Modern Masters XII

MODERN MASTERS

MODERN MASTERS

6–30 JANUARY 2021

A busy private view at The Scottish Gallery’s George Street premises, c.1986

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FOREWORD

The Scottish Gallery has always been a broad church for art, representing artists predominately from the four painting schools in Scotland or artists who have chosen to live here or who have come here to make work. The route to creativity is endless.

The Gallery works best when it can support and nurture artists and understand the inner life and practical needs of an artist, the highs and the lows – periods of intense creative activity or years spent quietly honing and accruing skill. Few artists have a straightforward career trajectory but The Gallery tries to remain a professional, supportive nexus serving artists and their art and an exhibition is of course a milestone from which the artist can look forward.

The Modern Masters series was conceived ten years ago and has been a platform for bringing together artists, past and present, with an eye on rediscovery and changing perceptions. Our previous edition in August 2020 sparked a national debate when we confined the selection to a celebration of women artists. We open 2021 with our twelfth exhibition and again we believe it is important and valid to interrogate expectations

and offer new insights. Here artists are exhibited individually and in the context of their peers, both close contemporaries and across the generations, side by side. Guy Peploe pays tribute to artist, writer and playwright John Byrne who turned 80 last year and we have created a Modern Masters Prints section with highlights from the era of The Vigorous Imagination alongside master printmakers and artists Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and Victoria Crowe. We showcase work by William Baillie and William Gillies; Mary Armour and Anne Redpath; Alan Davie and William Johnstone. Artists with huge national reputations like Elizabeth Blackadder and Victoria Crowe and others who have been overlooked, like Donald Buyers and Brenda Mark.

We hope that in a spirit of optimism the powerful, complex messages contained in these works of art will inspire and excite and look forward to welcoming you back to the heart and home of Scottish art.

Christina Jansen The Scottish Gallery

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MODERN MASTERS XII

Artists Mary Armour (1902–2000) William Baillie (1923–2011) Barbara Balmer (1929–2017) John Bellany (1942–2013) Dame Elizabeth Blackadder (b.1931) Donald Morrison Buyers (1930–2003) John Byrne (b.1940) Victoria Crowe (b.1945) Alan Davie (1920–2014) Pat Douthwaite (1934–2002) Mary Fedden (1915–2012) Sir William Gillies (1898–1973) John Houston (1930–2008) William Johnstone (1897–1981) Jack Knox (1936–2015) Brenda Mark (1922–1960) David Michie (1928–2015) Leon Morrocco (b.1942) Sir Robin Philipson (1916–1992) Anne Redpath (1895–1965) Duncan Shanks (b.1937) William Wilson (1905–1972) Sylvia Wishart (1936–2008)

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Mary Armour, 1970.

Photograph from Blantyre Projects

Mary Armour RSA (1902–2000) 1. Still Life with Petunias, 1973 oil on canvas, 51.5 x 61 cm signed and dated lower right provenance

The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh; Private collection, Devon

Mary Armour’s biography is not dissimilar to many women painters born around the beginning of the 20th Century in Scotland. She came from a working-class family background in Blantyre and was encouraged as a painter at school, in her instance by none other than Penny Beaton who went on to run first year at Edinburgh College of Art. In 1920 she attended The Glasgow School of Art completing a post-Dip year of study in 1925 followed by her teaching qualification. She married William Armour, a landscape painter, in 1927 and had to give up teaching, as was required. She continued to paint and exhibit at every opportunity at the RGI, RSA, SSA and RSW. After the War she was able to resume teaching and was on the staff at GSA for a decade, retiring in 1962. Honours followed, including the honorary Presidency of the School of Art, and she pursued a very successful commercial career before eyesight failure curtailed her career in the late 80s.

Her vibrant, freely painted still life was the basis for her huge popularity, paintings bursting with energy, strong natural colour and a delicacy which belied the vigorously handled paint. Her work can be compared with Anne Redpath who followed a similar trajectory based in Edinburgh in the post-war decades.

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William Baillie, c.1993.

Photograph by Kingfisher Gallery

William Baillie CBE, PPRSA, PPRSW (1923–2011) 2. Grey Table and White Jug, 1984 oil on canvas, 70 x 90 cm signed lower left exhibited

Kirkcaldy Art Gallery provenance

Private collection, Banffshire

William Baillie can be seen along with Robin Philipson, David Michie, John Houston and Elizabeth Blackadder as the core of the second generation of the Edinburgh School. He taught at the College and served as President of the RSA from 1990-1998.

Like so many tutored by Gillies in the War years he admired the School of Paris, Braque in particular, and his earlier still life is naturalistic, restrained in palette and analytic in form. Later, influenced by travel, in particular to India, his colours became hot: oranges, reds and yellows dominate, but the restraint persists and he eschewed the powerful subject matter of Philipson or the expressionism of John Houston, staying more aligned with the lyricism of Blackadder.

Here, painting in the mid-80s, he uses limited, strong colour using a tonal construction in grey, black and white and simple props in a frank acknowledgement of Gillies’ studio practice.

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Barbara Balmer painting, c.1980

Barbara Balmer RSA, RSW, RGI (1929–2017) 3. Dry Still Life, 1970s watercolour, 51 x 53.5 cm signed lower right, titled verso provenance

Private collection, Edinburgh

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 and Museum 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.

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John Bellany, c.1997

John Bellany CBE, RA, HRSA (1942–2013) 4. Fishwoman, c.1990 oil on board, 122 x 94 cm signed upper right exhibited

Scottish Myths, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1990 provenance

Private collection, Edinburgh

John Bellany had a major exhibition with The Scottish Galley in 1985, an extraordinary effort for a man who within months would undergo a liver transplant operation.

The operation was a success and for the next twenty-eight years work poured out of the artist; the first response was to call for paper and a pencil – the hospital provided sheets for the ECG printer – and he drew himself with life support tubes still attached. Over the proceeding years his subject matter continued to address the same themes, but without the haunted, disturbing atmosphere that characterised the 70s. His palette also settled into a more primary, vibrant hue, the simple joy of life restored expressed in every mark.

Fishwoman depicts a handsome fishwife at work but she is not a terrifying succubus and behind no ghouls hover, instead the simple, charming graffito of a child’s head hovers over the gutting table.

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

In considering the last hundred and twenty or so years of Scottish art, the period broadly covering the modern and of course the contemporary (those artists who enjoy the distinction of still being with us), we can detect commonalities: those that spring from a consideration of the same landscapes for example, or those to do with the enjoyment of the medium of oil paint. This allows us to make a comparison between Peploe, Redpath and Eardley or George Leslie Hunter, MacTaggart and John Houston. Creativity is as messy as nature and there is no unbroken line of development, indeed the notion of development has become invalid: modernism has provided the liberty to the artist to make work out of anything and depict anything and the art world has become atomised. For more than half of this period the images of Elizabeth Blackadder have surprised and beguiled us, a presence that has grown and achievements that can be considered as quite discrete from the usual fodder for the survey of our national school. She can perhaps best be considered as a national treasure, like Burns or Scott or Raeburn, her body of work a monument to quiet application, restraint, enlightenment and cultural variety. Each work has the simple poetry of a haiku but is presented with the perfect pitch of a tuning fork. Elizabeth Blackadder has a huge profile in the UK art market; not least with the National Galleries of Scotland

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) has added to her national profile. The list of honours and exhibitions runs to a booklet in itself, and it is hard to grasp the breadth of her achievement across many media. For many she is best understood as a watercolourist, for many more her printmaking has allowed collectors to own her work, new editions of etchings, screen prints and lithographs appearing regularly.

Her oil painting practice never went away, even when she had to work predominantly on paper, and she always maintained separate studios for each. She shared this diversity of approach with her husband John Houston, to whom she was married sixty years ago this year and whom she sadly lost when he died in 2008. Today her working life is severely restricted by ill-health and it is our pleasure and duty to remember her extraordinary variety and genius.

2021 marks the artist’s 90th birthday year.

In February she will be honoured with an exhibition celebrating her botanical subjects at the Garden Museum in London.

Guy Peploe

Elizabeth Blackadder, c.1980. Photograph by Robert Mabon

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Dame Elizabeth Blackadder RA, RSA, RSW, RGI (b.1931) 5. Two Jugs of Flowers, 1965 pencil, watercolour and gouache, 56 x 77.5 cm signed and dated lower right, titled verso

It is characteristic of Elizabeth Blackadder to show restraint, not to overplay or clutter her still life, where less is often more. She is celebrated as a painter of flowers, and she is a passionate plants-woman, but her blooms are not botanical illustration. Instead she paints their character, the ephemeral beauty of a cut flower in new conversation with others in a simple display. Here two jugs face each other on a simple table-top, the overall treatment consistent with minimal drawing and translucent washes of watercolour.

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DONALD MORRISON BUYERS RSW (1930–2003)

Donald Buyers was born in 1930 in Aberdeen where he attended the Grammar School and then Gray’s School of Art after which he assisted his tutor Robert Sivell in the murals at the University Union in Schoolhill. His was a quiet life, well lived, throughout which family and painting were his twin loves. A honeymoon in Paris turned into an extended stay and the School of Paris was always present in his work. Back in Aberdeen he began to teach in schools: Robert Gordon’s and eventually as a visiting lecturer at Gray’s, but he never stopped

working and exhibiting. Both The Hills of Braemar, Winter and The Blue Pool are exceptional examples of his work. Both owing something to the Modern British period, to Nash, Christopher Wood, Gillies and perhaps Robert Henderson Blyth, who was by then living in Aberdeen. But more it seems a heartfelt response to a deeply familiar landscape, understood as winter releases its grip, the uplands in the light, the banks of the river in shade, the fields and copses of trees at once real and a satisfying abstract pattern.

Donald Buyers at ABBO group opening, McLellan Galleries, Glasgow, 1960

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Donald Morrison Buyers RSW (1930–2003) 6. The Hills of Braemar, Winter, 1966 oil on board, 66 x 118 cm signed and dated lower right

Braemar is one of the highest villages in Scotland and the gateway to the Southern Grampians. The ancient pine forests of Glen Derry and Luibeg have their origins after the last ice age, where long walks over an arctic plateau access the great mountain peaks in a true wilderness. In the valley the fast flowing Dee, a great wide torrent in winter, is crossed at Braemar, and Ballater, and its tributaries provide wooded walks up to the high tops. In Buyers’ painting, winter is releasing its grip: snow still covers the higher ground towards the horizon but lower down colour emerges as the snow fields melt and the sap of nature rises.

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Donald Morrison Buyers RSW (1930–2003) 7. The Blue Pool, 1965 oil on board, 88 x 113 cm signed and dated lower right provenance

St Andrews Fine Art, 2001

If Buyers is close to English Neo-Romanticism in his approach to landscape in The Blue Pool we can see a homage to Joan Eardley. He would certainly have known her work and here the organisation of the masses, handling of the paint, palette and tonality recall Eardley, just two years after her death. These attributes are shared also with the Kincardineshire paintings of James Morrison of the same year.

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JOHN BYRNE RSA (B.1940)

A TRIBUTE John Byrne studied at both Edinburgh and Glasgow Schools of Art in the late 50s and early 60s.

A superb painter and draughtsman, the multitalented Byrne is also a first-class playwright (The Slab Boys; Tutti Frutti), his ear for dialogue as witty and acute as his eye for detail. Much of his subjectmatter is overtly autobiographical, often featuring or referring to the Teddy Boy/Rock and Roll era of his youth. Byrne has designed record covers for Donovan, The Beatles, Gerry Rafferty and Billy Connolly. His work is held in major collections in the UK and internationally. Several of his paintings hang in The Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, the Museum of Modern Art and the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow.

John Byrne celebrated his 80th birthday in 2020.

John Byrne had his first one-man show with The Scottish Gallery in 1974 and he showed again in 1991. The 1980s were a creative time for John, particularly for his writing. Tutti Frutti was broadcast in 1987 and then Your Cheatin’ Heart in 1990. It was also a time when he was often without a permanent studio so what he was able to paint was often on a small scale.

In 1990 I remember visiting him when he was staying at Fingask, near Dundee and he showed me

a treasure trove of works being stored in less than ideal conditions.

His monumental Patrick painting The American Boy was in a loft space and he had sawn it in half, very carefully and precisely down the middle, in order that it could be moved. Within a year or so we had sold the work to Glasgow Museums. At the same time, we had consigned a number of works on paper relating to his theatre work and a part edition of the Patrick image Girl with Monkey.

I remember a wonderful coloured drawing of a roadkill rabbit called On the Road Again from Tutti Frutti and lovely character costume drawings from Clifford Odette’s The Country Girl. And there were sheets and sheets of storyboard drawings for both television and theatre work.

In 2001 we also sold the monumental National Velvet to Paisley Museum, a key rock n’ roll image made in 1975 where the guitarist’s instrument seemed to have a slab of meat for a body. Soutineesque images of slabs of butchered meat had been included in our show of the previous year.

Guy Peploe

John Byrne by David Eustace. Part of Dear John, A Thirty Year Portrait.

This image by David Eustace was exhibited at The Scottish Gallery as part of an exhibition of photographs Dear John in March 2020. The exhibition included 12 portraits of John Byrne taken over a thirty year period and is available as a special edition portfolio limited to only 50 copies.

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John Byrne RSA (b.1940) 8. The Marriage at Cana, 1961/62 oil on canvas, 71 x 143 cm signed upper left, titled on stretcher verso exhibited

Byrne@60: The Unsolved Artist, Paisley Museum and Galleries, 2000 provenance

Private collection, Canterbury

This ambitious multi-figural subject picture was bought by a fellow student from Byrne’s exhibition at the Glasgow School of Art in 1962. This was after his spell at Hospitalfield and the term he spent at Edinburgh College of Art before returning to Glasgow. In making his picture for a competition Byrne was swimming against the tide of modern, taught practice, what Sandy Moffat, writing in the catalogue of the above exhibition, called “…widely held assumptions (that) condemned literary elements as harmful to painting.” For the next few years, before he invented his naïve alter ego Patrick, he would earn his living as a designer and illustrator and he would never accept that there was a more serious aspect to picture making which excluded the literary or illustrative. In addition his Marriage at Cana owes something to David Donaldson’s more whimsical subject paintings both stylistically and in terms of the painted figure. The Marriage at Cana is an exuberant, joyful, ambitious work full of content and humour. On the wall of the GSA it earned the approbation of the Principal DP Bliss as blasphemous which amused the artist and the student body.

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John Byrne RSA (b.1940) 9. Table Top, c.1964 gouache, 22 x 23 cm signer lower right provenance

Private collection, Canterbury

This richly worked piece is very early but typical of an aspect of Byrne’s oeuvre: texture, layering and patterns revealing form are worked in a variety of media in close tones.

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John Byrne RSA (b.1940) 10. White Church near Ponte Rio, 1963/64 mixed media, 34 x 54 cm signed lower right exhibited

Byrne@60: The Unsolved Artist, Paisley Museum and Galleries, 2000 provenance

Private collection, Canterbury

Byrne travelled to Italy on a Bellahouston Award where he professed to have greatly admired the Giottos in Assisi and the Italian Primitives. By his own recollection he left a bag with most of his work, mostly on paper, at the porter’s desk at the School of Art on his return but failed to retrieve it before it disappeared. This rare Italian work of a church in Ponte Rio, Perugia in Umbria is a cool, atmospheric record of place, not unlike the works made by John Houston and Elizabeth Blackadder in central Italy ten years before.

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John Byrne RSA (b.1940) 11. The Count (full-length), ‘The Marriage of Figaro’, c.1986 pencil drawing, 28 x 20.5 cm provenance

William Hardie Ltd, Glasgow

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John Byrne RSA (b.1940) 12. Marcellina, ‘The Marriage of Figaro’, c.1986 pencil drawing, 28 x 20.5 cm provenance

William Hardie Ltd, Glasgow

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John Byrne RSA (b.1940) 13. Don Basilio, ‘The Marriage of Figaro’, c.1986 pencil, ink & watercolour, 26 x 19 cm provenance

William Hardie Ltd, Glasgow

The three wonderful studies of cast characters from The Marriage of Figaro were made around 1986 when Byrne was commissioned as the costume designer for a Scottish Opera production. The old gossip Don Basilio is brilliantly realized, thicklipped and prim with his sheet music and cane, while the Count is dashing and sinister and Marcellina hopelessly overdressed, her mouth a little twisted.

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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’s studio, 2012. Photograph by Kenneth Gray

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Victoria Crowe OBE, DHC, FRSE, MA (RCA), RSA, RSW (b.1945) 14. Mind’s Eye, c.2005 oil on linen, 76 x 76 cm signed lower left exhibited

The Thackeray Gallery, London, 2005 provenance

Private collection, London

Victoria Crowe’s titles are not essential to the reading of her work but can offer a poetic insight. Mind’s Eye is one such example. Her starting point might be one simple element of the composition, perhaps the feather, but then its placing within the composition, the many other elements, her palette, the division of the composition (mindful of the golden section), all flow from the mind’s eye. This is no blueprint but a vision, fulfilled and developed by the act of painting.

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Victoria Crowe OBE, DHC, FRSE, MA (RCA), RSA, RSW (b.1945) 15. Winter Caveat, 2010–11 oil on linen, 127 x 127 cm signed lower right exhibited

Victoria Crowe, A Certain Light, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2018, ex.cat.

We are surrounded by trees where we live in West Linton. The most constant familiars that I draw are in the garden, the contorted hazel, the old plum and apple trees, the larch and the rowans. Beyond the garden are the distant lime trees and mixed woodland on the small hill by the green which have all been subject matter for me. I see the trees over days and years of change, in all seasons, transformed by frost, snow and backlit by low winter sun. Their familiarity to me seems to give them an iconic status which goes beyond the casual reality of the here and now, towards the contemplative. I am drawn to looking at the complexity of their structure, which is why winter is so wonderful. I love the transforming nature of snow light, twilight, backlight – all taking the image further away from conventional imagery. I’ve only ever done a couple of paintings where the deciduous trees are clothed all in green, and certainly no sustained drawing.

Victoria Crowe, July 2019

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Alan Davie, c.1987.

Louis Carre & Cie Gallery, Paris

Alan Davie CBE, HRSA (1920–2014) 16. Receptical for Sighs No.7, April 1975 oil on canvas, 122 x 152.5 cm signed verso exhibited

Gimpel Fils Gallery Ltd, London; Gimpel & Weitzenhoffer Gallery, New York, USA provenance

Private collection, Edinburgh

From the beginning of the 60s, Davie moved from essentially expressionist or tachist work towards a more symbol dominated mode of painting, less reliant on the power of gesture and impasto. The symbols represent access to Jung’s Collective Unconscious and the artist increasingly saw himself as a shaman and art as the vehicle for transformation to a positive, spiritual realm. In this work of 1975 he allows the title to point us in the direction of a healing process, the ritual capture of sorrow in the process of restoration of good spirit. A few years later he would have his triumphant Edinburgh Festival Exhibition with The Scottish Gallery, a return to his Scottish origins with a show entitled Magic Pictures, when the artist was at the peak of his powers, having reached the pinnacle of critical and commercial success on the international stage.

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Pat Douthwaite, c.1977

Pat Douthwaite (1934–2002) 17. Open Mouthed Figure, c.1968 charcoal, 59 x 44 cm signed lower right provenance

Corrymella Scott Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne

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 selfportrait. Her charcoal drawings share much with her Glasgow contemporary Jack Knox, in their quick execution, economy of line and direct engagement with their subject.

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Mary Fedden RA (1915–2012) 18. The Garden, West Cork, 2001 oil on canvas, 46 x 61 cm signed and dated lower right exhibited

Mary Fedden – A Celebration, Portland Gallery, London, 2012, cat. 65 provenance

Private collection, Edinburgh

“I really float from influence to influence… I found the early Ben Nicholsons fascinating as were the paintings of his wife Winifred. I also admire the Scottish artist Anne Redpath and the French painter Henri Hayden.”

(Interview, The Artist Magazine, 1995) Mary Fedden had studied at The Slade before the War and worked for the theatre before undertaking significant mural commissions for P&O, the Festival of Britain and more working with her husband Julian Trevelyan. It is for her oil painting in a modest scale of essentially domestic still life and exterior that she became best known and eventually a national icon, bringing her enormous commercial success, despite her indifference to such things.

This work, made on one of several visits to West Cork, is a charming scene combining the domestic (the hens surely recalling Winifred Nicholson) and a lyrical landscape view.

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SIR WILLIAM GILLIES CBE, RSA, RA, PPRSW (1898–1973)

Sir William Gillies was the dominant figure of the Edinburgh School over which both his personality and his work had a quiet authority. He led by example at the College of Art, encouraging his students to experiment but from a firm grounding in looking, and of course practice, drawing in particular. He also selected his staff to reflect this ethos: men and women who had a similar independence but respected hard work, what William McTaggart called ‘the good habit.’ The duties of teaching for Gillies and many of his colleagues in the School of Drawing and Painting were combined with their own practice without conflict; being a professional painter: working and exhibiting, was understood as integral to the reputation and health of the School.

Robin Philipson, Elizabeth Blackadder, John Houston, David Michie and James Cumming were the beneficiaries of this attitude, along with their students, quietly instilled by Gillies over his fifty years of influence.

William Gillies at work in The Scottish Borders Royal Scottish Academy of Art (William Gillies Bequest)

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“I have been trying to pin down my thoughts on the great man. I do not find it easy. In a way he remains an enigma. I was a student for five years while Gillies was Head of Paintings and yet I had only three or four lessons from him in all that time. The first was when MacTaggart called for Bill Gillies to come and see a painting I had done. He admired it generously and commended it for its tonal values. I had on the easel a much more freely painted thing with apples and a jug. He looked at it and said ‘Apples are not tennis balls. They have planes.’ He then proceeded to push the wet paint around with his horny thumb, making the apples truly threedimensional, and expressed in ‘planes’. On another occasion I was propounding a theory I had come across about ‘Organic Colour Values’… I asked him if he did not agree with this. His response was typically anti-intellectual. ‘No. Nature always gets the colour wrong, so you have to try to improve it.’”

David McClure, quoted in W.G. Gillies by W Gordon Smith, Atelier Books, 1991

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Sir William Gillies CBE, RSA, RA, PPRSW (1898–1973) 19. Near Cruden Bay, c.1951 watercolour, 12 x 17.5 cm signed lower left exhibited

Christmas Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1972; William Gillies, Paintings, Watercolours and Drawings, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2003, cat. 18 provenance

G.M.G. Robbie, Esq; private collection, London; private collection, Edinburgh

In a small format Gillies has nonetheless packed information and atmosphere into his watercolour. Neither is the eponymous village in northern Aberdeenshire without interest: it saw a great Scottish victory over the Danes in 1012 and lies in the lea of a headland which ends with the remains of Slains Castle, the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Castle Dracula. Gillies’s picture is far from bloody or sinister however, capturing a breezy summer day with assured drawing and delicate warm colour washes down by the estuary, with salmon nets and stone wharfs.

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Sir William Gillies CBE, RSA, RA, PPRSW (1898–1973) 20. Showery Weather, c.1970 pencil and watercolour, 24 x 33 cm signed lower right provenance

The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh

A foreground fence, receding on the right edge; a stone wall bounding an estate runs across then down, disappearing; the grand plantations of trees beyond. A lowering sky, becoming darker overhead; indications of fields below the Pentland Hills on the horizon. The artist will have to work quickly as the rainstorm rolls in from the west.

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John Houston OBE, RSA, RSW (1930–2008) 21. Bass Rock and Winter Sea, 2003 watercolour, 13.5 x 18.5 cm signed lower left exhibited

John Houston, New Paintings, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2003 provenance

Private collection, East Lothian

For John Houston the distinctive profile of The Bass Rock is an anchor for his expressionism, keeping it real and located. It appears in all media, seen in all seasons, weathers and times of day, as did Mt Sainte-Victoire for CĂŠzanne. Here a livid hue reveals the shape of the rock as dirty weather and dusk combine, the last light catching the rivulets running across the beach in the foreground.

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John Houston OBE, RSA, RSW (1930–2008) 22. After the Storm, 1974 watercolour, 40.5 x 40.5 cm signed lower right exhibited

John Houston, Festival Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1975, cat. 61 provenance

Private collection, London

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WILLIAM JOHNSTONE OBE (1897–1981)

William Johnstone was born in Denholm in the Scottish Borders in 1897. His father was a farmer and expected him to follow the same path but the fallout from WWI made him resolutely determined to become a painter. He studied at Edinburgh College of Art, then in Paris in 1925 under André Lhôte. He travelled to Spain, Italy and North Africa and lived for a short time in California but the financial crash forced him back to Scotland. The opportunity of a teaching position took him to London where he settled from 1931-1960. During this period much of his energy was directed towards art education, becoming Principal at Camberwell College of Art from 1938-1946 and then Principal at Central School of Arts and Crafts from 19471960. He developed the Basic Design course which stemmed from the Bauhaus and his instinct to defy convention and his eye for talented staff made Central a tour de force. “Design is Experience.” Alan Davie, Anton Ehrenzweig, Patrick Heron, Earl Haig, John Minton, Eduardo Paolozzi, Victor Pasmore, Gordon Baldwin, William Turnbull, Dora Batty, Naum Slutzky, Marianne Straub, Dora Billington all worked for him – which made for an explosive, creative mixture of artistic personalities. Described as autocratic in style, he didn’t suffer fools gladly but he looked after artists and students like a good shepherd. He received an OBE for his contribution to art education in 1954 then returned home to the Borders in 1960 to concentrate on painting and return to farming. The 1970s were incredibly productive; exhibitions of large and small scale works, a collaboration with Hugh MacDiarmid

combining lithographs and poems was published in 1977 and a similar project with Edwin Muir’s poetry was published a few years later. Two films were also produced including A Point in Time. In 1980 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Edinburgh for artistic achievement and two publications were released; Monograph

by Douglas Hall (Edinburgh University Press) and his autobiography Points in Time (Barrie & Jenkins).

Shortly before he died in 1981, The Hayward Gallery, London, held a major retrospective which included over 200 works.

In his studio at the family farm near Selkirk, William Johnstone made hundreds of wash drawings chiefly employing a broad brush and colour limited to sepia and black. For Johnstone these later works are the culmination of a lifetime of looking and distillation of the subject. Together they represent an extraordinary body of work, a commitment to his own inner eye as well as the landscape which surrounded him, the low hills, copses, watery sun and sharp profiles of buildings and dykes. Most are upright in format, made on a good Arches paper in imperial scale, 30 x 22 inches.

They have an oriental presence, very few western artists having the complete mastery of the gesture and being at once decorative and profound. Each seeks an essential truth and together they form an exploration of time and space, landscape and the artist’s inner vision.

Christina Jansen

William Johnstone at home, 1950s

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William Johnstone OBE (1897–1981) 23. Untitled 9, c.1975 ink on paper, 77.5 x 57 cm artist’s initials lower right

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William Johnstone OBE (1897–1981) 24. Untitled 13, c.1975 ink on paper, 78 x 57 cm artist’s initials lower right

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Jack Knox, c.1980. Photograph by Robert Mabon

Jack Knox RSA, RSW (1936–2015) 25. Table II, c.1982 charcoal on paper, 53 x 60 cm signed lower right, signed and dated verso exhibited

Scottish Art Now Exhibition, The Scottish Arts Council, Edinburgh, 1982, cat. 40 provenance

Private collection, Monmouthshire

Jack Knox was born in Kirkintilloch and studied at Glasgow School of Art, where he later became Head of Drawing and Painting after a senior lectureship at Duncan of Jordanstone in Dundee. In the mid-1960s, Knox produced his Studio series of canvases using mixed media and ‘stream of consciousness’ imagery. These were followed by square white canvases covered with symbols. However, it was a visit to a Dutch museum that motivated Knox’s subsequent change of artistic direction to produce lusciously coloured images of food. It was the combination of seeing Dutch still life painting and noticing the way that the food in the cafeteria was presented as if framed and on display that provided the inspiration.

Knox was a skilled draughtsman who produced a varied body of work in oil, pastel and charcoal and Table II is a typical example for the early 80s where the artist deploys a faux-naivety to make a sophisticated representation of his subject.

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Brenda and Robin Philipson at home in the West Bow, c.1951.

Photograph courtesy of the Philipson estate.

Brenda Mark (1922–1960) 26. Still Life with Horse, 1950s watercolour, 34.5 x 54 cm signed lower right provenance

Private collection, Devon

Mark was a brilliant student whose career was curtailed by her early death at 38 in 1960. She married Robin Philipson in 1949 – the gilded couple of the Edinburgh art world – and both were influenced by Oskar Kokoschka in the 50s. In this delicate still life, it is her former tutor Johnny Maxwell who is present however, in an ethereal watercolour playing with scale and animation in a Chagallesque dreamscape.

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David Michie graduating from Edinburgh College of Art, 1953.

Photograph courtesy of the Artist’s family

David Michie OBE, RSA, FRSA (1928–2015) 27. Mayfield, c.1949 oil on board, 43 x 53 cm signed lower left provenance

The Artist’s family

This early work by David Michie was painted whilst he was still a student at Edinburgh College of Art. A small number of these very early works survive and they suggest the influence of Robert Henderson Blyth who taught at The College from 1946–1954.

His subject is a local scene on the south side of Edinburgh, described in a limited palette – reflecting the post-war years of austerity that would also characterise work from his travels to The Continent later in the 50s.

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Leon Morrocco. Photograph by Dan Weill, courtesy of John Martin Gallery

Leon Morrocco RSA, RGI (b.1942) 28. Balcony in Alleghe, Italy, 1995 oil on board, 74 x 70 cm signed and dated lower right provenance

Private collection, Edinburgh

Alleghe is in the Province of Belluno in the Veneto region. It sits by a lake 1,000 meters high, in the shadow of Piz Buin, the highest mountain in the Vorarlberg.

Morrocco‘s striking image is strong in colour and texture and made up of a satisfying ensemble of straight and curved lines, rectangles and triangulations. Most striking is the light: we know the day is near its zenith because of the position of the shadows on the rooftop but still only the south-facing peaks of the mountain are in light, the mountain side otherwise a cool, blue penumbra. The still life on the table contains sunflowers and a cut melon, motifs inherited from the artist’s father Alberto.

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SIR ROBIN PHILIPSON PPRSA, RA, HRA, RSW (1916–1992)

Sir Robin Philipson was a charismatic figure in the Scottish art world as Head of the School of Drawing and Painting and then Principal of Edinburgh College of Art and President of the RSA for a decade from 1973. He held nine one-person shows with The Scottish Gallery from 1954 to 1983.

His work is thematically rich, ambitiously scaled (like Francis Bacon he embraced the polyptych) but equally able to hit the quiet notes on an intimate scale. His dedication to Scotland during decades when a move to London was a prerequisite to national and international recognition (he was already in his 40s when he tentatively approached Lillian Browse at Roland, Browse & Delbanco to see if he might have a show in London) makes him ripe for rediscovery.

Robin Philipson c.1957. Photograph by Paul Shillabeer

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“However we see his art, its free handling, its meaningful decorative values and its sometimes dark subjects, it remains a serious investigation of life. For him the production of art was essential but brave. He once spoke of the dread of starting a studio day, of the waiting easel – but then good art is never an easy business.”

Dr Elizabeth Cumming, in her introduction to his centenary exhibition with The Scottish Gallery, March 2016.

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Sir Robin Philipson PPRSA, RA, HRA, RSW (1916–1992) 29. Byzantine Interior, c.1971 oil on canvas, 71 x 91.5 cm signed and titled verso provenance

Private collection, Carlisle

Philipson drew on religious imagery in many of his series: the crucifixion, the gothic cathedral façade, primitive chapels in New Mexico and the interiors of Byzantine churches. The latter was inspired by a visit to St Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai.

Sometimes he concentrates on the screen of icons and, in this supreme work, he features both the iconostasis and a side chapel, and in a typical motif used in many subjects he divides the picture space with coloured bands or banners.

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Sir Robin Philipson PPRSA, RA, HRA, RSW (1916–1992) 30. Nude in Mirror, 1960–65 gouache, 24 x 24 cm signed lower left exhibited

Robin Philipson – 100, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2016, cat. 6 provenance

Rowland, Browse and Delbanco, London

The nude and interior is one of the richest subjects in Philipson’s oeuvre. Combined are themes such as mixed race lovers, Adam and Eve and the Waiting series (with all the languor of the harem, or Victorian opium den). This subject is also referenced in other themes; the merry-go-round, and African animals. In perhaps hundreds of small watercolour and pastels, as here, it is sufficient subject of itself.

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Sir Robin Philipson PPRSA, RA, HRA, RSW (1916–1992) 31. Lovers III, c.1989 watercolour, 18 x 18 cm signed lower right; signed verso provenance

The Loomshop Gallery, Lower Largo, 1989

Like many of the senior figures of the Edinburgh School: Gillies, Redpath and Blackadder in particular, Robin Philipson divided his practice between oil and watercolour, occasionally making monumental work in the latter using the polyptych.

On the whole watercolour is deployed on a smaller, more intimate scale as here in a subject from the mid-70s when he combined the wild animal and human lovers in rich, sunset tones.

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ANNE REDPATH OBE, RSA, ARA, RWA (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

Anne Redpath in her Edinburgh studio, 1960

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Associate of the Royal Academy having already been awarded an OBE 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.

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Uig and Loch Snizort, Skye

Anne Redpath OBE, RSA, ARA, RWA (1895–1965) 32. Cottages at Loch Snizort, c.1946 gouache, 38.5 x 48.5 cm signed lower left exhibited

MacAulay Gallery, Stenton, 1992, cat. 52 provenance

Private collection, Devon

Anne Redpath visited Skye in 1946 with her son David Michie and ceramicist Katie Horsman. Working in gouache Redpath made many atmospheric studies of which Cottages at Loch Snizort 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, 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, truthful palette 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 OBE, RSA, ARA, RWA (1895–1965) 33. Cyclamen, c.1960 oil on board, 35.5 x 29 cm signed lower right provenance

The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh; private collection, St Andrews

By 1960 Anne Redpath was enjoying considerable commercial success, exhibiting at The Scottish Gallery and Lefevre in London. Her approach had changed from the 50s in her studio work as she abandoned the conventional picture space for her still lives in favour of a freely painted, abstract background which swirls around the subject. Here a ceramic, handled pot holds a tumult of cyclamen, the brilliant white of the blooms contrasting with the low tones around. Her rich impasto lends a real, physical presence to her oil paintings.

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Duncan Shanks at his home in Crossford, c.1980.

Photograph by Robert Mabon.

Duncan Shanks RSA, RSW, RGI (b.1937) 34. Dam with Wheel, c.1988 acrylic, 145 x 117 cm signed lower right, titled verso exhibited

Duncan Shanks, Falling Water, Variation on a Theme, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, 1988 provenance

Private collection, Edinburgh

This painting featured on the catalogue front cover of Duncan Shanks’ major exhibition Falling Water at the Talbot Rice Gallery in 1988. The exhibition was a monumental exploration of the Clyde, the river which runs past the artist’s home at its most dramatic in the Falls of Clyde, at New Lanark, from Bonnington Linn to Stonebyres. But Shanks also explores the tributaries, the wild, wet parts, the forest floor, caulds and fallen trees, the detritus of the flood; the powerful element of water which has shaped our world is captured in all its moving, hypnotic majesty.

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William Wilson creating his stained glass window for Liverpool Cathedral, c.1946

William Wilson OBE, RSA, RSW (1905–1972) 35. Arbroath, c.1945 watercolour, 28.5 x 60 cm signed lower right

Wilson was born in Edinburgh in 1905, the son of John Wilson a gas meter index maker. His uncle Thomas worked for the local firm of stained glass artists James Ballantine and Son, with whom Wilson first worked for in 1920, aged 15. Wilson attended evening classes at Edinburgh College of Art and was taught there by Adam Bruce Thomson, who was 20 years his senior. Bruce Thomson recognised Wilson’s skill as a draughtsman and encouraged him to study at the College full time, which he did, enrolling in 1932. This was to be the start of an important friendship for both artists, which would last up until Wilson’s death in 1972. Wilson began to exhibit his watercolours at the Royal Scottish Academy from 1936. His watercolours from the late 1930s and 1940s focus on French travels, as well as locations in Fife and Skye and bear close similarities with his fiends and contemporaries Bruce Thomson and Anne Redpath.

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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 in Aberdeen 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 at Heatherybraes, c.1990. Photograph by Keith Allardyce.

Courtesy of Stromness Museum/ Estate of Keith Allardyce

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Sylvia Wishart RSA, RSW (1936–2008) 36. Evening Window with Bracken, 1969 oil on board, 95 x 74 cm signed and dated exhibited

Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 1970; Modern Masters Women, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2020, cat. 80

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 Window 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 RSA, RSW (1936–2008) 37. Broken Croft, Rackwick, 1969 pen and ink wash drawing, 24.5 x 34.5 cm signed and dated lower left provenance

Private collection, East Sussex

Few of the blackhouses that were the homes for the crofters and fishermen of Orkney for a thousand years are still intact. The stones have been taken for new structures and the roofless, low buildings have disappeared into the machar. Here Wishart has drawn such a site, a new straight wall butting the old wall and inside, protected from salt winds, itself perhaps abandoned, is the roof of a wooden structure, a store or hen-house. Beyond is a low headland, its cliffs falling to a calm sea, but it is the stones which are the subject; each chosen, handled and placed, to make a home in a beautiful, harsh land.

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MODERN MASTERS XII PRINTS

Artists Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912–2004) Victoria Crowe (b.1945) Stephen Conroy (b.1964) Peter Howson (b.1958) Bruce McLean (b.1944) Adrian Wiszniewski (b.1958) Frances Walker (b.1930)

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Wilhelmina Barns-Graham CBE, HRSA, HRSW (1912–2004) 38. Another Time, 1999 screenprint, 58 x 76 cm signed and dated lower right illustrated

Anne V. Gunn, The Prints of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Lund Humphries, 2007, p.128

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Wilhelmina Barns–Graham CBE, HRSA, HRSW (1912–2004) 39. Quiet Time, 1999 screenprint, 56 x 77 cm signed and dated lower right illustrated

Lynne Green, W Barns-Graham: a studio life, Lund Humphries, 2001, p.269; Anne V. Gunn, The Prints of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Lund Humphries, 2007, p.131

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Victoria Crowe OBE, DHC, FRSE, MA (RCA), RSA, RSW (b.1945) 40. Solstice, Trees and Ice, 2012 etching & collograph, 50 x 40 cm signed lower right, titled lower left

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Victoria Crowe OBE, DHC, FRSE, MA (RCA), RSA, RSW (b.1945) 41. Large Tree Group, Winter, 2014 screenprint & etching, 51 x 71 cm, variable edition signed lower right, inscribed ‘AP’ lower left

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Victoria Crowe OBE, DHC, FRSE, MA (RCA), RSA, RSW (b.1945) 42. Interior with Passing Figure, c.1995 silkscreen print, 56 x 103.5 cm signed lower right, titled centre

“This was the first screen print I ever made. It was a co-publication with the Edinburgh Printmakers, and I worked with Carol Robertson. Due to her technical expertise, this extremely complex image was finally completed after many separate screens of colour were printed on the work. Each colour separation was drawn or painted on to acetate sheets before being transferred on to the silk screen. It’s a waterbased screen print, so many of the colour separations could be as delicate or washy and transparent as watercolour itself. The image uses the familiar interior of Jenny’s cottage – we had moved away from Kittleyknowe four years earlier, so it was about remembering that time, and our own changed circumstances and there are many objects which relate to my family history.”

Victoria Crowe, July 2019

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Victoria Crowe OBE, DHC, FRSE, MA (RCA), RSA, RSW (b.1945) 43. Drawn from Italy, 2001 silkscreen, intaglio and chine collĂŠ, 38.1 x 88.9 cm signed lower right, titled lower left

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Vigorous Imagination at The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 1987. Photograph by Claire Henry.

Stephen Conroy (b.1964) 44. Man, Hands Clasped, c.2000 etching, 50 x 37.5 cm signed lower right, inscribed ‘BAT’ lower left

The Vigorous Imagination was an exhibition curated by The National Galleries with input from the critic Claire Henry as a response to the New Image Glasgow mounted at the Third Eye Gallery in 1985, which had signalled the rapid emergence of the New Glasgow Boys onto the world stage. The curators included photography and provided a regional balance featuring recent graduates from Edinburgh and Dundee as well as the conceptual artist Kate Whiteford, but otherwise concentrated on the new figuration which was the zeitgeist of the era. Today we can see these artists as working in opposition to the Thatcher era with work embracing social realism and nihilism. Within a decade the new Cool Britannia anti-art chic of the YBAs allowed little room for painting again, but many of the artists in this seminal survey have gone on to outlast much of the consumerist production of the 90s and 00s. In our exhibition they are represented with examples by Stephen Conroy, Peter Howson and Adrian Wiszniewski.

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Peter Howson OBE (b.1958) 45. The Heroic Dosser, 1987 woodcut, 177 x 116.5 cm signed and dated lower right provenance

Private collection, London

Since the 1980s Peter Howson has established himself as one of the leading figurative painters of his generation. He was part of a wave of young figurative artists working in Glasgow who were engaged with both social and political themes. Many of his most memorable works feature gritty characters of working-class Glasgow, where Howson was brought up from the age of three. This monumental woodcut The Heroic Dosser was created at the Glasgow Print Studio in 1987. At that time Howson had a studio at Gallowgate in the East End of Glasgow, close to a homeless hostel.

A version of this woodcut is in the collection of the V&A and a painting of the same title is in the National Galleries collection.

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Bruce McLean (b.1944) 46. Untitled, 1986 screenprint, 86 x 66.5 cm signed lower right exhibited

Modern Masters VIII, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2018, ex.cat. provenance

Private collection, Edinburgh

Bruce Mclean’s exhibition for The Edinburgh Festival in 1988 with The Scottish Gallery included a performance, painted ceramics, paintings on canvas (whose scale necessitated the enlargement of the Gallery entrance in George Street), acrylic paintings on photographic paper and screen prints. Born in 1944 he was tutored at the Glasgow School of Art and then moved to London where at St Martins and then The Slade he inspired generations of artists to express themselves outwith the confines of traditional practice. A carefree, instinctual form of expression cannot disguise his own innate sense of colour and design which underpins the action of the performance in all media.

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Adrian Wiszniewski (b.1958) 47. Ritual Killing, 1990 lithograph, 97.3 x 61.6 cm signed lower right provenance

Private collection, London

Adrian Wiszniewski was born in Glasgow and studied fine art at Glasgow School of Art emerging as one of the leading members of the New Glasgow Boys responsible for the revival and resurgence of figurative painting under Sandy Moffat, OBE. Adrian’s work is held in numerous collections including the Gallery of Modern Art New York, Metropolitan Museum New York, Setagaya Museum Tokyo, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Tate Britain, London and the Victoria & Albert Museum London.

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Frances Walker drawing the plate for Rockpool, Orkney, c.1981

Frances Walker RSA, RSW, CBE, DLITT (b.1930) 48. Achmelvich Landscape, 2012 etching with chine collé, 79 x 56 cm signed lower right

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.

2020 marked Walker’s 90th year and she was honoured with a CBE for her services to art in the Queen’s Birthday Honours.

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Published by The Scottish Gallery to coincide with the exhibition MODERN MASTERS XII 6–30 January 2021 Exhibition can be viewed online at www.scottish-gallery.co.uk/modernmasters ISBN: 978 1 912900 28 2 Designed by Kenneth Gray Photography by John McKenzie Printed by J Thomson 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: John Byrne, The Marriage at Cana, oil on canvas, 71 x 143 cm (detail) (cat. 8)

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