mellis, Anne Redpath, Joan Eardley, W. Barns-Graham, among them. Since then, The Gallery has continued, and increasingly, to support women painters, or perhaps more accurately painters who happen to be women. Certainly, during the period I worked at The Gallery (1980s and 90s) there was never any sense that gender played a part in the selection of solo exhibitions or work to be brought into stock, but rather the decision was based on quality and relevance to the remit of The Gallery. The fact that a significant proportion of exhibited work was by women only illustrates just how strong the female voice has been in Scottish art throughout the 20th century, and into the 21st. Among the contemporary painters at my time with The Gallery were; Elizabeth Blackadder, Barbara Rae, Victoria Crowe, Ann Oram, Willie Barns-Graham, Barbara Balmer, Alison Watt, Pat Douthwaite, Alexandra Gardner and June Redfern. Some memories of that time – the sense of privilege in handling any painting by Joan Eardley; the joie de vivre of Festival exhibitions with Elizabeth Blackadder; the re-introduction to the Scottish public, after years in obscurity, of the elegant work of Beatrice Huntington; a visit to Victoria Crowe’s light-filtered, ‘cabinet of curiosities’ studio; the luscious smell of oil paint while hanging a ‘freshoff-the-easel’ exhibition by June Redfern; the pale pinks and greys of Alison Watt’s debut solo show at The Scottish Gallery in Cork Street, London; Barbara Rae introducing the George Street Gallery to the oily darkness of a Scottish peat bog; and, any meeting with the extraordinary and unique Pat Douthwaite! Many of the artists already mentioned remain a regular feature of The Gallery’s exhibition

MODERN MASTERS WOMEN The Scottish Gallery, George Street premises, c.1987.

Sylvia Wishart, Broken Trawler, coloured etching, 1987 (cat. 81)

programme, and have work included in the current exhibition. Printmaking is well represented, and one of my first tasks at The Gallery was to run the print department at George Street. Women have excelled in that most varied of mediums, as shown here with some spare, vibrant mark-making from Willie Barns-Graham; Elizabeth Blackadder’s iconic tabletop flower specimens; Victoria Crowe’s spectral plants and architecture; some stark civil engineering from Kate Downie; a joyful revel in nature from Angie Lewin; some North East solitude from Frances Walker; Emily Sutton adding to the happy tradition of Ravilious and Bawden; and with a hint of Neo-Romanticism in an etching by the still underrated Sylvia Wishart, illustrated above. Printmaking, by its nature, is generally a meticulous art, however, central to Modern Masters Women is a group of gestural paintings of a bravura kind – Joan Eardley’s frothing sketch of a Catterline wave; some (almost) abstract expressionism from Mardi Barrie; a beautifully controlled colour field

seascape from Bet Low; more Catterline wind and wild from Lillian Neilson; brooding sweeps of darkness from Hannah Mooney; three Redpath oils that speak of Paris in the 1950s; a piece of typically idiosyncratic psychology from Douthwaite; still life à la mood indigo from Winifred McKenzie (better known for her Grosvenor School woodblock prints of the 1930s); and some explosive geometrics from Barns-Graham. All examples of the power and vigour inherent in so many Scottish women artists which, after ten Modern Masters exhibitions held at The Gallery, makes this show concentrating exclusively on female ‘masters’ more than timely. Iain Barnet Former Director of The Scottish Gallery (1987–2001) Quoted in Madeline Green – Reflections of an Artist by Dr. Carole Walker. Pub. Wolds Publishing Ltd, 2020 1

BACK TO THE FUTURE

I am delighted to have the chance to pen a few personal words to accompany Modern Masters Women. Covering a sixty-year period, many paintings are representational and inspired directly by their artists’ environment and are realised with a fine, and often moving, sensitivity of form, colour and application. Whether it is Joan Eardley or Anne Redpath’s use of rich impasto and brave subtlety of colour, the perfect arrangement of a still life study by Elizabeth Blackadder, or the fine beauty of Claire Harkess’s watercolour and wash studies of wild birds, there is a perfection and often beauty across a variety of techniques to be savoured here. The contribution of women painters to fine art up to the mid-20th century has been well documented, most recently and thoroughly by Alice Strang in her 2015 survey exhibition, Modern Scottish Women and publication at the National Galleries of Scotland. Today’s art stands on the shoulders of what was established half a century ago and more. Looking back, the early 1960s was the time which saw the number of women students attending art schools reach new heights. Tuition fees and maintenance grants towards living costs brought a social inclusiveness which benefited the schools, while the growth of departments in printmaking, tapestry and the ‘applied arts’ enriched the student experience for many. Tutors were appointed from across the UK, often refreshing the teaching. Alongside long-established exhibiting societies in Scotland’s cities the growth in small independent exhibiting groups, such as the Glasgow Group (1964), and small commercial galleries encouraged all ages to produce work for sale. Printmaking studios in particular offered opportunities for women. Before the economic downturn of the mid-1970s there had been a more ‘official’ flourishing in the creative arts with the opening of the Gallery of Modern Art in 1960 and formal establishment of the Scottish Arts Council (the forerunner of Creative Scotland) in 1967. Although for many years the

SAC curated a programme of touring exhibitions, the bursaries and grants it offered were naturally more important to artists. Here in Edinburgh the opening of the City Art Centre in the former Royal High School in 1973 provided basic studio spaces as well as exhibitions – a combination to continue for a time in Market Street ahead of the opening of WASPS spaces. The CAC’s key annual selling exhibition was the Pernod Art Competition for young artists. Sponsored by a drinks company, these were particularly popular private views! I must confess to a personal interest here. Employed from 1975 to manage the Centre and catalogue the city’s art collection, I discovered many (and by then often forgotten) women artists and sculptors including Mary Cameron, Josephine Haswell Miller, Josephine de Vasconcellos and Penelope Beaton. In the painting racks I came across an embroidered draughtscreen which led on to investigating the life and work of its artist-maker, Phoebe Anna Traquair. I was also very privileged to be able to get to know or interview artists of different generations. Possibly I may have been one of the last curators to visit Dorothy Johnstone in her Aberdeen home in the late 70s. That visit resulted in Edinburgh’s purchase of her painting, Rest Time in the Life Class. The directness and naturalism of her work was a reflection of her as a person. Acquiring art could also be a two-way business, with artists offering ideas or work. Works were of course also purchased from a range of sources including dealers and various exhibitions at the RSA and elsewhere. The Scottish Gallery, then under the direction of Bill Jackson, was important for a number of reasons from the provision of insurance valuations to building the collection. The city already owned the collection formed by the Scottish Modern Arts Association, a northern forerunner of the UK-wide Contemporary Art Society. There was also a healthy (for a local collection) purchase fund, and so major works by Armour, Redpath and Eardley, and historic pieces by Lily MacDougall, Bessie MacNicol, Mary Cameron,

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Wilhemina Barns-Graham Edinburgh Festival Exhibition at The Scottish Gallery, George Street, 1981.

Kate Cameron and so on were already there. The historical, including topographical, collection was growing little by little, and occasionally Bill would bid for us at auction. There were many other ways in which the collection expanded. After the new Centre opened its doors in Market Street, Victoria Crowe suggested we might together visit the psychologist Dr. Winifred Rushforth; in 1982 a key oil study of her by Vicky was purchased through The Scottish Gallery. In 1977, and also from The Gallery, we bought Pat Douthwaite’s Final Instructions before Take-off, one of her Amy Johnson series. However it is fair to say that the collection grew in many different ways with other Scottish Gallery purchases filling out holdings of modern printmaking or even local history. The 1970s and 1980s were decades when the parameters for mainstream Scottish art really broadened, and in a sense today’s wide range of ways of reflecting the world was firmly established. The Scottish Arts Council presented the occasional survey exhibition. The late Cordelia Oliver selected Painters in Parallel in 1978, where fifteen out of over seventy artists were women. That may seem disproportionate but for its time it was a not unfairly balanced show. A Mardi Barrie abstracted landscape and Barbara Balmer’s delicate sense of perfection in a still life watercolour were major

Contemporary Art From Scotland 1981–82

examples of their work, with both paintings then owned by the Council. The same was true of a BarnsGraham abstract in acrylic. The range of selected pieces included Eileen Lawrence’s delicate scroll installations; Liz Ogilvie’s sea poetics and Kate Whiteford’s simplicity of approach, staining her canvases with colour, were also shown. Painters in Parallel was followed by Contemporary Art from Scotland 1981–82 (illustrated above) curated by The Scottish Gallery and was seen across England and also displayed at the National Museum of Wales. Naturally the artists were mostly drawn from The Gallery’s stable, with a number of fine women painters as are seen here today – Frances Walker, Barbara Balmer, Elizabeth Blackadder, Mardi Barrie, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Victoria Crowe, Bet Low and others. Modern Masters Women builds on a framework well established in these past decades and offers a chance to revisit, and possibly rethink, what makes Scottish art and to celebrate the many experimental or traditional contributions made by women. Dr. Elizabeth Cumming (Honorary Fellow in History of Art, University of Edinburgh; Keeper of Fine Art Collections for Edinburgh Museums and Galleries 1975–1984)

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ARTISTS Barbara Balmer (1929–2017) Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912–2004) Mardi Barrie (1930–2004) Dame Elizabeth Blackadder (b.1931) Victoria Crowe (b.1945) Pat Douthwaite (1934–2002) Kate Downie (b.1958) Joan Eardley (1921–1963) Claire Harkess (b.1970) Angie Lewin (b.1963) Bet Low (1924–2007) Christine McArthur (b.1953) Winifred McKenzie (1905–2001) Hannah Mooney (b.1995) Lilian Neilson (1938–1998) Anne Redpath (1895–1965) Emily Sutton (b.1983) Frances Walker (b.1930) Sylvia Wishart (1936–2008)

18 22 30 34 46 62 74 84 92 100 106 110 118 120 132 136 144 150 156 17

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

Barbara Balmer, c.1980. Photograph by Robert Mabon

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. ‘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

Barbara Balmer 1. Carnations, c.1970s pencil & watercolour, 22.5 x 30.5 cm signed lower right, inscribed verso

Barbara Balmer 2. Black Parrot Tulips, 1979 pencil and watercolour, 42 x 54 cm signed and dated lower left exhibited

Barbara Balmer, Recent Paintings, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1980, cat. 1; 20th Century Art and Design, The Fine Art Society, Edinburgh, 2019

WILHELMINA BARNS-GRAHAM CBE, HRSA, HRWA, HRSW (1912–2004)

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, known as Willie, was born in St Andrews, Fife, on 8 June 1912. Determining while at school that she wanted to be an artist, she set her sights on Edinburgh College of Art, where she enrolled in 1932 and graduated with her diploma in 1937. At the suggestion of the College’s principal, Hubert Wellington, she moved to St Ives in 1940. Early on she met Borlase Smart, Alfred Wallis and Bernard Leach, as well as Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo who were living locally at Carbis Bay. Her peers in St Ives include, among others, Patrick Heron, Terry Frost, Roger Hilton, and John Wells. BarnsGraham’s history is bound up with St Ives, where she lived throughout her life. In 1951 she won the Painting Prize in the Penwith Society of Arts in Cornwall Festival of Britain Exhibition and went on to have her first London solo exhibition at the Redfern Gallery in 1952. She was included in many of the important exhibitions on pioneering British abstract art that took place in the 1950s. In 1960, Barns-Graham inherited Balmungo House near St Andrews, which initiated a new phase in her life. From this moment she divided her time between the two coastal communities, establishing herself as a Scottish artist as much as a St Ives

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, 1980. Photograph by Robert Mabon

one. Wilhelmina Barns-Graham was represented by The Gallery throughout her career. Important exhibitions of her work at the Tate St Ives in 1999/2000 and 2005, and the publication of the first monograph on her life and work, Lynne Green’s W. Barns-Graham: A Studio Life, 2001, confirmed her as one of the key contributors of the St Ives School, and as a significant British modernist. She died in St Andrews on 26 January 2004. ‘For Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, printmaking was a liberating experience. From 1991 she produced an astonishing array, toying with colours and forms to create a series of images. The possibility of variations in turn stimulated new ideas. Her later prints were mostly created in collaboration with Carol Robertson and Robert Adam of Graal Press. They offered the artist a range of possibilities through the use of water-based inks. With the artists individual brush marks captured on separate sheets of acetate, these prints are a true embodiment of Barns-Graham’s painting style.’ Geoffrey Bertram The Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust Last Light, The Scottish Gallery, 2016

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham 3. Grey Sheds, St Ives II, 1947 oil on canvas, 51 x 61 cm provenance

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust Inventory No. BGT603

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham 4. Geoff and Scruffy, 1958 mixed media, 12.5 x 20.5 cm signed and dated lower right

‘The Geoff and Scruffy series was a group of paintings which Barns-Graham first worked on in the mid-1950s when she was living in St Ives. The series is so-called as it was inspired by the relationship between her friend Geoffrey Tribe and his dog, a mongrel stray called Scruffy. The paintings themselves were based on the landscape around where the artist was living, close to Porthmeor Beach. The basic device in the original Geoff and Scruffy from 1956 of two strong geometric forms, linked by a pair of narrow bands was to become an important theme to which Barns-Graham would return to throughout her career.’ Geoffrey Bertram, The Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust Last Light, The Scottish Gallery, 2016

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham 5. Scorpio Series 2, No.15, 1996 acrylic on paper, 56.5 x 76 cm signed and dated lower left provenance

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust Inventory no. BGT944

Scorpio Series 2 is recognised as being one of the most important series of her career. This is a vibrant painting â&#x20AC;&#x201C; an explosion of colour and form which confronts the senses and is painted with absolute certainty. In 1996, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art held a retrospective of her work and this picture is a reflection of the artistic confidence in her own abilities and position.

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham 6. Scorpio I, 1996 etching, 56 x 76 cm signed lower right, edition lower left provenance

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham 7. Vision in Time III, 2006 screenprint, 76 x 58 cm editioned lower left provenance

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust

MARDI BARRIE RSW (1930â&#x20AC;&#x201C;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 oneâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;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 and Ivon Hitchins 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

Mardi Barrie 8. Part of a Stream, 1965 oil on board, 34 x 47 cm exhibited

Christmas Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1965

Part of a Stream is an early example of her mature style, an instinctive response to the event of landscape, more about time and movement than a record.

DAME ELIZABETH BLACKADDER DBE, RA, RSA, RSW, RGI (B.1931)

In her home on the south side of Edinburgh, Elizabeth Blackadder has worked quietly away, taking no heed of the awards and accolades with which she has been bestowed. For her the studio life, a life she shared with her husband and fellow painter John Houston, has been all consuming. The challenges of each artwork whether oil, watercolour or print are the sole focus of her attention. Her favourite subjects are the things that surround her everyday life; souvenirs of foreign travels, flowers from the garden, the quirks of the cats: Toby, Fred or Amalia or fresh fish from the market. Born in Falkirk in 1931, Blackadder studied at The University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh College of Art. In 1954 she was awarded a Carnegie travelling scholarship and travelled throughout southern Europe. She travelled widely with Houston throughout her career, including several trips to Japan. In 1962 she began teaching at Edinburgh College of Art where she continued until her retirement in 1986.

Elizabeth Blackadder, c.1980. Photograph by Antonia Reeve

Blackadder first exhibited with The Scottish Gallery in 1961 and it is a relationship which continues to this day. She was elected a member of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1972, and was made a Royal Academician in 1976 (she was the first woman to be elected to both institutions). She has four honorary doctorates. In 2001 she became the first woman in the 300 year history of the office to be made Her Majestyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Painter and Limner in Scotland, and was awarded a Damehood in 2003. Public and private collections include Tate Britain, The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, Glasgow Museums and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. She was the subject of a major retrospective at the National Galleries of Scotland in 2011 to celebrate her 80th birthday. Elizabeth Blackadderâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work is held in numerous public and private collections internationally.

Dame Elizabeth Blackadder 9. Church in Brittany, 1963 pencil, ink and wash, 49.5 x 68.5 cm signed lower right

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 which combine ‘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.

Dame Elizabeth Blackadder 10. Mixed Flowers and Jug, 2004 watercolour, 57 x 80 cm signed and dated lower right exhibited

The Nature of Things, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2013, cat. 13 provenance

Private collection, Cumbria

Blackadderâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s immense popularity is in large part down to her flower painting in watercolour. Indeed, many assume this is all she painted. Much has been written in an attempt to redress this imbalanced viewpoint but she herself makes no distinction between the value or importance of different subjects and media. Her practice in watercolour, the subjects taken from her cherished garden â&#x20AC;&#x201C; tulips, irises and lilies, pursued in a separate studio are no more or less important than her oil painting or printmaking of a great variety of subject matter. Mixed Flowers and Jug is a perfect exemplification of the sophistication of her composition as well as truthfulness to the natural beauty of her subject: the rhythm of the stems and spacial relationship of the blooms seems simple but provides a feast of the visual and intellectual.

Dame Elizabeth Blackadder 11. Curled Up Kikko, c.1990 pastel & pencil on paper, 24 x 27 cm signed lower right provenance

Private collection, Edinburgh

A cat is not property, like a dog: the animalâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s affection is real, but donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t expect gratitude. So to be drawn or painted they must be ether asleep or the drawing comes from observed memory. Happily, the shape of a cat at rest is always elegant and a few pentimenti can record how the subject moves a little at its ease. Blackadder has always kept cats and the different breeds and hues, each with a distinctive character, dynasties in the history of the household, are drawn and punctuate her paintings, providing valuable clues as to date to the art historian.

Dame Elizabeth Blackadder 12. Irises, Lilies, Tulips, 2013 coloured etching, 37 x 41.5 cm signed lower right, editioned lower left

Dame Elizabeth Blackadder 13. Toby, 2011 coloured etching, 22 x 30 cm signed lower right, editioned lower left

LILY COTTRELL (1896â&#x20AC;&#x201C;1984)

Lily Cottrell 14. Fishing Boats from the Window, c.1950 oil on canvas, 50 x 62 cm signed lower left

Lily Cottrell has eight works in the University of Stirling art collection where her son Tom was the first Principal and whose friendship with Margaret Morris secured the donation of the major works by J.D. Fergusson held at Stirling. This charming work has a Dufyesque lightness and a delicacy which indicate a considerable talent. She was a regular exhibitor at the RSA from the War years until 1967 but her work appears rarely these days: another rather overlooked woman artist whose commitment to family might have prevented a professional career.

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 practice 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 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 largescale 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 in residence at Dumfries House and in 2016 a group of work 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. Her work is held in numerous public and private collections worldwide.

Victoria Crowe, 1980. Photograph by Jessie Ann Matthew

Victoria Crowe 15. From Dusk to Wakening, 2014 oil on linen, 127 x 127 cm signed lower right exhibited

Victoria Crowe, Real and Reflected, The Scottish Gallery, 2014, cat. 5 provenance

Private collection, USA

This painting is from 2014, made in the artist’s former Edinburgh studio, which overlooked Queen’s Park. Her themes of interior/exterior, repetition/variation are present but explicitly contained in the idea of the span of the night. Crowe evokes the dream world – it is not dusk to dawn but dusk to wakening – the repeated filigree of winter branches can represent the neurons of our brains, recharging in sleep but unconstrained by the logic of consciousness. When we wake, we draw back the curtain to reassure ourselves that all is well, that the profile of the ancient volcano of Arthur’s Seat is in its place and the trees are renewed by the day.

‘From Dusk to Wakening is a personal favourite of mine as it sums up the ten years I had at my Carlton Terrace studio in Edinburgh. The two huge northeast facing windows were filled with reflected light throughout the day, changing from frail misty light of dawn through to the deep indigo of evening. My studio was wonderful in the winter, the bare trees of Regent Gardens backlit against the sky and the gradual fade into a luminous dusk pierced by street lighting. I did many paintings and drawings from that tree-lined source over the years, but only one with Arthur’s Seat in it.’ Victoria Crowe, 2020

Victoria Crowe 16. Landscape, Mirror Reflection, 2019 mixed media, 140 x 100 cm signed lower right

The motif of a mirror is one that has long fascinated Victoria Crowe. It has a compositional utility, like a window, so that its oblong shape can give vital structure to a painting. But more, its reflection can introduce content, both real and psychological, from outside. The concept of a world beyond the mirror is well established â&#x20AC;&#x201C; through the looking glass â&#x20AC;&#x201C; to past or future, perhaps to another dimension. In Landscape, Mirror Reflection the landscape is that of Dumfries House, where the artist spent two recent residencies, tonally limited as she reflects at increasing distance on her experience of the place, the great trees and near tangle of branches, the many drawings she made as she walked at dusk. For Crowe, art is not a reflection of immediately apparent reality but is richer, replete with Bergsonian ideas of intuition and memory and stream of consciousness, the mirror acting as a window to the subconscious as well as the reversal of reality.

Victoria Crowe 17. Quietude, c.2008 mixed media & oil monoprint, 19 x 62.5 cm signed lower left

Victoria Crowe 18. Sunset Tree, c.2008 oil monoprint with mixed media, 40 x 20 cm

Victoria Crowe 19. Les Alpilles, Saint Remy, c.2014 mixed media, 19 x 53 cm signed lower right

These two works were made in Provence where the artist visited the Saint-Paul Asylum in Saint Remy, where Van Gogh completed some magnificent paintings during his time as a voluntarily patient. The extraordinary structure of the arid limestone ridges of Les Alpilles dominate the landscape and Crowe made several drawings of their convoluted shapes.

Victoria Crowe 20. Sunset Pine, Saint Remy, c.2014 mixed media, 32 x 44.5 cm signed lower middle

Victoria Crowe 21. Found in Great Plenty, 2007 mixed media on museum board, 54.5 x 84 cm signed lower right

‘In 2004, Victoria Crowe was elected Scholar to St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. Around this time she also received the RSA Sir William Gillies Bequest Award which made it possible for her to make valuable study visits to Cambridge and Venice to experience there the wonderful archives of herbals and historic collections of plants. Our advantage is to witness, not a process, but an activity which is driven by a need for understanding based on a fascination with this natural world and also the history of human efforts to contribute to man’s knowledge.’ Professor Bill Scott PPRSA (1935–2012), ‘Introduction’, Victoria Crowe, Plant Memory, RSA, 2007

Victoria Crowe 22. Forest and Garden, Sun Rising above the Mist, 1981 viscosity etching, unique print, 34.5 x 45.5 cm signed lower right

Victoria Crowe 23. Italian Reflection, 1992 unique silkscreen print, 46.5 x 23 cm signed lower left

Victoria Crowe 24. Italian Offerings, Blue and Silver State, 1995 unique lithograph with silver leaf and wax crayon, 57 x 70.5 cm signed lower left, titled lower right

Victoria Crowe 25. While in Venice, c.1999 variable edition screenprint, 57.5 x 57.5 cm signed and titled lower middle

PAT DOUTHWAITE (1934–2002)

Pat Douthwaite was born in Paisley into a conservative, middle-class family, growing up with the privations of Post-War Scotland and from a very young age aware of feeling different and alien. She found her freedom and vocation in dance and art classes with Margaret Morris (1891–1980) and J.D. Fergusson (1874–1960) in Glasgow and never looked back. She went on to tour with Morris’ Celtic Ballet to America in 1954 and on her return she determined to be an artist, taking Fergusson’s advice that art school would ruin her. After she left Glasgow her life was always unrooted, moving around the country and latterly the world. In the late 50s she was in Essex and Suffolk alongside artists Robert Colquhoun (1914– 1962) and Robert MacBryde (1913–1966) as well as William Crozier (1930–2011). Amongst all the denizens of Soho and Suffolk she met the artist and illustrator Paul Hogarth (1917–2002) and they were married in 1960 having one son, Toby. From the early 60s she and Hogarth spent much time in Deya in Majorca becoming part of the circle around Robert Graves for whom she became a favourite, often dancing for him and in 1985 he wrote a foreword for her exhibition of Goddesses. She had an insatiable appetite for new visual experience but went much further than mere looking; she immersed herself in the esoterica, animals, ancient religions, folklore and intellectual life of a new place. She developed a growing mastery of technique, moving away from enamel to oil paint, which she applied with rags thereby abandoning any impasto, often working on the floor in an exhausting technique. Her drawing became as important as painting. She used sketchbooks when travelling working chiefly in pastel and in the

studio she drew constantly – when short of good paper on anything to hand. Despite the lack of a permanent base and studio she exhibited regularly from 1991 through The Scottish Gallery, a relationship of maturity, which mostly she valued highly. This culminated with a retrospective in June 2000. As the art market expanded many more people discovered Douthwaite; her life force, technical accomplishment and uncompromising subject matter and vision. Sometimes life enhancing and often dark: a visceral, tortured release of her id. All her work however was made with a stylishness and passion that marks her out as one of the great individual voices in Post-War British art. Writing in 1988 for the introduction of the Third Eye Gallery Retrospective in Glasgow, Cordelia Oliver summed up Douthwaite’s maturing as a subject painter: ‘Female – not feminine – to the core, baring teeth and claws in defence of her offspring (and by that I mean her often highly maligned paintings and drawings) she has made herself almost her sole subject, painting not as she appears in the mirror but, as it were, from the inside out, from painful firsthand knowledge of her physical and psychological makeup, of her essential needs, frustrations, rages and occasional ecstasies. From her work at its best emanates the essence of raw femaleness with all that implies of vulnerability, unacceptable drives and emotional demands. On Douthwaite’s stage the female appears in many guises, as victim and predator, and she understands better than most that the impressive outsize persona can hide a shrinking core of anxious, insecure humanity.’

Pat Douthwaite, c.1971.

Pat Douthwaite 26. Collage, c.1961 mixed media & collage, 75 x 95 cm exhibited

Pat Douthwaite: An Uncompromising Vision, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, 2012

The few collaged works of this year are successful works and indicate how Douthwaite was interested in texture and abstract design. The painstaking assembly of painted, canvas strips is deliberately crude, a denial of the craft which had so often underpinned much female artistic production: quilting, needlepoint and so on. It was anathema for Douthwaite to be pigeonholed as a woman artist despite the overwhelming thematic concentration on the distaff which would proceed. At this moment of intense experimentation, she sought a language and vocabulary to take forward and while she would return to an element of collage, it is the painted human figure which would soon dominate and inform her practice.

Pat Douthwaite 27. Village Taxi, 1960â&#x20AC;&#x201C;64 oil on board, 90 x 120 cm signed and dated lower right; inscribed with artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s name verso illustrated

Pat Douthwaite by Guy Peploe, Sansom and Co., 2016, plate 6

In the harsh East Anglian Winter of 1959/60 Douthwaite was often on her own, pregnant and living in considerable privation, her lover Paul Hogarth working in Cambridge or London. By her own account the large boards on which she worked with poster paint would be deployed to block the inadequate windows of her cottage at night. The village taxi would be the means to get to the shop, or pub, a conveyance reduced in her painting to two wheels, patterned and graffitied bodywork and a driver resembling a gravestone. But the chill of the winter night and the sense of isolation are palpable while her sense of humour is, as often, to the fore. On the following page, Man with Bared Teeth belongs to a group made in Suffolk in the winter of 1959, some were exhibited with The Redfern Gallery in February 1960. The influence of Dubuffet is evident both in the primitive human representation and the combination of pattern and gesture in the paint application.

Pat Douthwaite 28. Man with Bared Teeth, 1959 monotype, 40.5 x 50.5 cm provenance

Corrymella Scott, Northumberland

Pat Douthwaite 29. Man Smiling, 1959 monotype, 50 x 40 cm signed lower right illustrated

Pat Douthwaite by Guy Peploe, Sansom and Co., 2016, plate 5

Pat Douthwaite 30. Woman with Reptile, c.1970 oil on canvas, 125 x 100 cm signed upper left

Douthwaiteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most significant subject throughout her life was the female figure, clothed or naked, real (in the sense of a real woman) or grotesquely imagined. Her heroines: Amy Johnstone, Mary Queen of Scots, an alphabet of Goddesses, American Bandits, are at once self-portraits and celebrations of female power. The woman is often accompanied by a creature â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a sort of Pullmanian daemon or in Wicker, her familiar. In Woman with Reptile the grinning central figure poses like a showgirl stripped of her glamour while the patterned reptile, an ancient atavistic symbol, suspended inside down, adds to the queasy atmosphere along with the dirty background colour, like dingy stage lighting.

Pat Douthwaite 31. Demetre, 1975 pastel, 62.5 x 47.5 cm signed and dated upper right exhibited

Pat Douthwaite: Worshipped Women, 369 Gallery, Edinburgh, 1982

Pat Douthwaite 32. Bentley (Vintage Car), 1977 charcoal & pastel, 54 x 75 cm signed and dated upper right provenance

Corrymella Scott, Northumberland

KATE DOWNIE RSA, PPSSA (B.1958)

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. Kate’s constant search for new challenges and inspirations has seen her set up studios in such diverse places as a brewery, an oil rig, an abandoned Hydroponicum and an island underneath The Forth Bridge. ‘Ever since Kate Downie lived in Paris in the 1980s and her first solo show in Aberdeen, through to her Coast Road Diaries of 2007–9, the residencies in Beijing and visits to America and Japan, Kate Downie has investigated the spaces in-between structures and worlds. She has climbed bridges in her native Scotland to draw the underside of The Fife Cantilever, recorded the sound of lorries as they cross the steel surface of The Forth Bridge. She has visited the Thames and the Forth Estuaries where land and sea meet, and seabirds and gantries inhabit the same watery spaces. It is this interest in the liminal, in the gaps and interstices between things and places, often between what is manmade

and natural that feeds her work. Whether she is peering at distant cranes and scaffolding through the arch of a bridge across the bend in a busy road, creating the muscular charcoal, pastel and blood lines in The Art of Crossing (FRBI) 2013–14 from The Road Bridge Diaries, or mapping the busy street scene in Feijiacun Walk II, China, where bicycles, cars and people criss-cross beneath a web of pylons and cables. Although Downie sees herself primarily as a landscape painter she is not, in essence, a romantic. For her the line is a metaphor for human movement and migration, which she uses to explore the effect people have on the environment through the processes of building and industrialisation.’ Sue Hubbard from Kate Downie, Anatomy of Haste, The Scottish Gallery, 2017 ‘One of my creative concerns is to define these spaces between buildings rather than the buildings themselves. The object lesson for me is the witnessing and the drawing of these nonplaces which are also, by definition, public arenas of cumulative activity. My job as an artist is to accommodate these actions in our contemporary lives, and to find the poetry within.’ Kate Downie

Kate Downie in her Fife studio, 2019. Photograph by Alicia Bruce

Kate Downie 33. New Day Crossing, 2018 oil on canvas, 100 x 100 cm signed lower right

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

Kate Downie 34. The Art of Crossing, 2014 etching, 33 x 78.5 cm signed lower right, editioned lower left

Kate Downie 35. The Winter Commute, Saturday, 2014 monotype and relief print on Arches paper, 57 x 76 cm signed lower right

Kate Downie 36. The Story Bridge, 2015 ink and watercolour on paper, 70 x 138 cm signed lower right

Kate Downie 37. Iona Wave Form I, 2018â&#x20AC;&#x201C;2019 ink, gesso & watercolour on paper, 38 x 57 cm signed lower left

JOAN EARDLEY RSA (1921–1963)

In 2021, The Scottish Gallery will celebrate 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 ambitious scaled 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 down amongst the grasses and hedgerows, 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.

Joan Eardley at Catterline, June 1961. Photograph by Audrey Walker

Joan Eardley 38. A Wave, 1957 oil on board, 49 x 91 cm exhibited

Joan Eardley, Festival Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1964, as A Wave Study, cat. 33 provenance

The Artist’s Studio Inventory no. EE98; Private collection, Edinburgh

A favourite subject at Catterline was the storm, crashing into the Bay. Eardley would come down to the dark, pebbled beach, to sea level, so that the power of storm and wave are above and around, seeming to envelop artist and viewer. The features of the Bay are here: the triangular rock marking the entrance from the south, the rocks, so dangerous to the returning herring fleet and the water breaking in chaos over the underwater shoals. Like the Impressionists she worked in front of the subject and the urgency is palpable – to record the passage of natural ferocity – two hours perhaps to get her response onto the board before retreating up to her cottage, soaked and half-frozen to thaw out over a mug of tea.

Joan Eardley 39. The Pram, c.1958 pastel on paper, 16.5 x 12 cm provenance

The Artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Studio Inventory number ED483

Joan Eardley 40. The Checked Jersey, c.1958–60 pastel on paper, 25.2 x 20.1 cm provenance

The Artist’s Studio Inventory number ED761

CLAIRE HARKESS RSW (B.1970)

Claire Harkess graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1993 and has enjoyed a successful exhibition career. Her preferred medium is watercolour and she was elected a professional member of the RSW (Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour) in 2005. She is considered a wildlife artist though her work defies a narrow definition. She has travelled far to find her inspiration including to The Galapagos, Antarctic, India and Australia. Her last exhibition at The Scottish Gallery in 2018 A Wilder Place, concerned rewilding in Scotland, a reimagining of the wild ancestors: bear, lynx, elk and wolf that once roamed our land. In a Harkess painting a bird or animal is real, as might be experienced in the wild – a silhouette, camouflage patterns against background foliage, on the wing or on the move, sometimes not the whole animal, but always its whole spirit. Her work for this exhibition has necessarily been locally inspired, the wildlife around her home in Perth.

Claire Harkess on a rib, Svalbard, 2016.

‘Walk, eat, studio, sleep – our days are on repeat. My paintings bring together moments glimpsed on a walk and fragments of home – a house plant or vase of flowers. The distinction between being outside and in has never felt so strange. Staring out my urban window has become a daily habit and a surprising resource – from visiting birds in the church grounds opposite to chinks of intense sunset above the rooftops.’ Claire Harkess, June 2020 In Finch and Birthday Rose the indoor and exterior combine, the artist’s own life and the world beyond the window, the real and the reflected, while in Last Song Before Midnight the cool blue of the coming night, near summer solstice, is the background for a songbird’s last joyous call before the roost.

Claire Harkess 41. Last Song Before Midnight, 2020 watercolour, 74 x 100 cm signed

Claire Harkess 42. Finch and Birthday Rose, 2020 watercolour, 19 x 27 cm signed

Claire Harkess 43. Little Lost, A Budgie Outside my Window, 2020 watercolour, 26 x 38 cm signed

Claire Harkess 44. Midsummer Night Song, 2020 watercolour, 51 x 71 cm signed

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ANGIE LEWIN RWS (B.1963)

Angie Lewin was born in Cheshire and studied BA (Hons) Fine Art Printmaking at Central School of Art and Design between 1983 and 1986, followed by a year’s part-time postgraduate printmaking at Camberwell College of Arts and Crafts. After working in London as an illustrator she studied horticulture and then subsequently moved to Norfolk, which prompted a return to printmaking. Angie now works from her studios in Speyside and Edinburgh. In 2014, she had a major solo exhibition A Natural Line at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Her work is inspired by the native flora of the UK, especially that of Speyside, Scotland’s west coast and islands and also by the plants, both wild and cultivated, in her Edinburgh garden. Sketches are developed into wood engravings, linocuts, silkscreens, lithographs and watercolours. Attracted to the relationships between plant communities on an intimate level, even the fine lines of insect eggs on a flower bud are observed in her work. Still lifes often incorporate seedpods, grasses, flints and dried seaweed collected on walking and sketching trips. A Wedgwood cup designed by Ravilious may contain feathers and seedheads. Lewin’s work is featured in many public and private collections in the UK and abroad, including The London Institute, Aberystwyth University, Ashmolean Museum and The Victoria & Albert Museum. She has illustrated books for Faber and Faber, Penguin and Merrell, designed fabrics for Liberty of London and designs fabrics for St. Jude’s, which she founded and runs with her husband Simon.

‘When returning to the studio from a walk or after working in the garden, I’ll add the natural elements that I’ve gathered to the already cluttered shelves, often placing them in jam jars and the old, chipped ceramics that have been collecting over the years. They’re a constant memory of place and the passing of the seasons and many of these will then find their way into my still life compositions. It’s the associations I make between these found seedheads, feathers, strands of seaweed and stones and the decoration on my collection of ceramics and glass that are the starting point for my work. The two watercolours included in this exhibition each reflect the two contrasting places where I spend much of my time. ‘Beyond the lichened stems, twisted holdfast and chipped blue and white china mug in Dogwood and Lichen are the snowy hillsides seen from my Speyside studio window, while Festival of Britain, Glass with Spring Flowers features forget-me-not, muscari and fritillary from my springtime Edinburgh garden. Honesty Blue, a screenprint commissioned by the V&A, reflects my love of blue and white china, including the shards of shattered plates and cups found on a beach or while digging in the garden.’ Angie Lewin Angie Lewin has had several solo exhibitions with The Gallery and her next solo exhibition is in October 2020, Nature Assembled, which will include a new body of watercolour paintings alongside a selection of prints.

Angie Lewin in her Edinburgh Studio, 2018. Photograph by Alun Callender

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Angie Lewin 45. Festival of Britain, Glass with Spring Flowers, 2020 watercolour, 66 x 49 cm

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Angie Lewin 46. Dogwood and Lichen, 2020 watercolour, 51 x 44.5 cm signed lower right

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Angie Lewin 47. Harvest, 2017 linocut print, 17 x 11 cm signed lower right and editioned lower left

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Angie Lewin 48. Honesty Blue, 2015 screenprint commission by the V&A, London, 37 x 58 cm signed lower right and editioned lower left

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BET LOW (1924–2007)

Bet Low was born in 1924 in Gourock and studied at the Glasgow School of Art during the War. She then attended Hospitalfield in Arbroath when James Cowie was Warden. Like her fellow student Joan Eardley, she was inspired by the intellectual freedom and broad cultural engagement; Cowie’s rather prescriptive attitude to drawing and painting left no discernible trace on either but an intense way of looking and an idea of the seriousness of the painter’s calling was deeply valued. Back in Glasgow she became involved in politics and the artistic renaissance which coalesced around J.D. Fergusson and Margaret Morris. Low joined the New Scottish Group of writers and artists and co-founded the Clyde Group, working to provide exhibition opportunities outside the confines of the RSA and RGI, including from 1956 outside, on

Bet Low, c.1980. Photograph by Robert Mabon

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the railings of the Botanical Garden. Her interests included theatre and she worked with the Glasgow Unity Theatre and Morris’s Celtic Ballet. The realist/expressionist character of much of the work produced in this milieu, enriched by the presence of European refugee painters and Fergusson’s contact with the Parisian avant-garde was not sustained into the 60s and Bet Low moved back towards the natural world for her inspiration, to the poetry of her friend George Mackay Brown, the bare, linear charms of Orkney and the ever changing movement of water. She exhibited with The Scottish Gallery from the 50s showing regularly in mixed exhibitions and solo in 1981. Her work is widely collected with twelve examples in public collections.

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Bet Low 49. Northern Seascape, c.1991 watercolour, 51.5 x 49 cm signed lower right provenance

Compass Gallery, Glasgow

Northern Seascape is a typical later work, strong in abstract qualities, but a direct response to the atmosphere of light and water with suggestions of soft waves and veils of rain over a horizon broken with low islands.

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CHRISTINE MCARTHUR RSW, RGI (B.1953)

Christine McArthur was born in Kirkintilloch, near Glasgow in 1953 and studied at The Glasgow School of Art between 1971 and 1976, which included a post-diploma year. After graduating she taught and produced book illustrations until the demand for her work enabled her to paint full time. Her early work was primarily in oil and she became well known for her large scale still life paintings on canvas. In the late 1980s she began to work in oil pastel and watercolour but more recently she has reverted to oil, as well as acrylic and collage. Christine McArthur was awarded a Scottish Education Department travelling scholarships in 1975 and 1976 and was elected a member of the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts in 1990. In 1995 she was elected a member of the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour.

Collage ‘I enjoy working in collage and ever since I engaged with this medium, I haven’t stopped. Colouring the paper, tearing the shapes, pasting and bonding. It really is building a painting. I like using my hands without a brush or a pencil, knife or scissors. I love playing and working out the big shapes, the design, the pattern, the texture and all the tonal quirks.’ Flower Painting ‘I love painting flowers. I can think of no better way to bring colour, great patterns and a hundred surprises into a painting.’ The Night Kitchen Series ‘I quite often can’t sleep so I sit in my kitchen. I like the lack of light at night and the shapes in the gloom. Also Prussian Blue. So these drawings were done at night with blue ink.’ Christine McArthur, 2019

Christine McArthur in her Glasgow studio, 2020.

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Christine McArthur 50. Kitchen Story Diptych (Herbs), 2020 mixed media on panel, 76 x 76 cm (each) signed lower left

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Christine McArthur 51. Earlybright, 2020 mixed media on panel, 76 x 76 cm signed lower left

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Christine McArthur 52. Owing to the Weather, I Painted Tulips, 2019 mixed media on panel, 75 x 100.5 cm signed lower left

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Christine McArthur 53. Largest Mushrooms, 2020 ink drawing, 28 x 34 cm signed lower left

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Christine McArthur 54. Coffee Pot, Pears, and Espresso Cup, 2020 ink drawing 28 x 34 cm signed lower right

Christine McArthur 55. Coffee Pot and Tulips, 2020 ink drawing, 28 x 34 cm signed lower left

Christine McArthur 56. Coffee Pot, Pears and Basket, 2020 ink drawing, 28 x 34 cm signed lower left

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WINIFRED MCKENZIE (1905–2001)

McKenzie was born in India in 1905 and her sister Alison two years later. The family moved to Scotland in 1913 and she attended the Glasgow School of Art, then moving to London attending classes with her sister studying wood engraving and colour woodblock printing under renowned wood engraver, Iain Macnab at The Grosvenor School of Modern Art. They had been recommended the school by Macnab’s sister, Chica Macnab, who had been one of their tutors at Glasgow. Winfred exhibited widely and developed as a master wood engraver and printmaker in the 20s and 30s. The family moved to St Andrews to escape the Blitz in 1940. After the War both she and her sister stayed in Fife teaching in Dundee until 1957. The influence of William McCance is discernible at times but many of her later still life seems well grounded in the Edinburgh School with McTaggart, Redpath and Gillies recalled. Blue Still Life is a successful, luscious example where the paint is freely manipulated, the colour is strong

Winifred McKenzie 57. Blue Still Life, c.1980 oil on canvas, 62 x 75 cm signed lower right

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and drawing decisive. The National Galleries of Scotland have examples of her work and the St Andrews Preservation Trust Museum have built a collection of work by both Winifred and Alison. Chica Macnab had a story, perhaps all too typical of the times. She was a founder member of the Society of Artist Printers, studied at GSA, then was offered a job running a course in wood engraving and woodblock printing (the McKenzie sisters took the course, as did Ian Fleming). It ran only from 1926–27 as she got married in 1927. Under college rules women had to give up their job when they got married. However, what is interesting in Macnab’s case is that the then Principal offered to waive the rule on her behalf in order that she could continue teaching, so highly regarded was she. However, she still chose to leave and devoted herself to raising a family, only returning to art (oil painting, rather than printmaking) after her husband died in 1979.

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HANNAH MOONEY (B.1995)

Hannah Mooney was born in Ireland in 1995 and she graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2017. In 2018, Hannah received the Art in Healthcare Award and Fleming Wyfold Art Bursary at the New Contemporaries exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy. Hannah Mooney held her first solo exhibition with The Scottish Gallery, Notes from the West in 2019. ‘Throughout history people have tried to comprehend the intensity of the sea. So many are compelled and perplexed by this subject matter. For Modern Masters Women I have included a large seascape created in 2018 alongside more recent works. It was painted after spending a long period of time in Ireland. During this time, I walked daily in all kinds of weather conditions, finding comfort in being beside water and the Lough; experiencing its black and unpredictable moods. There is so much we cannot control in life and the sea is an example of this. It’s forceful and enigmatic nature makes it both a puzzling and wonderful subject to watch and record. Within seconds, the monstrous, endless darkness of the ocean can suddenly be broken up by delicate, shimmering speckles of glittering light. I will always be fascinated by this untamed, dynamic energy. This period of forced isolation in Glasgow has been invaluable. It has made me question what I require as both a person and painter. Unintentionally, I have reassessed my motives behind landscape and seascape painting; why it is a pivotal part of my practice. Each day I try to remind myself of the refreshing and spiritual

qualities of the landscape; the vigor of the wind, the vibrancy of the skies, and more subtle elements such as fragile branches dangling in the wind and the shifting sounds and smells I long for. Now, more than ever, I wish to experience a variety of landscapes in order to broaden my visual language as a young female artist. ‘Whilst I have felt fortunate to have uninterrupted studio time in Glasgow during the lockdown, it is the longest period I have spent away from Counties Mayo and Donegal. For the first time I have missed witnessing the flowering of the hawthorn which embellishes the hedgerows every May. Somehow it has drawn me closer to these places, realising the significance they have had in my life. Luckily, I am often sent photos and videos of the areas I have grown up and worked in. My favorite films are those of the sky; where I can spot cirrus clouds sitting contently on luminous panels of blue sky like small tufts of wispy white hair. I feel uplifted, knowing that these white clouds are indicators of good weather to come. Irish skies have an abundance of charming characteristics and properties. I will never grow tired of Ireland’s everchanging skies and light. The most powerful, golden light can be seen on an early morning of a sombre dark mid-winter day. I miss witnessing this sense of movement, shifting of colour and transience. Perhaps working in the studio now is a way of reconnecting to these memories.’ Hannah Mooney, 2020

Hannah Mooney, in her exhibition at The Scottish Gallery, 2019.

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Hannah Mooney 58. Seascape III, 2018 oil on board, 48 x 91 cm signed lower right

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Hannah Mooney 59. Seascape I, 2020 oil on board, 10 x 13 cm signed on verso 60. Monochrome sketch of the Lough, 2020 oil on board, 10 x 16 cm signed on verso

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Hannah Mooney 61. Dark Seascape, 2020 oil on board, 10 x 13 cm signed on verso

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Hannah Mooney 62. Oil sketch of Across the Lough, 2019 oil on board, 24.5 x 40.5 cm signed lower right

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Hannah Mooney 63. Early Morning, 2019 oil on board, 12.5 x 15.5 cm signed on verso

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Hannah Mooney 64. Across the Lough I, 2019 oil on plywood board, 10 x 15.5 cm signed on verso

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Hannah Mooney 65. Across Ballyglass, 2020 oil on canvas board, 17.5 x 12.5 cm signed on verso

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Hannah Mooney 66. The Lough at Evening I, 2020 oil on board, 10 x 16 cm signed on verso 67. Across the Lough Evening, 2019 oil on plywood board, 12.5 x 15.5 cm signed on verso

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LILIAN NEILSON (1938–1998)

Born in Kirkcaldy in 1938, Lil Neilson studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art from 1956– 60 where she was taught by Hugh Crawford and Alberto Morrocco. She was awarded a travelling scholarship to France and Italy in 1961–62 and on her return she joined Joan Eardley in Catterline: they had become friends in 1960 at Hospitalfield House and Eardley invited Lil to paint in the studio she and Annette Stephen shared in Catterline. Lil Neilson bought a cottage at No. 2 Southside after Joan Eardley died in August 1963. Her work is texturally rich, low in tone and always true to the place. She liked to work on rough boards or wooden fragments found on the beach. Neilson’s best work is arguably of the salmon nets, cottages and stormy coast which result in part from her inspirational friendship with Joan Eardley but also from the deep connection she had with Catterline and the North East.

Lillian Neilson in her Catterline studio, c.1990. Photograph by Jenny Rutlidge, courtesy of EA Studios

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Lilian Neilson 68. Cottages on the Coast, 1969 oil on board, 38 cm x 111.5 cm signed and dated lower left

The subject is familiar: the low cottages, haystacks, wild hedgerows, the sun rising as a storm cloud heads over the coast. This is Catterline, also the spiritual home of Joan Eardley. Neilson was her close friend and admirer, deeply affected by her death at forty-two, who decided to stay, buy a cottage in the row and dedicate herself to art. Cottages on the Coast was painted in 1968, five years after Eardleyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s death and by now Neilson has found her own voice; it is more conventional perhaps, but an honest, inspired response to a wild, familiar place.

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ANNE REDPATH OBE, RSA, ARA, RWA, RGI (1895–1965)

Anne Redpath was the pivotal figure in the group of painters now referred to as The Edinburgh School. Born in Galashiels in 1895 and brought up in Hawick, she attended Edinburgh College of Art, receiving her diploma in 1917. Redpath showed her exceptional talent as an artist at a young age and in 1919 she won a travelling scholarship which enabled her to spend that year in Florence, Siena, Bruges and Paris before returning to the Borders. Her brilliant manipulation of paint, left in delicious peaks or eked across a rough surface with a palette knife, is characteristic of her varied responses to different subjects at different times. She was elected an associate of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1947 and was the first woman to be elected as a full member, in 1952. She exhibited regularly at the Royal Scottish Academy, the Society of Scottish Artist's, the Royal Glasgow Institute and, from 1946 at the Royal Academy. During her lifetime she exhibited more than four hundred works at public exhibitions. In 1960 she was elected an

Associate of the Royal Academy having already been awarded an O.B.E. in 1955, the same year that she was awarded an honorary Doctorate from Edinburgh University. The majority of her exhibited work was produced between 1950 and 1965 when she travelled extensively throughout Europe. In the last years of her output she often favoured a limited palette – perhaps a few brilliant, jewel-like notes enlivening a dark or white composition. Redpath was an inspirational person and formed many enduring friendships. Her flat in London Street became an artistic salon, celebrated by Robin Philipson’s famous, affectionate group portrait in The Scottish National Portrait Gallery. She had considerable commercial success in her lifetime, enjoying a fruitful, consistent relationship with The Scottish Gallery and latterly with Reid & Lefevre in London. Since her passing, her reputation has been further enhanced with retrospective and centenary exhibitions, so that now she is established as one of the great figures in 20th century Scottish painting.

Anne Redpath at her Edinburgh studio, 1960.

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Anne Redpath 69. Cottages at Clachanish, Skye, c.1946 gouache and pencil, 35.5 x 48 cm signed lower left provenance

The Artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Family

Clachanish is a croft looking across Loch Snizort in the North of Skye. Redpath visited in 1946 with Katie Horsman and working in gouache she made many clear, bright studies of which Cottages at Clachanish is typical. The solid, well grounded, whitewashed crofts sitting in the harsh beauty of the wild landscape are a compelling motif similar to subjects chosen in the Canaries (cat. 71), Brittany and Corsica. The artist responded to harsh beauty where human habitation and activity is at the margin, the dwellings growing from the landscape rather than imposed upon it. In its description her minimal drawing with the brush, bright palette dominated by white and emphasis on texture are characteristic of all her painting but serve also to provide a compelling sense of place.

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Anne Redpath 70. Street in Menton, c.1949 gouache, 37 x 45.5 cm signed lower right

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Anne Redpath 71. Canaries, c.1960 oil on board, 36 x 45 cm signed lower right provenance

The Artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Family

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Anne Redpath 72. Flowers in a Jug, c.1963 oil on board, 82.5 x 72.5 cm signed lower left provenance

Tom Bell Fine Art, Troon, Ayrshire; Private collection, Ayrshire

Redpath recognised that the essential visual drama in a painting is in tonal contrast and her use of white against a dark blue, as in Flowers in a Jug, lends the composition immediate presence. She was always concerned with the texture of her oil painting, using a variety of techniques: palette knife, the end of the brush, even a chain to pull across the wet paint. By 1960, in the last productive five years of her life when she was exhibiting regularly in Edinburgh and London and enjoying commercial success, she has abandoned the conventional picture space for her still life in favour of a freely painted abstract background which swirls around the jug and sumptuous blooms of her flower arrangement.

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EMILY SUTTON (B.1983)

Emily Sutton was born in North Yorkshire and studied at Edinburgh College of Art and Rhode Island School of Design. Since graduating in 2008, Emily’s art works, sculptures, prints and designs have been highly sought-after. Her love of observational drawing and eye for detail sees her transform the ordinary into the extraordinary and celebrate beauty in everyday objects and scenes. Her home and studio in York is a treasure trove, no surface is clear from personal relics found in antique shops, salvage yards or local car boot sales – these accumulated objects provide Emily with a constant source of inspiration which is both intimate and universal. She had a major solo exhibition, Town & Country, at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2015. Emily has had three solo exhibitions with The Scottish Gallery to date. She combines her exhibition work with illustration projects, including many picture books for children.

‘My work incorporates a love of pattern and detail and is strongly influenced by the landscape and creatures of my surroundings in the Yorkshire countryside, as well as all kinds of weird and wonderful objects found in museums and antique shops. A visit to the American Folk Art Museum in New York inspired an ongoing interest in folk art of all kinds, and I am also influenced by 20th century illustrators such as Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious, and the American lithographed children’s books of a similar era. I’ve always found still lifes particularly appealing as a subject. As a book illustrator I enjoy the narrative quality of a group of gathered-together objects all with different origins and histories. Spending hours in front of my small curated scenes I make connections between the elements and stories begin to form in my mind. I always search in markets and antiques shops for interesting and characterful treasures that can make their way into a future painting. I’m drawn to items with a backstory and a certain nostalgia: tin toys; old packaging with beautiful typography; Victorian transferware in less than perfect condition. I love the careful, magical process of bringing to life these static man made objects with flowers, stones, feathers and other elements from nature.’ Emily Sutton, 2020

Emily Sutton outside her studio in York, 2020.

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Emily Sutton 73. Still life with Honeysuckle and Wild Roses, 2020 watercolour, 48 x 41 cm signed and dated lower right

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Emily Sutton 74. Sailorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Farewell, 2020 watercolour, 48 x 41 cm signed and dated lower right

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Emily Sutton 75. French Lemons, 2018 screenprint, 30.5 x 22 cm signed lower right, editioned lower left

This print and Fox and Grapes (cat. 76) were part of a series of three prints made for the exhibition Nature Table at Town House Spitalfields.

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Emily Sutton 76. Fox and Grapes, 2018 screenprint, 30.5 x 22 cm signed lower right, editioned lower left

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FRANCES WALKER RSA, RSW, DLITT (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. This year marks Walker’s 90th year.

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

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Frances Walker 77. Wester Tillyshogle Croft, 1970s oil on board, 30.5 x 40 cm signed lower left, signed and titled with another painting verso provenance

Private collection, Blairgowrie

The literal meaning of the name of the croft, near Echt in Aberdeenshire, is ‘wet hill’, a name surely done full justice in Frances Walker’s painting! The high horizon and structure of the landscape recall Gillies, her tutor at ECA but also Henderson Blyth, a new colleague in Aberdeen when Walker came to join the teaching staff at Gray’s School of Art in the late 1950s. He made the landscape of Aberdeenshire his principal, latter subject, in an impasto equally richly applied. Walker moved on, partly through her commitment to printmaking, to a finer drawn line but continued to utilise a high horizon in much of her landscape practice.

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Frances Walker 78. In from the Sea, c.1975 watercolour, 56 x 39 cm signed lower left provenance

Private collection, Blairgowrie

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Frances Walker 79. Green Geo, c.1985 screenprint, 107 x 58.5 cm signed lower right, editioned lower left

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SYLVIA WISHART RSA, RSW (1936–2008)

Sylvia Wishart is a name which today is inseparable from discussion of Orcadian art in the 20th century. She was a painter who lived and worked on Orkney, and whose intimate knowledge of the island and its people informed her direction as an artist. Her location in Orkney and subsequent distance from her peers in the ‘art world’ has meant that her career became somewhat overshadowed. However, the retrospective held at the Pier Art Centre in Stromness in 2011 which travelled in part to the RSA in 2012 has introduced her to a much wider audience who can appreciate her restraint, subtle mark-making and perfectly rendered sense of ‘place’ in British art. Opposite is Sylvia in her house on Rackwick; in the foreground are her familiar everyday objects and beyond the window is the sea and headland of Orkney. The following text is taken from Sylvia Wishart’s obituary published on 12th January 2009 by John Cumming, The Guardian, headed ‘One of Scotland’s finest contemporary landscape painters’. Born and raised in the harbour town of Stromness, Orkney, Sylvia grew up in a community where the paintings of Stanley Cursiter and Ian MacInnes hung in many family homes. According to MacInnes, who would later become her art teacher, Sylvia’s precocious talent was evident even in her primary school years. In spite of her teacher’s encouragement, Sylvia chose a career in the Post Office rather than going to art school, but continued to draw and paint in her free time. It was only later, and with MacInnes’ continued

support, that she entered Gray’s School of Art inAberdeen as a mature student. After several years of teaching in Aberdeenshire, Lewis and Orkney, Sylvia returned to Gray’s in 1969 as a lecturer in the fine arts department. She made her home in Howe of Tarty, and it was there, in the landscape of the Ythan Estuary, that her true voice began to emerge. Her paintings, from this period onwards, become increasingly visionary, as the wildlife that surrounds her begins to enter her compositions and the internal and external landscapes merge. Nature, in its many forms, the flocks of geese in Tarty; gulls against the dark waters of Scapa Flow; a sparrow darting through the cobbled closes of Stromness and once, magically, a gyrfalcon against the barley fields of Outertown, becomes the life source within her landscapes. The presence of man is often merely hinted at, in images such as a tiny ship, dwarfed by the Kame of Hoy; the wheels of a farmer’s derelict dump-rake, or occasionally, her own faint reflection on the window glass. In the foreground of later paintings, she would record the toys, ships in bottles, plants and paraphernalia of her daily life. The paintings of her later years, often made on huge sheets of paper tacked directly to the wall, are increasingly rich in rhythm and texture. She built layer on layer of colour and mixed her media, using oil, gouache, pastel and pencil in the same work. Her preoccupation with weather and light, as she obsessively recorded the world from her window, invites comparison with Turner and Monet. Her sense of awe and reverence before nature suggest the essays and stories of Barry Lopez, a writer whose work she read repeatedly.

Sylvia Wishart by Kate Downie, 2008.

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Sylvia Wishart 80. Evening Window with Bracken, 1969 oil on board, 95 x 74 cm signed and dated right exhibited

Annual Exhibition, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 1970, cat. 89

The artist cared little for her status in the art world; it was sufficient to work and enjoy her involvement with like minded friends, artists and collectors in her native Orkney. It was these who encouraged her to ‘send in’ to the RSA annual exhibition where she was eventually made a full member in 2005, three years before her death. Evening Shadow with Bracken was her submission in 1970, one she at least considered worthy of exhibition; it is far more. The evening sun in the west pours light into the small window of her cottage, Strynd, in Kirkwall. On the deep, whitewashed ledge, formed by the thickness of the stone wall, built to withstand the winter gales, is a white jug bearing a few fronds of bracken, completing her palette – orange, green turning brown and white. Her interior/still life is as seemingly effortlessly sophisticated as a William Nicholson while still rooted in place and experience. Her matière is her own recipe: oil, gouache, pencil, achieving an extraordinary delicacy of texture, extended as often to her own hand painted frame. She is about to leave Orkney for the mainland, to teach for some years at Gray’s in Aberdeen, but the islands are always with her, their light, weather, contrasting seasons and life made precious by its existence on the margins.

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Sylvia Wishart 81. Broken Trawler, 1987 coloured etching, 45 x 84 cm signed and dated lower right, titled lower left

Broken Trawler describes an abandoned boat hauled onto the shore, its bones drenched in sepia, becoming part of the archaeology of this harsh, ancient land.

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MODERN MASTERS WOMEN

To celebrate Modern Masters Women please join our events programme online and Meet The Artist by Zoom! We have joined forces with several organisations and individuals and created a 10-minute lecture series which centres on the history of women artists and current practice. Our exhibition will also be supported by films, blogs and podcasts. Our full programme can be found here: www.scottish-gallery.co.uk/events City Art Centre Dovecot Studios Edinburgh Art Festival The Fleming Collection Lyon & Turnbull Marchmont House Royal Scottish Academy University of Edinburgh History of Art Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust Victoria Crowe and Briony Anderson Lachlan Goudie Julia Mee Lindsey Michie Alice Strang Special online essay by John Finlay, Art Historian The Body/Politic: Women as Subject and Object in Art History

The Scottish Gallery would like to thank the artists, organisations and individuals who have supported Modern Masters Women, giving up their free time and preparing lectures, interviews and written contributions.

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Published by The Scottish Gallery to coincide with the exhibition MODERN MASTERS WOMEN 30 July â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 29 August 2020 Exhibition can be viewed online at www.scottish-gallery.co.uk/modernmasterswomen ISBN: 978 1 912900 21 3 Designed by Kenneth Gray Photography by John McKenzie and The Scottish Gallery Printed by Barr Colour Printers All rights reserved. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced in any form by print, photocopy or by any other means, without the permission of the copyright holders and of the publishers.

Cover: Victoria Crowe, From Dusk to Wakening, 2014, oil on linen, 127 x 127 cm (detail) (cat. 15)

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