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Telephone 0131 558 1200 or 01436 821 533

THE SCOTTISH GALLERY & EWAN MUNDY FINE ART • JUNE 2015

THE SCOTTISH GALLERY & EWAN MUNDY FINE ART Gallery 8 · 8 Duke Street · St James’s · London SW1Y 6BN

THE SCOTTISH GALLERY & EWAN MUNDY FINE ART at

GALLERY 8 8 DUKE STREET · ST JAMES’S · LONDON SW1Y 6BN

TWENTIETH CENTURY SCOTTISH PAINTING Monday June 22nd to Friday June 26th 10am to 6pm daily Saturday morning 27th June by appointment Telephone 0131 558 1200 or 01436 821 533 www.scottish-gallery.co.uk mail@scottish-gallery.co.uk

www.mundyfineart.com emundy@btconnect.com

THE SCOTTISH GALLERY 16 Dundas Street Edinburgh · EH3 6HZ

EWAN MUNDY FINE ART Lagarie Cottage Mhor Rhu · Argyll · G84 8LF

1.

Elizabeth Blackadder born 1931 DBE RA RSA RSW RGI Woman Kneeling, Portugal, 1967 oil pastel, 8 x 10 inches, 20 x 25.5 cms, signed and dated.

Elizabeth Blackadder studied at Edinburgh University and Edinburgh College of Art; her teachers included David Talbot Rice, Robert Henderson Blyth, Robin Philipson and William Gillies. In 1955 she was awarded a travelling scholarship which allowed her to spend nine months in Italy.

The next year, 1956, she married the painter John Houston – see catalogue numbers 13 and 14.

Blackadder’s work spans many subjects from her famed flower and botanical studies to figurative work and portraiture, still life, landscape, architecture and pictorial arrangements of interiors and objects. She and her husband John travelled widely, on painting trips, through Scotland and Europe; she visited Portugal in 1966 and 1967. From the 1980’s they made a number of visits to Japan, which confirmed and strengthened the aesthetic guiding her approach to painting and printmaking.

She is the last of a group of artists who are known as the ‘Edinburgh School’ and she is one of the brightest of its stars.

2.

Elizabeth Blackadder born 1931 DBE RA RSA RSW RGI Table-top Still Life with Cafetiere, 1970 watercolour, 22½ x 30½ inches, 57 x 76 cms, signed and dated.

3.

Elizabeth Blackadder born 1931 DBE RA RSA RSW RGI Still Life with Irises, 2014 watercolour and pastel, 17¼ x 22¾ inches, 44 x 57.5 cms, signed.

4.

Charles Cameron Baillie 1901-1960 Head and Shoulders of a Girl, 1930 pencil and ink drawing, 8 x 6¾ inches, 44 x 57.5 cms, signed and dated.

Charles Cameron Baillie was a Glasgow based artist and designer, responsible for the art deco state rooms and other interiors of the Cunard Liner, The Queen Mary, which was built at Clydebank.

He also designed and carried out the work on the interior of Rogano’s Restaurant in Glasgow, much of which still survives.

William Crosbie RSA RGI (1915-1999) who on occasion assisted Cameron Baillie with such work, recalled that, Charlie Baillie, when working on a decorative project that involved painting a ceiling, “was unable to contemplate ascending the ladder without at least the best part of a bottle of whisky inside him.”

His biographical details are sparse, but it is known that he also worked at the Empire Exhibition in Glasgow in 1938. He may also have had some connection with the Glasgow School of Art, as one of the drawings we have in this exhibition bears the label, ‘167 RENFREW ST, GLASGOW’. (The Glasgow School of Art).

Baillie’s drawings and paintings are rather wonderful idiosyncratic period pieces beautifully realised.

5.

Sir James Gunn 1893-1964 RA Toledo and the Hospital de Tavera from the Banks of the Tagus, 1914 oil on board, 10 x 14 inches, 25.5 x 35.5 cms, signed, inscribed and dated.

Provenance: T & R Annan and Sons, Glasgow.

James Gunn trained at Glasgow School of Art before going to Paris to study at the Academie Julian. His paintings of fashionable society and its haunts remind one of Lavery in their subject and style, but Gunn also painted beautiful landscapes and architectural subjects.

Many think Gunn’s finest work was done while he was a very young man, before the Great War, after which he concentrated a great deal on portraiture, from which he derived social success and a comfortable living.

Gunn made the journey to Spain in 1914 where he painted this view of Toledo. His palette on this Spanish trip was narrowed by the brilliant light and the local white grey stone, to pale blue, green and cream colours.

6.

Charles Cameron Baillie 1901-1960 Mother and Child, 1931 pencil drawing, 13 x 7½ inches, 33 x 19 cms, signed and dated.

Inscribed on a label on the reverse, ‘167 RENFREW ST, GLASOW’, (The Glasgow School of Art).

7.

Samuel John Peploe 1871-1935 RSA White Sands, Iona, 1924 oil on panel, 15 x 18 inches, 38 x 46 cms, signed.

Provenance: Alexander Reid, Glasgow, Aitken Dott & Son, Edinburgh, Major Ion Harrison.

Exhibited: Memorial Exhibition of Paintings by SJ Peploe, February 1937, as ‘Rough Sea, Iona’, The McLellan Galleries, Glasgow.

The Thistle Foundation, Pictures from a Private Collection, catalogue no. 44, The McLellan Galleries, Glasgow, March, 1951.

The Lefevre Gallery, London, Two Scottish Colourists, Samuel John Peploe and FCB Cadell, catalogue no. 7, November and December, 1988.

Peploe was introduced to Iona, as a place to paint, by his friend Cadell in 1920; thereafter he was a regular visitor.

The ever changing strong light and long summer days of the Hebrides, along with Iona’s artistic heritage (from the Scriptorium that produced the Book of Kells to the medieval artificers and craftsmen who created the stone sculptures and carving of the ‘Iona School’) made it an ideal and resonantly atmospheric location to create paintings.

Peploe and Cadell were both drawn to the motifs provided at the North End, the views to Mull, Eilean Annraidh and the Treshnish Isles.

White Sands, Iona is one of the finest of the artist’s paintings of Iona to become available for sale in recent years.

8.

David Donaldson 1916-1996 RSA RP Painter and Limner in Scotland to the Queen Village in Provence oil on canvas, 20 x 20 inches, 51 x 51 cms, signed.

David Donaldson joined the staff of Glasgow School of Art on a full time basis in 1944 and from 1967 to 1981 he was Head of Drawing and Painting.

His landscape paintings of France and Scotland show his concern with colour and texture (an inheritor in this respect of the values of the Glasgow Boys and the Scottish Colourists). He was a personality that could be irascible yet buoyant with great swagger and humour, a noted deliverer of a ‘bon mot’ in the ‘Glasgow fashion’. Above all he was a very gifted handler of oil paint and produced works of a rare and poetic quality.

9.

John Byrne born 1940 RSA Midnight Garden, c.1968 oil on canvas, 28 x 36 inches, 71 x 91.5 cms, signed ‘Patrick’.

Born in Paisley, Byrne enrolled in Glasgow School of Art in 1958, after a spell as a ‘slab boy’ in a local carpet designing firm. This important painting is an early example of Byrne’s faux naive pseudonym, ‘Patrick’, an alias he adopted in response to the unsuccessful experience he received from London galleries, after leaving the Art School. Byrne’s work is characterised by brilliant draughtsmanship, whimsy and a propensity for dark wit and humour. He was the subject of retrospective at Paisley Art Gallery in 2010 and a major portrait exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in 2014.

10. Duncan Shanks born 1937 RSA RSW RGI Summer Greenhouse, 2013 acrylic on paper, 28 x 27¼ inches, 71 x 69 cms, signed.

Duncan Shanks was born in Airdrie and studied at Glasgow School of Art where he later lectured. He derives his subjects and inspiration from the garden and countryside around his home at Crossford in the Clyde Valley. The act of drawing is vitally important for Shanks’ creative output and it is through the act of drawing that Shanks feels closest to the natural world. His deep familiarity with nature allows Shanks to abandon pure representation in favour of expressionism; strong colour and richly applied paint chart the changing seasons and the forces of nature. Shanks is currently the subject of a major exhibition at the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow, The Poetry of Place, which celebrates the artist’s gift of over a hundred sketchbooks to Glasgow University.

11. Robert Henderson Blyth 1919-1970 RSA RSW The Mill Lade, c.1950-1 watercolour, 18½ x 24½ inches, 47 x 62 cms, signed.

Provenance: Mrs Peter Russell, The Mercury Gallery, London, 1979, The Fleming Collection, London, Private Collection.

Exhibited: The Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 1951, catalogue no.730. The Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada.

Nottingham University, Six Scottish Painters, 1959.

Henderson Blyth was born in Glasgow and was a student at the Glasgow School of Art in the 1930’s. He came under the influence of James Cowie (1886-1956 RSA) when he attended Hospitalfield College in Arbroath in 1940. Cowie focused on Blyth’s latent skills as a fine draughtsman and helped to bring them to the fore.

After the war he joined the staff of the Edinburgh College of Art where among his colleagues were William Gillies, John Maxwell and Robin Philipson. He went on painting trips with Gillies to Fife, the Moray Coast and the West Highlands. They painted the same landscapes, but Blyth laid an emphasis on the linear structure of his pictures. In 1954 he moved to Aberdeen and by 1960 he was appointed Head of Drawing and Painting at Gray’s School of Art. His painting developed in the North East where he arrived at a synthesis of the architectural qualities in his work with a more lyrical vision of the landscape.

12. Sir Robin Philipson 1916-1992 PRSA RA RSW Iconostasis, 1975 oil on canvas, 36 x 48 inches, 91.5 x 122 cms, signed on the reverse.

Provenance: Sir Anthony Wheeler Exhibited: The Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 1975 Philipson went to Edinburgh College of Art from 1936 to 1940 and became a member of the staff after the war and subsequently went onto become Head of Drawing and Painting there from 1960 to 1982. His early work was influenced by Gillies and then Kokoschka, but during the late 1950s and 1960s he came into his own, painting subjects and themes which ranged from ancient Kings to scenes of twentieth century war. He turned to painting church interiors, first, rose and blue medieval windows, then in Mexico a series of alter and chapel interiors and ultimately in the 1970’s a group of magnificent Byzantine interiors, of which this is a really fine example.

Iconostasis, 1975, is based on the interior of the Greek Orthodox chapel at St Catherines’s Monastery in Sinai; which is famed for its large collection of early icons and an important library of the earliest Christian texts. A chapel was built on the site in the fourth century on the orders of (St) Helena, the emperor Constantine’s mother. The Monastery itself was established in the sixth century.

13. John Houston 1930-2008 OBE RSA RSW RGI Autumn Festival, Heian Shrine, Kyoto, Japan, 1994-95 oil on canvas, 12 x 14 inches, 30.5 x 35.5 cms, signed and inscribed verso.

John Houston was born in Buckhaven in Fife. He graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 1952, but remained closely associated with the College through his role as lecturer until his retirement in 1989. He showed with The Scottish Gallery from the late 1950’s and was honoured with ten Festival exhibitions between 1961 and 2008. He was the subject of a major retrospective at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 2005.

John Houston first visited Japan in 1986 with his wife Elizabeth Blackadder and they returned on two further occasions. In this picture Houston has revelled in depicting the kimonos of the festival goers and the distinctive architecture of the temple beyond, captured with short, gestural brushstrokes and brilliant expressionist colour.

14. John Houston 1930-2008 OBE RSA RSW RGI Tulips and Daffodils, oil on board, 12 x 5 inches, 30 x 12.5 cms, signed.

Provenance: Summer Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, 1974

15. Sylvia Wishart 1936-2008 RSA Bobby Greig’s Close, Stromness, Orkney, 1965 oil on board, 24¾ x 17 inches, 63 x 43 cms, signed.

Provenance: Ian MacInnes and thence by descent.

Sylvia Wishart is a name which today is inseparable from discussion of Orcadian art in the 20th century. Encouraged by Stanley Cursiter and Ian MacInnes from a young age, she was a painter who lived and worked on Orkney, and whose intimate knowledge of the islands and their people informed her direction as an artist. Her location on Orkney and her distance from her peers in the ‘art world’ has meant that her career has been somewhat overlooked. However, the recent retrospective organised by the Pier Art Centre in Stromness in 2011 which travelled in part to the RSA in 2012 has introduced her work to a much wider audience who can appreciate her restraint, subtle mark-making and perfectly rendered sense of ‘place’. Robert ‘Bobby’ Greig was a local lobster fisherman who had lived in Stromness and the location is just round the corner from the Pier Art Centre which opened its doors in 1979.

16. James Morrison born 1932 RSA RSW Break in the Clouds, 2014 oil on board, 12 x 15 inches, 30 x 38 cms, signed and dated.

James Morrison RSA is whole-heartedly engaged as a landscape painter but sees no constraint in this choice; his work is thematically rich, poetic and lyrical and for many has added to our understanding of the Scottish landscape. His main working areas are the ancient farmland around his home in Angus, the Mearns of Grassic Gibbon’s, Sunset Song and in complete contrast, the rugged wilderness of Assynt on the west coast. He will be the subject of a major new exhibition at The Scottish Gallery in August 2015.

17. Jessie Marion King 1875-1949 St Etienne du Mont, Paris, 1911-12 watercolour, 10 x 7 inches, 25.5 x 18 cms.

Provenance: Merle Taylor, Aitken Dott & Son, Edinburgh.

This watercolour by Jessie King of the beautiful church of St Etienne du Mont at the top of the Rue de la MontagneSt Genevieve on the Left Bank was intended as an illustration for a book of views of Paris; which was never published because of the outbreak of war in 1914.

18. James McBey 1883-1959 The Kimono, 1923 watercolour, 16 x 12 inches, 41 x 30 cms, signed and dated.

Provenance: Aitken Dott & Son, Edinburgh.

James McBey worked for the North of Scotland Bank in Aberdeen and although he attended evening classes at Gray’s School of Art he was largely self taught as a painter and etcher.

A growing confidence in his own abilities as an artist allowed him to resign his post at the Bank in 1910 and to live by and for his art.

In contrast to the poverty and hard life of his childhood, McBey’s success and the recognition he received as an artist, both in Scotland and London, allowed him to live in some style in Holland Park. This watercolour, The Kimono, seems to reflect the glamour of life in the ‘roaring twenties’ in London.

19. Denis Peploe 1914-1993 RSA Loch Sionascaig, Sutherland, c.1950 oil on board, 9¾ x 13 inches, 25 x 33 cms, signed twice.

From the late 1940’s based in an ancient caravan in the garden of the Old Manse at Plockton in Wester Ross, Peploe would spend the summer months working, latterly joined by his wife and family. The rugged terrain and ever changing weather became his most prolific and successful subject, a total contrast to the intellectual rigours of the Edinburgh studio. Loch Sionascaig and the area around, provides some of the most spectacular wilderness in the UK, perched high in Sutherland.

This work will have been painted on the spot, using one of his father’s painting boxes. The entire landscape artist’s paraphernalia could be packed into a rucksack so that Peploe could walk to find his subjects.

20. Robert Colquhoun 1914-1962 The Farmer, 1954 coloured monotype, 20 x 12 inches, 51 x 31 cms, signed with initials.

Provenance: Private Collection, London Colquhoun and MacBryde lived in Tilty Mill in Essex from 1951-54, at the invitation of Elizabeth Smart, working and helping to look after her children. Colquhoun completed perhaps his most ambitious painting here, Three Figures in a Farmyard, which is now in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. The pose of The Farmer, relates closely to the totemic figure of the woman in the finished painting.

21. George Leslie Hunter 1877-1931 Nude by a Window, c. 1927-30 coloured crayons and ink, 13¾ x 8½ inches, 35 x 21.5 cms, signed.

Provenance: The Fine Art Society, 1973.

Though this drawing by Leslie Hunter might have been done in the artist’s studio in Glasgow, it could as easily have been made in the South of France. It is imbued with the spirit of Cezanne’s Les Baigneuses paintings and the colour and design of Matisse and is a fine example of the influence that the developments in French painting had on Hunter and his contemporaries.

22. Wilhelmina Barns-Graham 1912-2004 CBE HRSA RSW Taormina, Sicily, 1955 pencil and wash drawing, 18 x 23 inches, 46 x 58.5 cms, signed and dated.

After studying at Edinburgh College of Art in the 1930’s, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham with the help of a travelling scholarship moved to St Ives in Cornwall in 1940.

There she met and became influenced by the work of Ben Nicholson and was introduced to Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo. These artists recognised the quality of her work, especially the power and rigour of her draughtsmanship; which is exemplified in this large wash drawing of the Norman fortress town of Taormina in Sicily, which she made in 1955, on a visit to Italy sponsored by the Italian Government.

23. Anne Redpath 1895-1965 RSA ARA Loch Snizort, Skye, 1946, gouache and watercolour, 15¼ x 19 inches, 38.5 x 48 cms, signed.

Provenance: The Mercury Gallery, London, 1982.

The Reader’s Digest Art Collection.

The work of Anne Redpath again demonstrates the French influence on Scottish painting. Redpath lived in France from 1920 to 1934. The subject of this painting is the Hebrides, but its palette, composition and style of execution derives from the ateliers of Paris and the Cote d’Azur.

24. Sir William Gillies 1898-1973 RSA RA RSW Boats on the Shore, Kippford, on the Solway, 1949 ink drawing, 17 x 22 inches, 43 x 56 cms, signed.

Provenance: Aitken Dott & Son, Edinburgh.

After service in the Great War where he was wounded and gassed, Gillies returned to his studies at Edinburgh College of Art in 1919; when he graduated he went to Paris and spent some time in the studio of André Lhote and travelled to Italy. In 1925 he was appointed as a part-time lecturer at Edinburgh College of Art and in 1934 he was made a full-time member of the staff. He later became Head of Drawing and Painting and in 1959 Principal of Edinburgh College of Art. Among his many students were Robin Philipson, Elizabeth Blackadder and John Houston.

According to the foremost collector of his work, Robert Lillie (writing in 1953), William Gillies, “lived to paint”, he went onto compare him to Burns saying that the poet himself, “could not be more authentic and direct – simple, sensuous and passionate”.

25. Sir William Gillies 1898-1973 RSA RA RSW Houses by the Shore, Plockton, Wester Ross, 1949 9½ x 10ž inches, 24 x 27 cms, signed.

Provenance: William Gillies Exhibition, 1949, catalogue no. 9, Aitken Dott & Son, Edinburgh.

26. Sir Willam Gillies 1898-1973 RSA RA RSW Still Life, Blue and Red, 1957 oil on canvas, 36 x 39 inches, 91.5 x 99 cms, signed.

Provenance: Dr and Mrs Henry Walton Exhibited: John Moores Exhibition, Liverpool, 1957 catalogue no. 142 Nottingham University, Six Scottish Painters, 1959 catalogue no. 15 Commonwealth Institute, London, 14 Scottish Painters, 1963-64 catalogue no. 35 The Scottish Arts Council, Edinburgh, William Gillies Retrospective, 1970, catalogue no. 73 The Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, William Gillies Centenary Exhibition, 1998, catalogue no. 205 This painting is illustrated on the back cover of the catalogue.

THE SCOTTISH GALLERY & EWAN MUNDY FINE ART Gallery 8 · 8 Duke Street · St James’s · London SW1Y 6BN Telephone 0131 558 1200 or 01436 821 533