Modern Masters

Festival Edition

MODERN MASTERS

Festival Edition

August 2024

16 Dundas Street, Edinburgh EH3 6HZ

+44 (0) 131 558 1200 scottish-gallery.co.uk

William Gillies at his Temple home and studio with his labrador, Jet.

Photographs by Jessie Ann Matthew, December 1972

Modern Masters | The Many Days

Colours went by

As shades of colour and a rose tree was Where space must thicken and where time must pause.

Brackloch by Norman MacCaig, 1962

In 1972, William Gillies agreed to be photographed by his neighbour and art student Jessie Ann Matthew, at his home and studio in Midlothian. The encounter resulted in an intimate portrayal of the artist’s life, revealing his warmth, humour, generosity, and studio practice.

Sir William Gillies (1898–1973) was a renowned figure in Scottish modern art, celebrated for his landscape and still-life paintings. He was a pioneering Principal at Edinburgh College of Art, and significantly impacted the Scottish art scene. Gillies was a man who lived in the moment, enjoyed the company of others, and dedicated his life to art and artists which included poets, writers and musicians. Gillies’ legacy has quietly contributed to a distinctive visual language unique to Scotland. Gillies maintained a lifelong

association with The Scottish Gallery, enriched by the many students and colleagues he taught and worked alongside, many of whom were also represented by The Gallery.

In this Festival edition, we include many of Gillies’ peers, colleagues, and former students. We bring together the Peploe family – S.J. Peploe, Denis Peploe, and Clotilde Peploe – and reflect on their legacy of colour. Additionally, we introduce some lesser-known women artists as the wider debate in the art world continues to challenge perceptions of artists. Our Modern Masters series showcases The Scottish Gallery’s unique ability to blend meaningful historical insights with the best of Scottish contemporary art.

Christina Jansen | The Scottish Gallery

The beneficent lights dim but don’t vanish. The razory edges dull, but still cut. He’s gone: but you can see his tracks still, in the snow of the world.

Praise of a Man by Norman MacCaig, c.1990

Kate Downie, Beached Boat, Solway Firth, 2023 (cat.26) (detail)

Barbara Balmer, Posie with Crabapple Bough, c.1979 (cat.4) (detail)

ARTISTS

Barbara Balmer (1929–2017)

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912–2004)

Elizabeth Blackadder (1931–2021)

Robert Henderson Blyth (1919–1970)

Victoria Crowe (b.1945)

Alan Davie (1920–2014)

Pat Douthwaite (1934–2002)

Kate Downie (b.1958)

Joan Eardley (1921–1963)

William Gillies (1898–1973)

Audrey Johnson (1919–2005)

Brenda King (1934–2011)

Brenda Lenaghan (1941–2020)

William Littlejohn (1929–2006)

Sheila Macmillan (1928–2018)

Margaret McGavin (1924–2004)

Leon Morrocco (b.1942)

Ann Oram (b.1956)

Ann Patrick (b.1937)

James McIntosh Patrick (1907–1998)

Clotilde Peploe (1915–1997)

Denis Peploe (1914–1993)

S.J. Peploe (1871–1935)

Anne Redpath (1895–1965)

Joan Renton (b.1935)

Una Shanks (b.1940)

Robert T H Smith (1938–2016)

Geoff Uglow (b.1978)

Barbara Balmer (1929–2017)

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

‘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

Public collections include:

Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums

City Art Centre, Edinburgh

Dundee Art Galleries and Museums

Herbert Art Gallery & Museum

Glasgow Museums

Leicester Museum & Art Gallery

National Galleries of Scotland

Perth Art Gallery

Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen

Royal Collection

Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh University of Edinburgh University of Stirling

Barbara Balmer painting, c.1980.

Photograph by Robert Mabon

1. Fruits from Manolo – Almuñécar, Andalucia, c.1985 watercolour and pencil on paper, 70.5 x 54 cm signed lower left; signed and title inscribed verso

Barbara Balmer (1929–2017)

2. Basket of Apples, c.1970 watercolour and crayon on paper, 43 x 51 cm signed lower left; signed and title inscribed on label verso

Barbara Balmer (1929–2017)

signed lower right

Barbara Balmer (1929–2017)

3. Little Still Life, c.1975

watercolour on paper, 23.5 x 29 cm

exhibited Barbara Balmer Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1975, cat.44

4. Posie

Bough, c.1979 watercolour and pencil on paper, 71 x 52 cm signed lower left; signed and title inscribed verso

Barbara Balmer (1929–2017)

with Crabapple

Barbara Balmer (1929–2017)

5. Marquee in a Walled Garden, c.1980 oil on board, 92 x 122 cm signed lower left

Rendezvous Gallery, Aberdeen

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912–2004)

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912–2004) was a leading member of the St Ives group of artists and made an outstanding contribution to the advancement of post-war British art. Last year, filmmaker and director Mark Cousins directed a new film A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things, which is a cinematic immersion into Wilhelmina Barns-Graham’s art and life. The film will be on general release in 2025.

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. Barns-

Graham’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 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.

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, 1980. Photograph by Robert Mabon

At my age, there’s now no time to be lost. I say to myself, “Do it now, say it now, don’t be afraid.” I’ve got today, but who knows about tomorrow? I’m not ready for death yet, there’s still so much I want to do. Life is so exciting; nature is so exciting. Trying to catch the one simple statement about it.

That’s what I’m aiming for, I’ll keep on trying.

W. Barns-Graham, A Studio Life, p.271

[Untitled], 1998, is from her Millennium series.

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912–2004)

6. [Untitled], 1998

acrylic on paper, 25.5 x 37.5 cm signed and dated lower right

provenance

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust

However absorbed Barns-Graham is in the dialogue between her materials and her imagination, what goes on outside the window proves irresistible to an artist who is captivated by the beauty of the world. Work of the late 1990s is often a direct response to the pleasures of colour and movement on the beach below her St Ives studio: the activity of figures about to run into the sea may become a construction of oblongs, or stripes, moving across the picture plane? In the creative process, the relationship between external and internal, observed, and invented, is complex and multi-faceted: there are no rules of degree or proportion. Whatever the impulse or inspiration of her imagery, the

artist’s exploration of line, form and texture, colour, light, and space (their interrelationship and effect one upon the other, their ability to convey physical, emotional, and spiritual insight), is firmly rooted in experience. To look with the outer eye and to see with the inner eye is the mark of a natural painter. Barns-Graham is quintessentially this: an artist who imagines in form and colour, whose first response to experience is to express its equivalent in the language of painting. The studio is where outer and inner vision become one.

W. Barns-Graham, A Studio Life, p.271

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912–2004)

7. Beach Dance, 1997–98

acrylic on paper, 58 x 77.5 cm signed and dated lower right

provenance

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust

Elizabeth Blackadder

(1931–2021)

For more than half of the one hundred and twenty years or so that we consider the modern period, the images of Elizabeth Blackadder have surprised and beguiled us. She is now considered a national treasure, like Burns or Scott or Raeburn; her body of work a monument to quiet application, restraint, enlightenment, and cultural variety. Her work has the simple poetry of a haiku but is presented with the perfect pitch of a tuning fork.

Flowers are often present in Elizabeth Blackadder’s still life compositions and increasingly they became a subject in themselves. She acquired her first garden with her move to Queens Crescent in 1963. There can be no other painter as prolific in the number of things included in her painting: toys, wrappers, ceramics, postcards, fabric, fruit (real and carved), boxes, bowls, parcels and so on. When she travelled, she accumulated things and then, eventually, they might be put to use, often crumpled, upside down, rescaled, flattened or partial.

Elizabeth enjoyed a long, consistent history of exhibitions with The Gallery over the long span of her professional life from the late 1950s onwards. She was honoured with a retrospective at The National Galleries of Scotland in 2010 and her long association with the Royal Academy (she became an Associate in 1971 and was the first woman to be a member of both the RA and RSA) provided her with a national profile. Her list of honours and exhibitions is extraordinary, and it is hard to grasp the breadth of her achievement across many media. For many she is best known as a watercolourist, for many more her printmaking allowed collectors to own her work. Her oil painting practice dominated, even though she also worked predominantly on paper, always maintaining separate studios for each medium. This diversity of approach she shared for forty-five years with her husband John Houston – they met as students – and whom she sadly lost when he died in 2008.

Guy Peploe

Elizabeth Blackadder in her garden, 1989.

Blackadder shares with William Gillies, her tutor, friend and colleague from Edinburgh College of Art, a profound understanding of medium, sophistication of composition and subtle use of colour. But her work goes further in its restraint, subtlety, and originality to mark her out as the leading light in the Edinburgh School. In Still Life with Daisies, she has painted a jazzy frieze at the foot of the canvas which conventionally might have represented a table edge, defining a picture space, but she has defied this visual expectation by balancing her vase of delicate daisies over its edge. There are no straight lines, and the simplicity and formality of the central composition is further modified by her use of scratchy lines and tonal shifts in her background. She had painted in Harris in 1974 and the harsh, subtle beauty of a pared down landscape produced an effect in all her work. August saw her major one-person show at The Scottish Gallery for the Edinburgh Festival, exactly fifty years ago.

8. Still Life with Daisies, 1974 oil on canvas, 50.5 x 50.5 cm signed and dated lower right

Elizabeth Blackadder (1931–2021)

9. Still Life and Peony, 1977

watercolour on paper, 41 x 51 cm signed and dated lower right; artist name and title inscribed verso

Elizabeth Blackadder (1931–2021)

Elizabeth Blackadder visited Japan in 1985, and also after her retirement from Edinburgh College of Art the following year. Her work had long chimed with Japan’s aesthetic style, but from then she added distinct Japanese subject matter, from kimonos to chopsticks to formal gardens.

Elizabeth Blackadder (1931–2021)

10. Still Life with Chinese Boxes, 1978 watercolour on paper, 61.5 x 99.5 cm signed and dated lower left exhibited

Austin/Desmond Fine Art, London

11. Parrot Tulip and Irises, 1979 watercolour on paper, 29.5 x 30 cm signed and dated lower right; artist name and title inscribed verso

Elizabeth Blackadder (1931–2021)

Elizabeth Blackadder (1931–2021)

12. Summer Flowers, 1979 watercolour on paper, 25 x 30 cm signed and dated lower right; artist name and title inscribed verso

John and I didn’t have cats until we went to live at Queen’s Crescent in Edinburgh. I wasn’t too sure about drawing cats because I thought the subject of cats and flowers are dangerous – they can be too pretty or something… So I began looking at a lot of paintings of cats by Bonard and Gwen John. That’s when I started drawing cats. They’re flexible. I looked at anatomy books on cats. They would come into the studio because they love lying on paper, or they would lie on a painting or a stack of paintings. They are quite difficult to draw! You have to do lots of drawings because they’ll move – even when they’re sleeping they’ll turn their head over.

Elizabeth Blackadder, 2006

Elizabeth Blackadder (1931–2021)

13. Coco and Sophie, 1981 pastel on paper, 43 x 53 cm signed and dated lower left

exhibited Mercury Gallery, Edinburgh, 1982

Robert Henderson Blyth

(1919–1970)

Bobby Blyth, as he was known amongst his fellow artists, was a popular, familiar figure in the academic and institutional corridors, in Edinburgh and Aberdeen. He took his diploma at Glasgow School of Art before serving in the Army Medical Corps from 1941 until VE Day. Gillies then offered him work at Edinburgh before he moved to Aberdeen by way of Hospitalfield in 1954, a similar route to that of his colleague Ian Fleming. He had already become a friend of the young students McClure, Houston and Blackadder, with whom he remained close. His response to War had been in a few surrealist influenced subject pictures but his subsequent development was in lyrical landscape owing something to Gillies and English Neo Romanticism. He became head of drawing and painting at Gray’s in 1960 and had great influence on the next generation of painters emerging from the college, a post he maintained until his death in 1970. Henderson Blyth’s painting moved through distinct phases from early work where line, structure and texture were uppermost in his mind to his late work where form dissolves into colour. This striking work of Summer Fields shows the shared influences of his Gray’s colleagues Wishart and Fleming. Like the compositional devices used in Fleming’s

harbour scenes, Blyth has revelled in capturing the immediate texture of the stone dyke, before it recedes into the distance, leading the viewer into the rolling landscape of Aberdeenshire. A brilliant draughtsman, Blyth made distinctive choices on the information he would include. Here, he divides the distant fields and fences into flat areas of pattern, under a darkening North Sea sky.

Robert Henderson Blyth, c.1969. Photograph by Richard Collins

Robert Henderson Blyth (1919–1970)

signed lower right

exhibited Robert Henderson Blyth – Memorial Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1972, cat.26

14. Summer Fields, c.1958

oil on canvas, 61 x 51 cm

Victoria Crowe (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. Her first solo exhibition at The Scottish Gallery was in 1970. In August 2018, The Scottish National Portrait Gallery held a retrospective exhibition of Crowe’s portraits, Beyond Likeness. In 2019, the City Art Centre, Edinburgh, honoured 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 Scottish Gallery hosted a complementary exhibition in September 2019, 50 Years: Drawing & Thinking. Victoria Crowe is a member of the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolours. 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.

Crowe was awarded an OBE for Services to Art in 2004 and, from 2004–07, she was a Senior Visiting Scholar at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. The resulting work, Plant Memory, was exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy in 2007 and subsequently toured Scotland. In 2009, she received an Honorary Degree from The University of Aberdeen and, in 2010, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 2013, Dovecot Studios wove a large-scale tapestry of Crowe’s painting Large Tree Group. This collaborative tapestry was acquired for the National Museums Scotland. In 2015, Crowe 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. Crowe was commissioned in 2014 by the Worshipful Company of Leathersellers to design a forty metre tapestry for their new hall in the city of London; it took over three years to weave and was installed in January 2017. In collaboration with singer Matthew Rose, Crowe produced a 70-minute video of her work, Winterreise: a Parallel Journey. The film was shown in Snape Maltings; Wigmore Hall, London; in 2018 at the Weesp Chamber Music Festival in the Netherlands; and in South Korea in 2023.

Victoria Cowe will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Pier Art Centre, Stromness in August 2024. The Scottish Gallery celebrates Victoria Crowe’s 80th birthday in 2025.

Victoria Crowe with Gemma, c.1980. Photograph by Jessie Ann Matthew

Victoria Crowe found the reality of life, harsh and idyllic by turn, around her new home in the Pentlands at Kittleyknowe, to be the roots of her development in Scotland, lending her the confidence and fortitude to develop into the great painter she is today. She came first in 1970, happier to commute into Edinburgh College of Art after moving from London, headhunted by Robin Philipson to the School of Drawing and Painting; in the country she was a different person. Her neighbour Jenny Armstrong was a hill sheep farmer, in an environment where being neighbours meant something, a kinship in times of adversity, sharing in times of plenty. The winter fence, hencoop and kennel, the view out from the warm comfort of a room with a coal fire, the twilight shape of a familiar landmark, all became fit subjects, little pieces creating a world of hardship shared and a landscape fully inhabited.

Victoria Crowe OBE (b.1945)

15. Corner of the Garden (Summer, Kittleyknowe), c.1972 oil on board, 71 x 91 cm signed lower right

Victoria Crowe OBE (b.1945)

16. Corner of a Garden, West Linton, c.1979 watercolour on paper, 55 x 75 cm signed lower left

Victoria Crowe OBE (b.1945)

17. Trees and Gold Sky, 1985 oil on canvas, 51 x 61 cm signed lower right

Alan Davie (1920–2014)

Alan Davie was born in Grangemouth and studied at Edinburgh College of Art from 1937 to 1940. After his war service, he performed as a jazz musician, wrote poetry, designed textiles, and made jewellery. From 1953 to 1956, Davie taught at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, under the principal and artist William Johnstone (1897–1981). Davie developed an interest in African and Pacific art. In 1971, he first visited St. Lucia and subsequently spent six months a year there, incorporating Caribbean influences into his work. Over the years, his art was also influenced by Paul Klee, American Abstract Expressionism, Zen Buddhism, and Indian mythology.

Davie was the first British—and likely the first European—artist to recognise and embrace Jackson Pollock’s innovations in ‘action painting’. The quietly spoken yet formidable Scot charted his own expressive course, which was less an imitation of Pollock and more, as fellow artist Peter Doig recently described, ‘like an expanded Paul Klee… but much more physical, much more visceral’.

By the time of his breakthrough exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery in 1958, Davie’s improvisational paintings were among the most avant-garde in British art. Monumental works such as The Creation of Man and Sacrifice (Tate Gallery) combined exuberant physicality with a ritualistic, symbolist quality. His Edinburgh Festival exhibition Magic Pictures was held at The Scottish Gallery in 1979.

‘When a black mark is placed on a white paper, both paper and pigment immediately become transformed. A relationship is set up between them – a marriage: the white becomes a mythic substance, evocative of infinity and sonorous depth.’

Alan Davie, 1994

Alan Davie.

Photograph: Scotsman publications

Alan Davie (1920–2014)

18. Island Phantasy, 1999 screenprint, 56 x 67 cm, edition of 50 signed lower right

Alan Davie (1920–2014)

19. Opus Drawing, 28, 2001 ink on paper, 30 x 26 cm signed and dated upper middle

Alan Davie (1920–2014)

20. Wall of Jewels, Opus G2461, 2004

gouache on paper, 30 x 23 cm signed and dated upper right

provenance

The Open Eye Gallery, Edinburgh

Pat Douthwaite (1934–2002)

Pat Douthwaite is a painter with an exceptional gift of externalising her own fantasy world, filling and quickening a two-dimensional space with nervously vital lines and emotionally expressive colour. Whether her subjects are legendary women – and these, like Theda Bara, Belle Starr, Amy Johnson, have been recurrent obsessions – or a shivering, cowering dog, or a palm tree sorely out of its element in an alien, northern winter, Douthwaite seems to find it necessary, like a method actress, to inhabit the idea, to get inside the skin of the role, as it were. Her paintings, often grotesque for all their elegance, can range in mood from tragicomic frenzy to angst-ridden melancholy, but they usually have a certain exciting theatricality in common.

Cordelia Oliver, 1981

Pat Douthwaite, 1984.

Douthwaite’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 – a sort of Pullmanian daemon.

Douthwaite visited Skye and Barra in the 1980s and drew seagulls, puffins and people, the latter invested with huge character. Douthwaite was a prolific draughtswoman, favouring a large sheet. Her drawings are usually of a single, arresting subject made with charcoal and coloured chalks, using white and coloured paper. The starting point for a painting or drawing by Douthwaite is always particular: an historical figure, a character, an observed incident or self-portrait.

Public collections include:

Aberdeen Art Gallery

Art in Healthcare

City Art Centre, Edinburgh

Ferens Art Gallery

Fife Collections Centre

The Hepworth, Wakefield

Museum of Contemporary Art, Warsaw, Poland

National Galleries of Scotland

Paisley Museum & Art Gallery

University of St Andrews

University of Stirling

Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Like all her portrayals of women, Sunglasses is a self-portrait, whatever the ostensive subject. It is always worth noting the composition: a ghost face concealed by large black sunglasses, lit cigarette suspended from pale pink lips, asymmetric hair and body hidden within a black polo neck and large, oversized yellow coat with wide collar and a patterned trim to the hem. Douthwaite worked on the floor, using charcoal and pastel with great tonal subtlety. The background colour is near uniform but not neutral: she creates the psychological keynote in her choices: black, red or green, against which her heroines have a heightened, theatrical presence.

21. Self Portrait with Sunglasses, 1976 pastel on paper, 65 x 50 cm signed upper right

Pat Douthwaite (1934–2002)

22. Barra Man with Cat, c.1987 charcoal on paper, 81 x 56 cm

signed and dated upper right

Pat Douthwaite (1934–2002)

23. Dog Laying Down, 1989 charcoal and pastel on paper, 54 x 41 cm

Pat Douthwaite’s son Toby Hogarth has recalled that his mother: ‘adored animals above all, preferred them to humans any day. I suppose because they gave her undivided affection no matter what. She collected butterflies and beetles and always had a soft spot in her heart for animals of any kind. She became closer to them as life went on, I think because she’d had bad experiences with people’.

Simon Martin, Director, Pallant House Gallery

Pat Douthwaite (1934–2002)

24. Snow Leopard Sniffing Flowers, Kashmir, 1984 oil on canvas, 152 x 122 cm signed and dated upper left

Kate Downie (b.1958)

Kate Downie was born in North Carolina but was raised from the age of seven in Scotland. She studied at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen before travel and residencies took her to the United States, The Netherlands, France, Japan and Norway.

As a landscape painter/printmaker she studies the relationship of the human coexistence within nature, with works defined by good draughtsmanship and a sense of movement. Downie has established studios in places as diverse as a brewery, a maternity hospital, an oil rig and an island underneath the Forth Rail Bridge. She has taught both in art colleges and universities and has directed major public and community art projects since 1987.

As President to the Society of Scottish Artist from 2004 to 2006, Downie co-curated contemporary visual art projects of international standing, including an exchange exhibition with Indian artists and the Bodyparts live

art Festival at the RSA in Edinburgh. Her work appears in many public and corporate collections including the BBC; Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art; Gracefield Art Gallery, Dumfries; Aberdeen Art Gallery; Rietveld Kunst Academie, Amsterdam; City of Edinburgh Council; HM The King; Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Glasgow & New Hall College Art Collection in Cambridge. In 2005, the artist was shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing Prize, and in 2008 became a member of the Royal Scottish Academy.

Like the Scottish Artists Joan Eardley and D.Y. Cameron in the last century, Downie has spent the past thirty years exploring an artistic vision for both the extremes of a Scottish urban landscape as well as Scotland’s coastal ‘edgescapes’ beyond the cities. Downie re-located to Fife in 2018, establishing Birchtree Studios in 2019, which has since become a hub for creative collaborations both locally and internationally.

Kate Downie in Elie, Fife, 2024. Photograph by Michael Wolchover

25. North Beach, Iona (Walking the Dog), 2022 Chinese ink and watercolour on Xuan paper, 99 x 51 cm signed lower right; title inscribed verso

Kate Downie (b.1958)

Beached Boat,

, 2023 monotype, 52 x 100 cm signed lower right; title inscribed verso

Kate Downie (b.1958)

26.

Solway Firth

Joan

Eardley

(1921–1963)

There is an enduring fascination for Joan Eardley far beyond her unconventional life and early death at the age of forty-two. In her short career it is still hard to believe what this artist achieved; Eardley was an exceptionally gifted artist of her generation. Born in 1921 in Sussex, Joan Eardley’s family moved to Scotland in 1939 and a year later she joined the Glasgow School of Art. She found subjects in the shipyards of Clydebank and Townhead, at first the run-down tenements and buildings and later the children and street life around the Maternity Hospital on Rottenrow where the character of the people and the place became the vital subject of her work. Her art education was finished with scholarship visits to Paris and the cities of Renaissance Italy and back in Scotland she ventured with her art school friends to Arran and back to the south of France. However, by the fifties, Joan Eardley divided her life between her studio in Townhead and the fishing village of Catterline, a place she had discovered in the

Northeast of Scotland after a visit to recuperate from illness after her solo exhibition at the Gaumont Cinema gallery in Aberdeen. Eardley felt at ease in these two contrasting localities and over the succeeding decade, as if by accident, she created an epic vision of the world from no more than two streets and one small fishing hamlet. The slums of Townhead are no more, the harsh realities memorialised by the honesty of her vision, the spirit of the people invested in its children captured, enduring like no other example in the history of art. Catterline remains unchanged, and the village is inevitably a place of pilgrimage for the thousands who admire the artist’s deep-felt engagement with nature on the Kincardineshire coast. Joan Eardley was a regular gallery exhibitor from the 1950s under the care of our former Director William Macaulay, and The Gallery remains strongly associated with the artist since her passing.

Joan Eardley in Catterline, c.1955. Photograph by Audrey Walker

Much has been written about Joan Eardley and the Samsons, a Townhead family of perhaps 12 kids, who drifted in and out of her studio and became the subject for which she is most celebrated. This interior depicts Andrew, the eldest and first of the siblings she painted. It is dated as early as 1949 by Eardley’s biographer Christopher Andreae, but relates closely to her portrait of Angus Neil (page 112 of Joan Eardley, Lund Humphries, 2013). Neil sits passive, eyes downcast, cigarette burning in his fingers, but the boy looks about, posed with elbow on the table, hand tucked into his bomber jacket; he won’t be there for much longer.

On the reverse, is an unfinished painting of Townhead with a group of children in the foreground. The view is of the back of the close – an area directly behind the tenement buildings where the drying greens (for hanging washing) were situated; a playground of sorts. It was very common for artists to reverse a picture if they favoured another subject and didn’t want to waste the canvas. Seated Figure with Table is therefore a portrait with interior and exterior combined, which together reflects a period of post-war Britain.

Joan Eardley RSA (1921–1963)

27. Seated Figure with Table, c.1949–53 oil on canvas, 51 x 63.5 cm painting verso

provenance

Private collection, Edinburgh

illustrated

Christopher Andreae, Joan Eardley, Lund Humphries, 2013, p.99

Reverse side of Seated Figure with Table

William Gillies (1898–1973)

William George Gillies, born in Haddington in 1898, died in tranquillity at his luncheon table on Sunday, 15th April 1973. His painting stands out in any contemporary environment – his idiom was very personal and always unmistakably Scottish. After a spell at Edinburgh College of Art, interrupted from 1917 to 1919 by military service, he was awarded a travelling scholarship which enabled him to study some time in Paris and later travel in Italy. He was elected ARSA in 1940, becoming an Academician seven years later. He was awarded the CBE in 1957 for services to Art in Scotland. The accolade of knighthood was bestowed on William Gillies in 1970. In 1971 he was made Royal Academician, London.

There was something birdlike about him: his tempo was faster than normal and while most people walked, Bill Gillies ran – effortless in all his many activities and in conversation he often anticipated what was going to be said to him. In short, he used time to the full, being a prolific painter who managed also to be an inspiring teacher. At the Edinburgh College of Art his first junior appointment in 1925 led to his becoming the Head of the School of Drawing and Painting. As a climax to his career as a teacher he became the Principal of the College from 1961 to 1966. It has been estimated that Gillies completed well over 2,000 paintings and works on paper. He was an exciting colourist, and his paintings were full of light and poetry. Dedicated as he was to the gravity of his work which ever contained an original quality of Scottish character, Bill Gillies, an inveterate maker of wines and jams, regarded life with an air of detached amusement.

Broadly speaking, it could be said that there are two kinds of painters. Those who find their inspiration abroad and those who can only blossom in their native soil, Gillies being a perfect example of the latter. He found all the material he wanted in Scotland – Highland landscape and Lowland townscape, in Fife and the Lothians, in little seaports and bare hillsides, especially in the charming village of Temple where he lived and died. It would be a mistake to say that Gillies, the master of the Scottish scene, was indifferent to the many contemporary trends of art – it would be more true to say that he had something so fundamental, so pressing to say that he was not side-tracked by the passing fashions and whims of the day and his art will endure when a great deal that is fashionable will have long since been forgotten.

Sir William MacTaggart, edited obituary from the Royal Scottish Academy, 1973

In this edition, Gillies is connected to the following artists:

Barbara Balmer Former student

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Former student

Elizabeth Blackadder Former student and colleague

Robert Henderson Blyth Former student

Alan Davie Former student

Joan Eardley Peer and champion

Leon Morrocco Former student

Denis Peploe Former student and colleague

S.J. Peploe Peer and colleague

Anne Redpath Peer

Joan Renton Former student

Robert T H Smith Former student

William Gillies at his Temple home and studio. Photographs by Jessie Ann Matthew, December 1972

William Gillies, Pittenweem, c.1947 (cat.28) (detail)

Gillies was a prolific watercolourist and his approach varied throughout his life. In the earlier period he only employs the brush, sometimes wet on wet, with a minimum of drawing which can lend a spontaneous and gestural quality and often captures a particular moment or some fleeting atmospheric effect. From the 1940s he tended to draw first, with pencil or pen and then use monochrome or colour washes. Pittenweem, painted in 1947, the year he was elected an Academician has been painted on a large sheet of watercolour paper on a magnificent summer’s day. He has painted the dappled light on the pavement and road and has colour washed the detail of the seafront houses, gables and pantile roofs.

Gillies held several one-person shows with The Scottish Gallery in his lifetime and in addition there was often a ‘bin’ of unframed Gillies watercolours displayed in the premises on Castle Street which were constantly on sale at the ‘bargain’ price of 20 guineas.

William Gillies (1898–1973)

28. Pittenweem, c.1947 ink and watercolour on paper, 47 x 67 cm signed lower left

exhibited

The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1949

William Gillies at his first exhibition with The Scottish Gallery in 1949, where Pittenweem was originally exhibited and sold.

Unlike the old masters, Gillies’ drawings were rarely studies for future oil paintings. Instead, most of them were completed as a first response to the scene in front of him and in this sense they offer a far more intimate and personal view than many of his paintings. His line varies from a languorous grace to breathless fury, every mark, scribble and dot offers an image of something observed by a passionately aware and purposeful mind. Unlike his watercolours which can be contemplative, his drawings are lighthearted, energetic and spirited.

William Gillies (1898–1973)

29. The Pentlands from near Temple, c.1950 pencil on paper, 21 x 35.5 cm signed lower left exhibited Steigal Fine Art Ltd, Edinburgh

Each time Gillies selected his sister Emma’s pots for a still life he acknowledged her. Her death in 1936 was one of several personal losses that Gillies bore in life. This small still life seems perfectly formed: the four ceramic vessels help define the space, two in diagonal conversation, two intimately close, the stems of the delicate poppies offering an embrace. Colour is strong and harmonious, and the paint deliciously applied.

William Gillies (1898–1973)

30. Iceland Poppies, c.1959 oil on canvas, 36

46 cm signed lower right

provenance

The Visionary Painter, The Scottish Gallery, 2023

Gillies divided his energy between oil and watercolour; painting in oils was his studio routine, whilst he was happiest working in front of the landscape on his watercolour block. The originality and spontaneity of his landscapes on paper in pencil, pen and ink and pure watercolour, form the core of his reputation. When filmed in 1970, he spoke eloquently about his watercolour practice: ‘My landscape painting began with watercolour and a great part of my work has continued in this medium and I feel the peculiar qualities of the medium have had a strong influence on my conception of landscape... I have perhaps opened many people’s eyes to some unexpected, some subtle beauties in our daily surroundings. This has been, I hope, a by-product of my own enjoyment of what I perceive and my great delight in the very act of handling the paint.’

Portmore is a small estate sitting 800ft up on the side of a Peeblesshire hill near Eddleston.

William Gillies (1898–1973)

31. Ploughed Fields, Portmore, c.1960 watercolour on paper, 54.5 x 76 cm signed lower right

exhibited

The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh; Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour, Edinburgh

Gillies enjoyed visits to Wester Ross and Cromarty during the summers of the 1940s. This joyous oil, which will have been made en plein air, renders the effects of sunshine on the sea and landscape of Loch Alsh, looking east towards Balmacara. His swift notations with the brush captures the joy he experiences in the landscape, with the accuracy of painter whose technical ability allows him to translate reality into an image imbued with a poetic quality.

‘A landscape has to be digested. Working from nature, one is distracted by the perpetual change – I get led astray from the original conception. I seek the permanent in nature.’

William Gillies, 1961

William Gillies (1898–1973)

32. Kyle of Lochalsh, c.1946 oil on canvas, 35 x 45 cm signed lower right

exhibited Cyril Gerber Fine Art, Glasgow

Audrey Johnson (1919-2010)

Audrey Johnson is an artist about whom we know very little, but whose work deserves wider recognition. Her deceptively simple and honest still-life paintings have quietly influenced many of today’s social media-savvy popular artists. Johnson drew inspiration from her home, garden, and the joy in everyday things, which is reflected in her subtle and delicate compositions. These works, distilled down to their most essential forms, create an intimate experience for the viewer.

Although we don’t know much about Johnson’s training or the awards she may have received, we do know that she lived in the picturesque hamlet of Cartmel Fell in Cumbria with her husband and fellow artist, Claude Harrison (1922–2009). Harrison trained at Preston College of Art and Liverpool College of Art before serving in the Royal Air Force during the war. He married Johnson in 1947.

Audrey Johnson, Still Life in Jug, 1988 (cat.34) (detail)

Audrey Johnson (1919–2005)

33. Cyclamen, 1985 oil on board, 28 x 23 cm signed and dated lower right

Audrey Johnson (1919–2005)

34. Still Life in Jug, 1988 oil on board, 23 x 18 cm signed and dated lower right

Brenda King

(1934–2011)

Brenda King was born in Cumbria and studied art at Lancaster College of Art and at the Royal College of Art in the 1950s. While living near London, she exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. During the 1960s and 70s, she held numerous shows in the Southeast before relocating to Cornwall in 1975. King’s paintings are characterised by a folk style and her subject often features compositions of a table-top with crockery in front of a window overlooking a coastal scene. She was married to Jeremy King, and shared working studios in St Just, Cornwall.

Brenda King (1934–2011)

35. Flowers in a Cup, 1973 oil on board, 18 x 14 cm signed and dated lower left

Brenda Lenaghan (1941–2020)

Brenda Lenaghan was born in Galashiels in 1941. She studied at Glasgow School of Art between 1958–63 before joining Bernat Klein (1922–2014) in Galashiels. Klein was an artist, colourist and textile designer who founded his business in the Scottish Borders in 1952, where he produced innovative fashion fabrics for the couture houses of Europe. Lenaghan worked in the modernist building set in the landscape of Selkirk, which was designed by the pioneering architect Peter Womersley. The tweed fabrics which Lenaghan contributed to the design of, featured in Chanel and Dior’s haute couture collections. The colour experience during her time with Klein, informed her palette and compositional studies. When her son moved to Japan, her painting began to absorb oriental influences. Lenaghan won numerous awards throughout her career, including the SSWA’s Anne Redpath Award in 1975 and 1983. In 1984, Lenaghan was elected a member of the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour.

Brenda Lenaghan, Rendezvous Gallery, Aberdeen, 2014. Photograph by Press and Journal

36. Two Figures, c.1990 oil on board, 42 x 42 cm signed lower left

Brenda Lenaghan (1941–2020)

37. Figures in a Garden oil on board, 76 x 76 cm signed lower right

William Littlejohn

(1929–2006)

Littlejohn, who was born in Arbroath and lived there for most of his life, was known for his modernist watercolours and iconic imagery.

He studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee and, after national service in the RAF and work as an art teacher at Arbroath High School, he studied at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen, where he became a lecturer and later principal of the school of painting. Littlejohn was elected a member of the Royal Scottish Academy, the Royal Glasgow Institute and the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour.

From the early 1960s, The Scottish Gallery held regular solo exhibitions of his work.

Littlejohn’s work is held in numerous public collections including the National Gallery of Scotland and the Royal Scottish Academy.

William Littlejohn, 1980.

Photograph by Robert Mabon

William Littlejohn (1929–2006)

38. At a Shrine, 1998 watercolour on paper, 53 x 31 cm signed and dated lower middle; title inscribed verso

Sheila Macmillan (1928–2018)

Sheila Macnab Macmillan was born in Glasgow in 1928. She studied Geography at Glasgow University and went on to train as a teacher. Her painting talent was encouraged by her artist uncle Iain Macnab RE ROI (1890–1967) who persuaded Sheila to come to London to study fine art. Iain Macnab had been Principal at Heatherley’s Art School (1925–1940) and became the founding Principal of the Grosvenor School of Modern Art. Macmillan’s London influences and Glasgow School foundations gradually evolved into a distinctive and individual style. She worked en plein air and her work is semi-abstract. Her chief subject is the landscape where her training as a geographer and understanding of land formation explores the delicate balance of the seasons and interaction between man and the environment. Macmillan painted in Scotland, Spain, France and Italy.