The Scottish Gallery remembers WW1 | The Scottish Gallery

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The Scottish Gallery remembers WWI On the 28th of July 1914, the day War was declared, The Scottish Gallery invoiced Dr. Marr of Greenlaw, Berwickshire for the purchase of Companions by William McTaggart for £157 and ten shillings, the equivalent of around £45,000 today.

Life goes on after all and War was declared on a wave of patriotism and optimism.

A reading of the subsequent months’ entries in The Gallery day book give an occasional insight into the early days of the War; a room at 26 South Castle Street is rented to the YMCA as a distribution point (for donations) at the nominal rent of £1.00 per month. A reference is made to the status of a painting by Robert Hope donated for the Belgian Relief Fund. The commercial activity focusses on works going off to regional salerooms: Curr & Dewar in Dundee, and Dowell’s in Edinburgh, and there is activity with works consigned or handled on a joint commission basis with Colnagi & Obach in London, Connell & Co and George Davidson Ltd in Glasgow. On a more optimistic note in July 1915 six works are consigned to The Gallery

by SJ Peploe, now living in India Street with his wife and two boys, two of Crawford, four of Cassis and one is sold, for £25, less 25% commission. The balance is however returned to the artist unsold in early October. Six more are consigned in November, including three flower paintings, but one is immediately passed on to Alexander Reid in Glasgow and the rest returned the following August. In January 1917, Peploe writes to FCB Cadell in the trenches, clearly feeling confined by the War, joking with his friend that he must surely give up ‘flake white’ because of the expense and that ‘is it not quite unnecessary for a colourist?’ He wrote again in August after Cadell has been wounded and is recuperating in Rouen, wishing him a

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Above: C F Partoon Photographers, Dundee, William Gillies in military uniform, photograph, c.1917. Royal Scottish Academy of Art & Architecture (William Gillies Bequest) Left: FCB Cadell, Self-Portrait, c.1914 (detail) (in the collection of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh)

In January 1917, Peploe writes to FCB Cadell in the trenches, clearly feeling confined by the War, joking with his friend that he must surely give up ‘flake white’

‘slow recovery’ and looking forward to revisiting the Hebrides to recover ‘lost virtues’ and how they must all go together to Iona next summer.

At The Gallery a brisk trade in James Lawton Wingate continues with an exhibition in March promoted jointly with George Davidson of Glasgow. As is typical with the picture selling world there are prominent repeat purchasers, like Hugh Stoddard of East Lothian. On October 12, 1916, William Boyd of Broughty Ferry buys Macrihannish Bay by McTaggart for £1,000 but he has deferred payment until the following July and consigns a higher value of works by McTaggart and Hague School painters for sale. Clearly the partners are having to be creative to make significant sales. At the end of

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Adam Bruce Thomson Royal Engineers Constructing a Suspension Bridge, lithograph, 26 x 16 cms (cat. 35)

the year McTaggart’s Stormy Day, Mull of Kintyre is sold but this time with the arrangement that the purchaser has two months to pay and can swap the picture for others of similar value within two years.

Collectors like Jack Blyth of Kirkcaldy, who ended up with eighty-four Peploes but began with a passion for McTaggart, and William Burrell, who acquired Hutton Castle in Berwickshire in 1916, were identifying buying opportunities and ‘good’ prices. It was a conservative, perhaps safer policy which sustained the Gallery in these difficult years: McTaggart, Wingate, Wintour, the later work of The Glasgow Boys and European works

by Monticelli, Blommers, Israels and Maris.

Business was patchy, but the occasional major sale can be attributed to the partners’ reputations and ability to ‘keep up appearances’ in otherwise straightened times. In March

1918 James Howden Hume, owner of the great Engineering company still trading today as James Howden, bought McTaggart’s Among the Bents, 1898 for the equivalent today of £500,000.

The Scottish virtues of hard work and enterprise in the territories of engineering and shipping could pay dividends in a war economy. A month or so before the War ended James Wright, who would go on to persuade the R & A to bring The Open to Carnoustie and was responsible for remodelling the fiendish finish to the golf course, bought another McTaggart for the same figure as Howden Hume, this time agreeing to pay by instalment over two years at 5% interest!

Cadell was typical of most artists to survive The War: he chose to face down whatever trauma he had suffered by ‘moving on’, by refusing to be defined by the experiences and by seeking the redemptive comfort of art and hard work to rebuild his life. Adam Bruce Thomson, who

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joined up with friends from the College, many of whom would not return, like Walter Hyslop whose sister he would marry, dedicated a long, productive life to art, a way to both escape and rationalise the past and memorialise those who had been less fortunate on the battlefield.

William Gillies was called up in April 1917, after two terms of the first year of his Diploma course at Edinburgh College of Art. His time in France saw him twice wounded, wounds which most likely saved him from the fate of so much of his battalion of the Scottish Rifles when in 1918 they lost over three-quarters of its number.

Cadell had volunteered as an enlisted soldier, albeit in a Saville Row tailored uniform, and his drawings of 1915, published for the War effort as Jack & Tommy, were gentle observations, well short of satire but thoroughly from the perspective of the common soldier rather than the staff officer. Whether by the end of the War

he could have been so gentle again is a moot point. Andrew McPherson in his book William Gillies (yet unpublished) identifies Gillies elusive character and traits of self-sufficiency and his loyalty to a non-hierarchical band of colleagues at Edinburgh College of Art as arising from his War experience when the only comfort was the idea of home and your comrades around you.

It is always an intriguing question to ask: will great artists always out? Or do we lose talent to discouragement and accident in the random nature of life? What is certain is that the flower of a generation of creative talent died on Flanders fields and that art would never be the same. Survivor guilt and anger manifested itself in the work of war artists like Nevinson and Orpen but it was to the Germans, the defeated, that art provided the most visceral expression of loss and rage in the work of Beckman, Dix and George Grosz. English painters like Glyn

Adam Bruce Thomson, Reconstruction of Demolished Bridge near Conde, France, wash drawing, 22.5 x 24 cms (cat. 34)

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Post War: Recovery and remembrance Cadell is supposed to have been the first of the two artists to have visited Iona and there are many works that date from before the First War. Peploe wrote to Cadell from Edinburgh when Cadell was at the Western Front, giving him the gossip and looking forward to the end of the war and a trip to the islands, to Iona, to somehow rediscover their innocence. Their visits did not always coincide but each made an annual pilgrimage to the island for the rest of their lives, experiences valuable to them as artists and friends.

FCB Cadell, Breezy Day, Iona, oil on panel, 36.5 x 44 cms (cat. 6)

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Robert Graves (1895-1985) Served as captain for the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers.

A Pinch of Salt

by Robert Graves (written on August 14th 1916) When a dream is born in you With a sudden clamorous pain, When you know the dream is true And lovely, with no flaw nor stain, O then, be careful, or with sudden clutch You’ll hurt the delicate thing you prize so much.

Philpot and Edward Burra did expose the underbelly of the roaring twenties while Dreams are like a bird that mocks, others like Stanley Spencer Flirting the feathers of his tail. tried to find a new vocabulary When you seize at the salt-box, to describe the physical Over the hedge you’ll see him sail: and spiritual aftermath.

Old birds are neither caught with salt nor chaff: Scotland, whose families They watch you from the apple bough, and laugh. suffered disproportionately, saw a denuded countryside Poet, never chase the dream, change forever and an era Laugh yourself, and turn away, of depression and hunger Mask your hunger; let it seem marches and emigration.

Small matter if he come or stay, In literature new ideas of But when he nestles in your hand at last, nationalism emerged in the Close up your fingers tight and hold him fast. poetry of MacDiarmid and writers such as Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Neil Gunn approached issues such as women’s liberation, socialism and land reform but in art the emphasis was alternatives to the Academies while Peploe and on the regenerative possibilities with sporadic Cadell, both paragons of modernism, moved political engagement or social commentary. towards a romantic lyricism and structured In art what Simon Martin refers to as ‘the clarity respectively. What is clear is that there return to order’ in his chapter in Aftermath, is no dominant movement in the post-War the catalogue for the Tate exhibition this year, art world, but neither would anything ever begins to hold sway. Braque, Derain and Picasso be the same. The enormous contribution of turn away from cubism to the human figure and women was recognised in universal suffrage in Germany Neue Sachlichkeit counterbalances and women artists had new freedoms to work, Dada and expressionism. In his essay ‘Going escaping their roles as mistresses, models Modern and being British’ (Weekend Review, 1932) and muses to make real contributions to 20th Paul Nash sought to reconcile and an emergent Century art. neo-romanticism began to characterise much younger artists. In Scotland groups such as the GUY PEPLOE Society of Eight and Edinburgh Group sought The Scottish Gallery