Modern Masters XVI

MODERN MASTERS XVI

MODERN MASTERS XVI January 2024

16 Dundas Street, Edinburgh EH3 6HZ +44 (0) 131 558 1200 | scottish-gallery.co.uk

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Christina Jansen | Managing Director

Guy Peploe | Senior Specialist

Kirsty Sumerling | Director

Tommy Zyw | Director

Introduction

We open 2024 with Modern Masters, a series created over ten years ago where we continue to delve into our prestigious heritage and explore our living links with artists past and present. In this edition, we have created several chapters opening up specific dialogues, or highlighting a particular artist’s career milestones often coinciding with exhibitions with The Scottish Gallery. Guy Peploe writes a personal memoir about the late John Houston and Elizabeth Blackadder and we debut a new tapestry woven by Dovecot Studios as a final farewell and tribute to Blackadder’s remarkable legacy. We feel the heat of high summer on the Mediterranean, in the crucible of modern British art, looking at the significant rediscovery of painting in S. J. Peploe’s magnificent A Street in Cassis. In direct contrast there are several masterpiece works which define the Northeast of Scotland with paintings by Joan Eardley, Ian Fleming, Harry Jefferson Barnes and Gordon Bryce and we explore the enduring fascination of Catterline through the studio practice of Joan Eardley, James Morrison and Lilian Neilson.

The Scottish Gallery has earned a unique place

in art history by championing women artists, and we continue to put a spotlight on women artists, both well-known and rediscovered.

One of the things that struck us as we put this edition together, covering the last one hundred and twenty years, was the number of artists who served in the wars of the last century and more who were children of veterans. At a time of war, these earlier eddies and influences make the art itself more poignant and relevant in the face of new adversity. If artists reveal the world we live in and their lived experience, some artists also depict a parallel alternative, such as Reinhard Behrens’ entrancing Naboland, and we are delighted to share two major works from this outstanding and enigmatic series that he has been creating for nearly fifty years. The Gallery continues to mine the rich seams of Scottish art and navigate an evolving landscape, familiar and less so, making a meaningful contribution to the market underpinned by knowledge and connoisseurship.

Christina Jansen | The Scottish Gallery

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Ian Fleming, Findochty, 1962/1985 (cat. 37) (detail)

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Artists Harry Jefferson Barnes (1915–1982) Reinhard Behrens (b.1951) Elizabeth Blackadder (1931–2021) Robert Henderson Blyth (1919–1970) Gordon Bryce (b.1943) Victoria Crowe (b.1945) James Cumming (1922–1991) Pat Douthwaite (1934–2002) Joan Eardley (1921–1963) Ian Fleming (1906–1994) William Gillies (1898–1973) Carola Gordon (b.1940) John Houston (1930–2008) Robert Scott Irvine (1906–1988) William Johnstone (1897–1981) Bet Low (1924–2007) Margaret McGavin (1924–2004) Ellen Malcolm (1923–2002) David Michie (1928–2015) James Morrison (1932–2020) Leon Morrocco (b.1942) Lilian Neilson (1938–1998) Denis Peploe (1914–1993) S. J. Peploe (1871–1935) Robin Philipson (1916–1992) Carlo Rossi (1921–2010) Margaret Kemplay Snowdon (1878–1965) Ethel Walker (b.1941) Carel Weight (1908–1997) Gordon Hope Wyllie (1930–2005)

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Chapters Expeditions into Naboland

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The Art of Reinhard Behrens

Painters in Parallel

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Elizabeth Blackadder and John Houston

Thunderclap

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James Cumming

Pat Douthwaite (1934–2002)

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An Uncompromising Vision

The Northeast | Catterline

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Joan Eardley, James Morrison, Lilian Neilson

Robert Scott Irvine (1906–1988)

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Tribute to a Scottish Watercolour Painter

Marchlands | Looking Back, Looking Forward

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The Art of William Johnstone (1897–1981)

S. J. Peploe’s Cassis

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Victoria Crowe, Richer Twilight, Venice on the loom at Dovecot Studios, 2019.

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Harry Jefferson Barnes (1915–1982)

Sir Harry Jefferson Barnes was the Director of the Glasgow School of Art 1964–1980.

He grew up in Sheffield and went on to study at the Slade under Randolph Schwabe. Barnes became Assistant Master in Painting & Drawing at the Glasgow School of Art in 1944. He was appointed Director in 1964 and set up the Mackintosh School of Architecture in 1965.

His own personal interest in stage design was shown in the part he played in promoting and managing many of the students’ plays at the Glasgow School of Art. He was also a set designer for the Glasgow Grand Opera Society.

In conjunction with John Noble, Barnes acquired

the Edinburgh Tapestry Company in 1954 at The Dovecot Studios and assisted running it.

Barnes also served on the Saltire Society and the National Trust for Scotland and was on the board of the Citizens Theatre. During the 50s and the 60s, Barnes’ interests in Scotland gravitated to the crafts and he was involved in the creation of the Scottish Crafts Centre in Edinburgh and was appointed Convener of the Panel of Assessors who judged the work submitted to the Centre. He also represented the Scottish Crafts Centre as a member of the Joint Crafts Committee.

Lossiemouth Lossiemouth (known as Lossie) is a fishing town in Moray known as the Riviera of the North. Two beaches, one to the East and one to the West, flank the iconic harbour. It is an amalgamation of several fishing villages: Kinneddar, Stotfield, Seatown and Branderburgh – these neighbouring coastal communities once sat on a peninsula wedged between the Moray Firth and the Loch Spynie. This large sea loch stretched eleven miles east-west, from Lossie to Burghead. In 1600, shifting sands cut it off

Harry Jefferson Barnes (1915–1982) 1. Lossiemouth Harbour, 1965 oil on canvas, 62 x 92 cm signed and dated lower left

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from the sea. In the mid-1800s, Thomas Telford engineered the draining of the peninsula.

James Ramsay MacDonald (1866–1937) who was originally from Lossiemouth, made the place famous when he became Prime Minister in 1929.

Lossiemouth Harbour is both closely observed and a personal edit of the harbour, sky and landscape beyond – the reflections in the water carefully balance a sky which has echoes of ships passing and houses on the clifftop.

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Expeditions into Naboland The Art of Reinhard Behrens

Background Born in Germany, Reinhard Behrens studied Drawing and Painting at Hamburg College of Art and at Vienna Academy of Art 1971–1978. In 1979 he was awarded an academic exchange grant which allowed him to complete a Postgraduate Course in Drawing and Painting at Edinburgh College of Art. Between 1982 and 1986 Behrens worked as a part time lecturer at Edinburgh College of art, the Glasgow School of Art and Grays School of Art in Aberdeen. From 1995, he worked as a lecturer at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (Printmaking and Life Drawing). Behrens’ practice inhabits a fictional world called Naboland, a mythical place of snow and ice. For over forty years, the artist has examined this world through the lens of a real history of discovery, with the artist adopting the role as explorer to create an archive of drawings, paintings, prints and installations which record the found objects and landscapes of Naboland.

2025 will mark the 50th anniversary of Naboland.

The origins of Naboland Little could I have known that, when I was working as an archaeological draughtsman in Turkey in 1975, a chance discovery would give me the key into an unknown world that I have charted and inhabited ever since. While I was a student at Hamburg College of Art, I spent three summer months at the excavation site of Pergamon on the west coast of Turkey. During my first week, I suffered mild sunstroke which forced me to spend a few miserable days in bed.

I found myself one day sifting through some Turkish newspapers and I was struck by one particular front-page story that reported the collision between a cargo ship and a submarine in the Bosphorus. This reminded me of a little toy submarine that I had found on the German North

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Sea coast the previous year. The photograph in the newspaper revealed the damaged bow of the cargo ship. The word that jumped out at me was the name of the ship: NABOLAND. It might have needed that feverish moment in a foreign country to allow me a glimpse of the path that lay ahead of me. Just as my archaeological colleagues would use found objects to back up or create new theories of life in the past, I came upon the idea of creating Naboland as a new means of exploration. I wanted to juxtapose different visual elements: drawn found objects would be linked with landscapes of real and imagined travel, nineteenth century sources of expeditions would be incorporated into drawings, paintings and etchings. If the origin of Naboland was in a foreign country far away from Germany, it needed another country to provide the ideal environment to explore Naboland.

Scotland In 1979, I received a travelling grant to undertake a Post Graduate year at Edinburgh College of Art. During the preceding summer months, I had explored the dramatic Scottish north and west coasts, I spent a week in Orkney and was moved by the grandeur of Glencoe and Skye.

Previously I had been to Iceland and Norway, but Scotland was the first Northern country in which I could understand the inhabitants’ language. When the academic year started, I joined the Edinburgh University Mountaineering Club in order to experience the mountains in wintertime. During these excursions it was easy to imagine being one of Scott’s polar expedition party and back in the studio those romantic notions were linked with visual references from the extensive history of polar exploration of which I became increasingly aware. Indeed, the documentation of travels to far flung corners of the British Empire started to become an

Reinhard Behrens, Hunters in the Snow, 1996 (detail) (cat. 3)

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Reinhard Behrens, San Gimignano, Nowhere to Land, 1997 (detail) (cat. 4)

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essential source of inspiration and quotation.

The painting style I employed was a realistic one, as fostered by my Viennese tutor Rudolf Hausner, a senior exponent of the Wiener Schule des Phantastischen Realismus.

ironically called Lhasa Visitor, in which my toy torpedo boat (made in China) floats beneath the deserted streets of Tibet’s capital with the Potala Palace towering high above.

Travels in Europe

The North The Arctic appearance of the Scottish winter landscape soon inspired me to start my first chapter: Naboland – The North. Rich pickings from beachcombing excursions provided the objects that claimed Nabolandic origin: bones, rusty metal, broken glass and discarded items of everyday life. Rather than just leading to two-dimensional representations on paper and canvas, as before, these objects soon became part of installations that recreated some of the shelter huts and sledge structures that might have been used in the early days of polar exploration. To increase the sense of otherworldliness these constructions were on a diminutive scale, fit for undersized explorers trying to survive in a harsh climate.

The East Parallel to my interest in the Arctic/Antarctic, I developed a fascination for the other climatic extreme: the desert, particularly as depicted by the Orientalists. Their atmospheric evocation of an Arabian world full of architectural detail and sun-bleached landscapes allowed me to set colour against the white of the polar regions.

Artists such as Arthur Melville, Joseph Crawhall and especially David Roberts were inspiring discoveries for me. A trip to Nepal in 1990 provided me with even more colourful imagery that allowed me to open the chapter Naboland – The East. The magical strangeness of the Hindu and Buddhist culture inspired me to let my submarine claim the whole Himalayan region as potentially Nabolandic. Suddenly sherpas diaries appeared and one extensive installation even introduced The Great Yeti Hall with Yeti footprint casts and the faint sound of chanting Tibetan monks. One key painting of this phase was the

But Europe is not free from Nabolandic redefinition either. The towers of San Gimignano, that impressive medieval hill town between Siena and Florence, offered a challenge for the landing of the torpedo boat, and the intricate structure of Siena Cathedral proved an equally insurmountable obstacle. Later, an exchange project with artists from Ghent in Flanders led to a series of ten paintings that marked the submarine’s voyage from Pittenweem, the Fife fishing village that has been my home since 1986, to Ghent via eight paintings from Flemish art history, including Hans Memling and Hergé.

A visit to the Shetland Islands in 2004 made me aware of the pride that the islanders take in their Viking heritage and when it came to an exhibition offer there a few years later I knew that the torpedo boat would need to complete that early part of Scottish history before coming to a sticky end during Up Helly Aa. A Parallel World Writing this now with all the awareness that we have about our changing climate it is sad to think how the early polar explorers must have assumed they had entered an everlasting world of snow and ice. A small source of relief for me, however, is the knowledge that my journeys into Naboland have a very small carbon footprint, indeed. The concept of Naboland, however, is not just meant to be a parallel world of mine that is only accessible to me. Rather, I regard myself as a pioneer into a world that, once documented, becomes a common good and is open to association and interpretation by anyone who looks at my drawings, paintings, prints and installations.

Reinhard Behrens

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Reinhard Behrens (b.1951)

The House at Boreraig after Reinhard Behrens I’ll not go to the house at Boreraig.

I’ve no desire to watch the stones resign their gradual geometry; and there’s no comfort for me in the song of the rowan, as it empties the old seasons from its frame.

Instead, I’ll wear these tokens fixed to my conscience like dead stoats on a fence: 1

a riddled copper bowl which bleeds in the late rain;

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a twist of barbed wire clogged with oily fleece;

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an eroded bread knife;

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a curl of bootsole, smoothed by a child’s foot; and

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by the twisted lock of the broken door of the tumbled wall of the burned house of Boreraig; a key, infinitesimally turning in its hidden grave.

John Glenday Twenty-five Years of Expeditions into Naboland by Reinhard Behrens and published by Roger Billcliffe Gallery, 2000

Reinhard Behrens (b.1951) 2. Boreraig, Skye, 1986 etching and aquatint, 50 x 33 cm

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Reinhard Behrens travels to the Northern Renaissance in his tin submarine to visit The Hunters in the Snow, a 1565 oil on wood painting by Pieter Bruegel (c.1525–1569).

The original painting which has been made popular as a Christmas card in the late 20th century depicts a winter’s scene in which three hunters return from an expedition accompanied by their dogs. It does not appear to have been a successful trip; the hunters trudge wearily, and the dogs appear downcast. It is a calm, cold, overcast day; the colours are muted, and wood smoke hangs in the air. Several adults and a child prepare food outside an inn and in the distance, figures can be seen ice skating and participating in winter games on a frozen river.

The jagged mountain peaks in the distance are entirely fictional. Behrens has created his own entirely fictional Flemish excursion which he has edited to suit his own personal narrative of exploration and parallel worlds.

Reinhard Behrens (b.1951) 3. Hunters in the Snow, 1996 acrylic and oil on canvas, 120 x 170 cm signed and dated lower right exhibited

Annual Exhibition, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 1996, cat. 149

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We All Live in a Tin Submarine I’m sitting on an aeroplane returning from Bologna to London. The silver craft surges through the pale air, while I gaze downwards through the convex rectangle of a scratched window. The jagged molars of snowy Alpine peaks bite through soft tissues of white cloud. I am a Behrens traveller sealed in a tin submarine. The trailing vapours of the roaring jets reel out the growing distance from the Italy I know so well, yet within which I retain the indelible traces of an alien. I am an observer, conscious of distinctions which are etched against the background in the deeply ingrained habits of mind. The Italian culture into which I have penetrated most deeply is that of the artistic past, most especially the Renaissance (which happens to be a French word).

The University of Bologna is home to what remains of Ulisse Aldrovandi’s astonishing gabinetto, his wunderkammer, or ‘cabinet of curiosities’ – that compelling aggregation of wonderful, exotic and monstrous things from the corners of the known world that the great naturalist, antiquarian and student of visual wonders gathered in his proto-museum during the later sixteenth century. The objects and their engraved simulacra serve as cultural residues from distant realms. I stare at them through the thick glass of the window of here and now, my understanding refracted irreversibly.

Behrens’ intrepid navigator is engaged in a ceaseless cultural quest, nosing variously through mediums of air and water, a Jules Verne adventurer, disclosing lands that are lost, however apparently familiar, washing up on strange shores, and insinuating his craft silently into the private spaces of historic paintings. The protean culture of Naboland is documented through specifics and

minute particulars. Concrete views are rendered unblinkingly with forensic care. The constructed worlds of nature and man are impartially charted through what Michelangelo called the ‘compasses in the eye’. Flotsam and jetsam, shaped into strangeness by unknown forces and hands, are piously delineated so that no potentially meaningful detail can escape. Beached fragments of naturalia and artificialia are laid out in eloquent juxtaposition, like those incongruous specimens that rested cheek-by-jowl in a Baroque wunderkammer. Mysterious stories are invariably inferred. Deserted base camps, cluttered with the paraphernalia of an aged expedition, are lovingly pieced together in modern galleries, their radios crackling out poignantly to those who, like Captain Oates, have gone out ‘for a little while’.

Yet, as the speeding jet eases unchallenged across the borders of sea and land that demarcate France from Britain, I realise that the intense specifics and obsessional particularities of Behrens’ created world speak of universal truths of discovery, recording, collecting, classifying, appropriating, assimilating, transposing, translating and picturing – yet never dispelling the fascination of things that obstinately remain exotic visitors in our visual territory, it is telling that an artist born in Germany, and resident in a foreign country that defines itself by historic difference from its larger neighbour, should have become the cultural architect of an unknown land in which even the familiar becomes an exotic subject of heightened fascination.

Martin Kemp, Professor of Fine Art, Oxford University Edited extract from Twenty-five Years of Expeditions into Naboland by Reinhard Behrens and published by Roger Billcliffe Gallery, 2000

Reinhard Behrens (b.1951) 4. San Gimignano, Nowhere to Land, 1997 acrylic and oil on canvas, 170 x 120 cm signed and dated lower right exhibited

Annual Exhibition, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 1997, cat. 160

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‘Here we find the little toy submarine having made it all the way to Antarctica, only to be met by indifference from the locals.’

Reinhard Behrens

Reinhard Behrens (b.1951) 5. Summer Snow, 2023 etching, drypoint and coloured pencil, 50 x 85 cm 2/50

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Elizabeth Blackadder’s studio, Edinburgh.

Opposite: John Houston’s paintbrushes.

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Painters in Parallel Elizabeth Blackadder and John Houston

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Painters in Parallel Elizabeth Blackadder (1931–2021) and John Houston (1930–2008) John Houston was perhaps the most prolific exhibitor in the history of The Scottish Gallery to date. On the eve of his Edinburgh Festival exhibition in 2007, he reminded me that from his first Festival show in 1962, he had sold 95 works. I checked in our daybook for the period and counted 98. His huge knowledge of contemporary and modern painting and wise counsel made him a valued advisor for The Gallery for over 45 years. And then he was the husband and devoted, proud supporter of Dame Elizabeth Blackadder, perhaps the best-loved and celebrated of all Scottish post war painters. They were together for over 52 years; children did not appear; this was accepted, understood as a sacrifice to the altar of undistracted creativity that their unique partnership represented. I knew both from family connections; my father was a colleague in the department of Drawing and Painting at Edinburgh College of Art. In addition, they lived at Queens Crescent in Newington and our house on McLaren Road shared the private gardens enclosed where John and Elizabeth occasionally appeared in whites for a rather crude form of lawn tennis. Newington was a painters’ enclave with Robin Philipson, David Michie and Bill Baillie nearby. Their kindness and regard to me as a raw young art dealer at The Gallery in the early eighties, when we were rebuilding bridges

with several, senior painters in the Edinburgh School, was invaluable. Exhibitions were agreed over lunch at the Kweilin restaurant over the road from The Gallery and the regular studio visits to their last home at Fountainhall Road are remembered with great fondness. John had the large first floor studio at the rear, the broad bay windows looking over the gardens and south to Blackford and Arthur’s Seat. A forest of easels, work on each and lots more arrayed around, propped up and on the floor. Stacks of panels, watercolours and pastels were on tables, chairs and in boxes to be selected from; the smell of turps and oil paint and John’s diffident, benign presence are etched in the memory.

Elizabeth had two studios, north facing, the smaller for watercolour painting festooned with the painter’s paraphernalia and hundreds of objects, trinkets, toys, wrappers and esoterica all gathered on her travels in the east, all stimulus and subject matter for a composition.

In her oil studio she might have a table arranged for painting with wooden fruit, a vase of flowers, a ceramic plate; but this was not to be carefully rendered, rather a starting point for exploration resolved by the artist’s personal karma, her instinct for completeness, no more required other than her distinctive signature in capitals.

Guy Peploe

John Houston and Elizabeth Blackadder, Edinburgh College of Art, 1954.

John Houston and Elizabeth Blackadder, Edinburgh, c.1985.

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Elizabeth Blackadder (1931–2021)

Blackadder, not surprisingly, has foregone the bright lights of Macau, the Las Vegas of the east, and even avoided the most celebrated, elaborate temple of A-Ma. Instead, her painting, no doubt gestated until back in her Edinburgh studio, perhaps derived at least from a sketch, is substantially abstract. The simple temple, determinedly two dimensional, floats against a dark heavenly body, earth or moon inverted, flanked by abstract panels partially reflected in water. The background could be borrowed from a John Houston painting of the Forth at Gullane; ripples on the water, streaks in the sky.

Elizabeth Blackadder (1931–2021) 6. Chinese Temple, Macau, 1991 oil on canvas, 102 x 127 cm signed and dated lower left

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Elizabeth Blackadder (1931–2021) 7. Anemones, Irises and Tortoiseshell Cat, 1992 watercolour on paper, 56 x 47 cm signed and dated lower right

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Elizabeth Blackadder (1931–2021) 8. Spring Flowers, 1983 watercolour on paper, 57 x 66 cm signed and dated lower left exhibited

Elizabeth Blackadder: Henry Moore, Lillian Heidenberg Gallery, New York, USA, 1983

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Elizabeth Blackadder (1931–2021) 9. Prawns, 2011 watercolour and pencil on paper, 23 x 39.5 cm signed lower centre exhibited

Elizabeth Blackadder, Festival Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2011, cat. 12

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Elizabeth Blackadder (1931–2021) 10. Lilies and Mixed Flowers, 2010 watercolour and pencil on paper, 80.5 x 59 cm signed lower left

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Blackadder first worked with Dovecot weavers in 1966 on an interpretation of her Still Life (Tulips); Dovecot would go on to make a further 28 tapestries and five rugs with the artist during her lifetime. She was one of the first major women artists Dovecot worked with, just two years after the employment of the Studio’s first woman weaver. The ‘Scottish Collection’ of tapestries produced to mark Dovecot’s 75th anniversary in 1987 featured two made with Blackadder, and she was a vital part of the institution’s efforts to define itself as a specifically Scottish tapestry studio.

Blackadder’s vivid use of colour and exploration of the spaces between objects proffers considerable opportunity for the weavers to make the most of their knowledge and skill. This collaborative relationship flourished thanks to the mutual appreciation that developed between Blackadder and the weavers interpreting her work. The weavers knew Blackadder would quickly and reliably provide a design that could be made into a successful tapestry, while Blackadder trusted the weavers enough to remain open to their suggested edits or adjustments. To celebrate Blackadder’s weaving legacy and Dovecot’s long and fruitful relationship with the artist, Dovecot has woven Still Life with Chequered Box as the perfect way to sum up a beautiful relationship that lasted over half a century.

Dovecot Studios after Elizabeth Blackadder 11. Still Life with Chequered Box, 2023 handwoven tapestry, wool and cotton, 107 x 107 cm woven by Emma Jo Webster and Elaine Wilson

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John Houston (1930–2008)

John Houston (1930–2008) 12. Flowers on a Dark Ground, c.1968 watercolour on paper, 49.5 x 39.5 cm signed lower left exhibited

Christmas Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1968, cat. 167

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John Houston (1930–2008) 13. Birds over Dark Hillside, c.1968 oil on canvas, 96.5 x 101.5 cm signed lower right

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John Houston (1930–2008) 14. Poppies and Lilac, 1983 oil on canvas, 102 x 61 cm signed lower right, signed and inscribed on stretcher

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John Houston (1930–2008) 15. Flowers at a Window, Summer, 1989 oil on canvas, 91.5 x 101.5 cm signed and dated lower right

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John Houston was the foremost expressionist landscape painter of his generation. He used colour in a direct, emotional way to engage with the subconscious. His great subject is the Forth Estuary, initially from the Fife side, often depicting the fields and birds rising from hedgerows above the sea, observed walking near his home in Buckhaven. And later, when his home was in Edinburgh, he painted north and east, from Gullane and North Berwick in all media, times of year and weather. The Bass Rock became a recurring motif, the great basalt plug once the home of prisoners, now just the home of gannets and kittiwakes. Like Mt. St. Victoire near Aix for Cézanne, Houston found limitless inspiration from this ever-changing locale, the subtlest pale of snow over water or, as here, the full drama of rock, sea and sunset.

John Houston (1930–2008) 16. Rocky Coast, 2007 oil on canvas, 101.5 x 127 cm signed lower left exhibited

John Houston, New Paintings, The Scottish Gallery, 2007, cat. 22

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John Houston (1930–2008) 17. Sea and Sky, Crail, 2003 watercolour on paper, 13.5 x 19 cm signed lower left exhibited

John Houston, A Retrospective Selection, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2005, cat. 36

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John Houston (1930–2008) 18. Dark Sky and Dunes, c.2003 watercolour on paper, 16 x 20 cm signed lower right exhibited

Mixed Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2009

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Robert Henderson Blyth (1919–1970)

Robert Henderson Blyth (1919–1970) 19. Across the Pont Marie, Paris, c.1940 mixed media on paper, 24 x 25 cm signed lower right

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Robert Henderson Blyth (1919–1970) 20. A Village Street, c.1959 ink and watercolour on paper, 27 x 35.5 cm signed lower left exhibited

The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh

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Gordon Bryce, Beach Boulevard after Rain, 1976 (cat. 21) (detail)

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Gordon Bryce (b.1943)

Gordon Bryce was born in Edinburgh in 1943.

He studied at Edinburgh College of Art, where his tutors, Sir Robin Philipson and Sir William Gillies instilled in him a love of texture and colour which has remained integral to his practice ever since. After graduating, Bryce moved to Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen where he was appointed as a lecturer in Printmaking. He later served as Head of Fine Art from 1986 to 1995, before retiring to concentrate on painting full time. For many, Bryce embodies the best qualities of the belle peinture tradition, a torch borne in previous generations by Anne Redpath and S. J. Peploe. He is an easel painter with an endless fascination for his chosen medium, for composition and the subtle expressions of familiar landscape. His paintings do not shout

Gordon Bryce (b.1943) 21. Beach Boulevard after Rain, 1976 oil on canvas, 101 x 127 cm signed and dated lower right

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for attention; they are the antithesis of the current vogue for artworks arising out of identity politics, instead giving us pause to recognise the value of simple pleasure and truth; his technical gifts are great, but they have never been set to serve the ego. This impressive oil from 1976 shows his close alignment with colleague Frances Walker, whose paintings of the Northeast are always underpinned by strong draughtsmanship and sense of place. Here we see the beach boulevard in Aberdeen, looking towards the promenade and the art deco Beach Ballroom. A pattern of paths and parkland, glassy after a recent downpour, reflect the late afternoon sun as the weather moves toward the North Sea.

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Victoria Crowe (b.1945)

‘It’s the scale that tapestry lends to my work that I find very rewarding; small marks, gestures, overlays, patches of opaque and transparent colour, suddenly transformed by the huge increase in scale. The woven artwork can really exploit textural passages and I find the colour translation from my design to the tapestry, which is an almost pointillist resolution, a fascinating process.’

Victoria Crowe

Victoria Crowe (b.1945) and Dovecot Studios 22. Richer Twilight, Venice, 2019 handwoven tapestry, wool and cotton, 250 x 98 cm woven by Naomi Robertson, David Cochrane, Rudi Richardson and Emma Jo Webster

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Richer Twilight, Venice is a tapestry inspired by a detail from Victoria Crowe’s painting, Twilight, Venice, 2014. Like many of Victoria’s Venetian paintings, Twilight, Venice features rich colours of a jewel-like quality that reflect the intangible preciousness of the city. Engaging with the textural complexity of the painting, Dovecot Master Weavers David Cochrane and Naomi Robertson, and Dovecot weaver Rudi Richardson, created a sumptuous interpretation of the work in conjunction with the artist which captured the tones and shades of twilight.

Dovecot have a long-standing creative relationship with Crowe, which began in 2007 with the tapestry Two Views commissioned by the Duke of Buccleuch. Dovecot weavers and the artist have worked on significant projects including an iconic 40-metre tapestry for The Leathersellers’ Company, London, and Large Tree Group, which was woven entirely with undyed wool.

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Rudi Richardson weaving Victoria Crowe’s Richer Twilight, Venice and tapestry details from the weaving floor, Dovecot Studios.

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Thunderclap James Cumming

James Cumming was born in 1922 in Dunfermline, in the East Neuk of Fife, as that windy corner of the Scottish coast is known. His father was superintendent of the local swimming baths, his mother a factory worker who went on to have three children over the space of seven years, the youngest born in such traumatic circumstances that he was given the full name of the doctor, John Murray Black, in gratitude for saving both mother and child.

James Cumming was their firstborn, my beloved father Jimmy. He swam 100 lengths in those baths every morning before high school. Were his discipline not evident from his meticulously beautiful paintings, or his lifelong craving for knowledge – from science and philosophy to art and anatomy – it would be apparent from my bookshelves even now. There are his prizes for Latin and medieval poetry, for geometry, piano and painting, all bearing the high school bookplate. I have the parrot that won him the national competition at the age of eight and the watercolour of the Dunfermline wall, every brick given the attention of a Dutch painting.

No sooner had he started at Edinburgh College of Art than war was declared. Like all those boys who lied about their age, he tried to sign up for pilot training straight away. It was two years before he was accepted. There is a fading photograph of him with his navigator in Terrell: two flyboys, Jimmy on the right, earning their wings over the immense flatlands of Texas. My father’s mind was so often up in the air, dreaming, imagining, cogitating, to use a word he loved; watching the planes overhead, waiting for Apollo to land on the moon, for the undreamed-of wonders of the space age.

After the war, he went back home to live with his parents. Like other demobbed servicemen, in those grey postwar days when clothes and food were still rationed, and money out of reach,

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James Cumming in his Edinburgh studio, c.1980.

Photograph by Jessie Ann Matthew

Thunderclap by Laura Cumming, Chatto & Windus, 2023

he wore his wartime uniform to paint at the easel. He won a travelling scholarship in the late 1940s. This was a time when other students yearned for the Mediterranean, for the Matisse Chapel in Vence, Picasso’s Barcelona, Giotto in Padua. But not my father: he asked for time instead of distance, and went no further than the Outer Hebrides. There he found a croft at the northern end of the Isle of Lewis, where the rain gathered in pools beneath his iron bed and he caught 17 mice in one record fortnight. The money for two or three months of European art was eked out for 12, and then for another whole year by teaching art at the village school.

Callanish was where he lived and painted.

It was barely more than a few crofts and a post office. The village gives its name to the towering figures known in these parts as The Men: the Stones of Callanish, high slabs of ancient gneiss that have watched over the landscape for five millennia, older than Stonehenge and standing in a cruciform arrangement. In his descriptions, they are watchers on the shores of Loch Roag or formidable dark verticals in the gloaming. The present was to him coterminous with the ancient ways of living.

After two years of extreme thrift, the money finally ran to its end and he returned home to Dunfermline again. The paintings he made from his time in Lewis continued for almost 18 years, all the way through meeting and marrying my mother and the arrival of us two children. He was sustained entirely by the memory.

Callanish became one of many Lewis names indelibly commemorated in his art. I remember the hamlet of Garynahine – he cycled there once, at two o’clock in the morning, to see if there was any truth in the sightings of spectres at a crossroads (he saw nothing). I remember Breasclete, where the grazings committee used to gather between two crofts. My father talked about the way the cold and dark reached into

his bones, the island atmosphere filling his imagination with premonitory visions.

The past was present everywhere and to everyone; and to some people, so were events in the future. He encountered many islanders with the foretelling gift known on Lewis as second sight. They included the minister who wished to be rid of what he regarded as its curse, the carpenter who bleakly knew the dimensions of each coffin before a death had even occurred, the woman with second sight who brought milk to Callanish in an iron urn.

Nobody is more associated with second sight in the isles than the so-called Brahan Seer, also known in Gaelic as Coinneach Odhar, or Grey Kenneth. Born in the early 17th century near the village of Callanish, his visions foretold the future sometimes whole centuries in advance. There are those who say he never existed; but others claim direct descent from a real man, whose nickname comes from Brahan Castle on the Black Isle, where he worked for the Earl of Seaforth as a labourer.

Laura Cumming Edited extract from Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life & Sudden Death by Laura Cumming, Chatto & Windus, London. Adapted from The Guardian article Fabritius, my father and me: how art has shaped my life, 25th June 2023

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James Cumming (1922–1991)

James Cumming’s painting The Seaforth was included in touring exhibition, Fourteen Scottish Painters, an important survey of Scottish painting in the early sixties, a year after his first major exhibition with The Scottish Gallery. The subject remains enigmatic, a bust portrait of a man, using techniques derived from cubism, a palette knife used to incise sharp lines and paint scraped back to reveal glowing colour in a lower layer. But his title allows us an in: The Seaforth, a Highland soldier from a regiment steeped in blood and glory for a hundred years, a decorated warrior with a glint in his eye, a man from the harsh Highlands transformed into the cutting edge of the British army, bent to the British colonial project, but still fiercely independent. Cumming’s experiences as a post-dip student in Lewis, his deep sympathy for a simple, hard life on the fringes of Scotland persists in this soldier portrait.

James Cumming (1922–1991) 23. The Seaforth, c.1963 oil on canvas, 74 x 61 cm signed lower left exhibited

Fourteen Scottish Painters Exhibition, Commonwealth Institute, London and Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Glasgow, 1963–64

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Pat Douthwaite (1934–2002) An Uncompromising Vision

Pat Douthwaite’s drawings have an edgy, idiosyncratic quality. During a life beset with personal difficulties, she created paintings and drawings that are charged with great power and tremendous wit. During her lifetime Pat Douthwaite often identified herself with the fringes of the art world, not least because her emotionally intense paintings and uncompromising vision set her apart from the establishment. A glamorous, maverick character, Douthwaite had a reputation for being ‘difficult’, both in character and in her non-commercial approach to her work.

Painting was a passion – usually undertaken at night while listening to experimental jazz music at full volume – and her ambivalence about parting with work was so extreme that she once staged a midnight theft to retrieve one of her own paintings having changed her mind about selling it to an unsuspecting buyer. Born in Glasgow to a middle-class family, Douthwaite was self-taught as an artist though she attended classes in mime and modern dance with Margaret Morris, the imposing wife of the Scottish Colourist painter J. D. Fergusson, who encouraged her to paint. In 1958 she left Glasgow for an artistic commune in East Anglia where she lived among fellow artists Robert Colquhoun, Robert MacBryde and William Crozier. Their influence can be traced in her work of the time – Crozier in her restricted palette of red, black, and white and Colquhoun and MacBryde through the simplified landscape forms, as well as the influence of Jean Dubuffet. East Anglia was also where she met Paul Hogarth, a well-established artist who had houses in Cambridge and Majorca. They married in 1960, having a son together and living together in relative stability for a decade. Eventually, though, the marriage fractured and Douthwaite’s wanderlust, which was to dominate the rest of her life, took root.

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She moved north, living in a variety of homes in Edinburgh, Berwick and Ayr, travelling extensively abroad and never settling long in one place for the rest of her life. They divorced in 1981. Douthwaite’s subjects of choice were people and later animals, especially cats, which she adored. Early portrayal of Soho dandies were followed by a number of series of archetypal women – western heroines such as Cattle Kate, Mary Queen of Scots and the doomed aviator Amy Johnson. Douthwaite’s first significant gallery appearance was at the Mary Queen of Scots Gallery in Edinburgh in 1967, leading to several other exhibitions throughout the ensuing decades including a major retrospective exhibition at the Royal College of Art, London, in 1982-83.

Douthwaite’s profile, though, remained relatively low until a solo exhibition at The Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh in 1993 finally seemed to give her the recognition she was seeking. The then art critic of The Scotsman, Edward Gage, proclaimed: ‘This exhibition demands that she should no longer be seen as an exotic maverick but acknowledged as one of the true originals of Scottish art.’ However, Douthwaite’s final years were not happy. After battling with illness and disability and having sustained back injuries from a brutal attack in Edinburgh, she died alone of an overdose of prescription drugs aged just 68 in a hotel in Broughty Ferry. As Guy Peploe, Director of The Scottish Gallery, has said: ‘There is often no happy ending in the life of the creative, but Pat Douthwaite is present in her work and meeting her there is as rewarding and challenging as ever it was in her life.’

Simon Martin Artistic Director, Pallant House Gallery, 2014

Pat Douthwaite, c.1977.

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Pat Douthwaite (1934–2002)

Pat Douthwaite (1934–2002) 24. Flowers in a Vase, 1982 pastel on paper, 29.5 x 20.5 cm signed and dated upper right exhibited

Summer Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2004

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Pat Douthwaite (1934–2002) 25. Mauve Headpiece, 1974 pastel on paper, 65 x 50 cm signed and dated upper right exhibited

Pat Douthwaite – An Uncompromising Vision, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, 2012; Pat Douthwaite – An Uncompromising Vision, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2014, cat. 4

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Joan Eardley, Winter Sea, c.1960 (cat. 26) (detail)

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The Northeast | Catterline Joan Eardley, James Morrison, Lilian Neilson

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The Northeast | Catterline Joan Eardley, James Morrison, Lilian Neilson

The Northeast, Aberdeenshire and Kincardinshire. The Mearns. An ancient, fertile country whose inhabitants, fishermen and farmers, were the Pictish folk, so named by their Roman adversaries for their war-paint.

They were the tribes of the Iron Age and before, peoples thriving on the rich lands and seas boiling with herring, accommodating, for the most part, the Brythonic tribes from the Southwest and the Celts from Ireland, as well as Romans, Vikings and Angles from Northumbria.

Their brochs, chambered tombs and most of all elaborately, intricately carved stone stele, with symbols and scenes, attest to their sophistication and prowess. Aberlemno, Rhynie, Strathpeffer, Dunnichen. And today so much remains in the character of the landscape, its ancient fields, with dykes and hedgerows, farms

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and copses, so lovingly brought to life in Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song.

The fishing village of Catterline, ten miles south of Stonehaven, clings to the bents above the harbour, a tight community in the rows of cottages, men and women toiling on the pursuit of the herring and the harvest in a way of life much unaltered since the Iron Age. The place spoke to Joan Eardley, who made it her second home, to Jim Morrison, starting his family here in the late fifties, he and his wife Dorothy, commuting to teach. And subsequently and ever since artists have come to find something and nearly always found it. Lil Neilson inspired

by Eardley added something particular in looking at the rough texture of the life here, the resilience of the fertile fields and majesty of an ever-changing sea.

Joan Eardley in Catterline, summer 1961.

Photograph by Audrey Walker

James Morrison in Angus, 1981.

Photograph by Robert Mabon

Lilian Neilson in her Catterline studio, c.1990.

Photograph by Jenny Rutlidge

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Joan Eardley (1921–1963)

‘…The Northeast – it’s just vast waste and vast seas, vast areas of cliff – you’ve just got to paint it. I very often find I will take my paints to a certain place which has moved me and I’ll begin to paint there and I find by perhaps the end of the summer I haven’t moved from that place. My paints are still there. I’ve worn a kind of mark in the ground – no grass left! – and I just leave my paints there overnight and eventually it seems to have built up this other table and generally a studio seems to have arrived outside and that seems to be how I work. Once I’ve started in a place I don’t find I want to move, because I’m trying to do something and you’re never really satisfied with what you’re doing, so you keep on trying and the more you try the more you think of new ways of doing this particular subject and so you just go on and on.’

Joan Eardley

Winter Sea, Catterline, c.1960.

Photograph by Audrey Walker

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The Sea VII, 1963, oil and collage on board, 92 x 154 cm Exhibited: Ten Years of Modern Masters, London, The Scottish Gallery, June 2023. Sold to private collection

The Sea VII is the last monumental Catterline painting made by Joan Eardley. The furious tumult of sea arrives in a great, foaming wave and crashes, dissipating rapidly as spume of the bed of rock in the shallows of the bay, below the dark sands in the foreground. The artist has added crumpled newspaper to create physical dimension to her impasto. The sky is unrelenting, driving the storm across the North Sea, the whole a vision of awe in which we can participate, a remarkable, final tribute to the vision of Joan Eardley. She has signed and dated the work on the verso: Joan Eardley 1963. Her late paintings are seldom signed on the recto and a signature can be associated with a work being sent off for exhibition. Exactly when The Sea VII was started is not known but it belongs to the winter of 1962/63 and it was finished and signed for her final exhibition at Roland, Browse & Delbanco which took place in May-June 1963. This series of sea paintings began in the winter of 1960/1961 and the first

four were included in the exhibition at The Scottish Gallery in May 1961, reviewed by Sidney Goodsir Smith for The Scotsman, ‘As you enter the main gallery you are met on the far wall with a great wall of sea coming in, straight at you, and coming with speed. There is nothing else in the large six-footer, not a rock, not a cloud in the flat dirty, really dirty brown sky – just sheer sea. This is flanked by two other tempestuous scenes, while to their right is another enormous wave. This is a tremendous series, The Sea I, II, III, IIII. This is an explosive show but not destructive. You enter, you are shattered; you remain; you find it difficult to leave and when you do the pictures are still with you.’ The Sea VII can be seen as her last monumental work, the climax of a series which propelled the artist into the centre of art world attention and provided brilliant, poignant resolution of her painterly need to reconcile the power of nature and abstract expressionism.

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‘Three large canvases all worked throughout the day from my front door or thereabouts. It has been a perfect painting day – Not as regards climate! (I wore a fur coat for the first time). But for beauty quite perfect – A big sea – with lovely light – greyness and blowing swirling mists – and latterly a strong wind blowing from the south, blowing up great froths of whiteness off the sea, like soap suds onto the field behind our wee house – And towards evening the sun appeared shrouded in heavy mist – and turned yellow and orange and red, with great swirls of mist obscuring her every now and again – I wanted so much to paint the sun but it meant turning round and leaving my sea – or else running round paints and all to the other side of the bay. And I just hadn’t time or energy to do this – Tomorrow perhaps there will be the possibility of this sun again and I can take up my position, the other side, by the minister’s house. I think it could be good there.’

Joan Eardley

Joan Eardley (1921–1963) 26. Winter Sea, c.1960 oil on board, 89 x 122 cm exhibited

Roland, Browse & Delbanco, London; Modern Art from Scottish Houses, Scottish Arts Council provenance

Artist’s studio inventory number EE126

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A Field by the Sea No.1 is painted in the days between summer and autumn, the harvests are taking place and the fecundity of hedgerow is knocked back by the first storms of autumn. In the next summer of 1963, friends brought her wildflowers to paint in her cottage studio as the cancer that had stalked her for two years took its final toll. She had so much more to give, yet her light had burned so brightly, in the urgency of the work of the previous year, and right up to her last months, that nothing should be regretted; her legacy as a painter and the purpose of her life are in the firmament of great Scottish painting, enduring and life-enhancing for all who come afterwards. This painting was included in the Arts Council Memorial Exhibition in 1964 after having been acquired from Roland, Browse & Delbanco.

Joan Eardley (1921–1963) 27. A Field by the Sea No.1, c.1962 oil on board, 90 x 89 cm signed verso exhibited

Roland, Browse & Delbanco, London; Joan Eardley Memorial Exhibition, The Arts Council of Great Britain, Scottish Committee, 1964

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James Morrison (1932–2020)

James Morrison lived in Catterline from 1958 to 1965. He and his wife Dorothy had both secured teaching posts – his was a part-time position just north of the village of Stonehaven. The landscape was a completely new subject for Morrison who came from the urban environment of Glasgow. He began by making paintings of the village and worked around the fishing season – salmon fishing in the summer and crab and lobster in the winter and he would occasionally sail with the fishermen and made a series of paintings of the fishing boats and nets. The Bothy was a standalone building near

Above: Fisherman, Mr William Crull, mending crab creels, Catterline, c.1960.

Photograph by Audrey Walker Right: Retired skipper, Mr Harry Wyclie, with a few lobsters, Catterline, c.1960.

Photograph by Audrey Walker

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the pier which housed the salmon nets, creels and lines and The Salmon Bothy, Catterline (cat. 29) depicts this symbolic little building which was central to village life. Being part of the environment and local community was important to the artist, his seascapes and landscapes from this period reflect a deep engagement with Catterline and the Mearns.

He made a series of paintings at Denhead Farm, which lies approximately a mile inland and, from here, he began to expand his landscape practice by observing the geology and geography of the Mearns.

Catterline – From South Cliff outside No.1, c.1959.

Photograph by Audrey Walker

James Morrison, The Linfall, 1963, oil on board, 51 x 76 cm Private collection

Catterline fishermen.

Photograph by Audrey Walker

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James Morrison (1932–2020) 28. The Braes, Catterline, c.1962 oil on canvas, 40 x 48 cm signed lower left

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James Morrison (1932–2020) 29. The Salmon Bothy, Catterline, 1962 oil on canvas, 48 x 67 cm signed and dated lower left

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Lilian Neilson (1938–1998)

The fierce and fragile daily existence at Catterline depicted in our collection of Lil Neilson’s paintings offers a window into her practice and intimate knowledge of Catterline and the Northeast. We can imagine the row of houses which overlooks the harbour and vast North Sea being battered by a cold, biting and unrelenting wind. Neilson’s intense impasto pulls across the rough board, are all real, observed details of the houses; the land, sky and sea are treated with a soft and diffused light. Born in Kirkcaldy, Lilian Neilson studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee (1955–60), followed by a brief period at Hospitalfield House in Arbroath, where she became friends with Joan Eardley (1921–1963).

She completed a post-diploma year tutored

by Hugh Crawford and Alberto Morrocco in 1960–61 and was awarded a travelling scholarship to France and Italy in 1961–62.

Following this time in Europe, she joined Joan Eardley in Catterline where Neilson responded to the dramatic Northeast coastline and began painting powerful landscapes and seascapes.

The artist also worked backstage with Reet Guenigault in theatres including the Traverse in Edinburgh and in England, returning to

Clockwise from top left: The South Row, Catterline, winter, c.1960; No.1 South Row, Catterline, winter, c.1959; The sea at Catterline, c.1960.

Photographs by Audrey Walker

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Catterline to help nurse Joan Eardley when her illness was diagnosed in 1962. Neilson bought one of the tiny fishing cottages, No.2 South Side, Catterline, with her home on one side and studio on the other. Like Eardley, she lived a frugal life.

She moved permanently to Catterline in 1986 where Neilson undertook monthly surveys of the coastline and local beaches and began studying printmaking in Dundee. Her final exhibition, Certain Days and Other Seasons, was held at the Seagate in Dundee and Aberdeen Museum & Art Gallery. Neilson, known as ‘Lil’ to her friends, pronounced this to be the end of her life’s work, prophetically as it turned out, for by August 1997, the artist was terminally ill with cancer.

In the next few years she painted many of the same subjects as Joan and with a similar approach. Her work is texturally rich, low in tone and always true to the place. She liked to work on rough boards or wooden fragments found on the beach. Neilson eventually was able to move onto other subjects, but Eardley’s shadow was cast long and we can recognise that Neilson’s best work of the salmon nets, cottages and stormy coast result from her inspirational friendship with the senior painter.

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Catterline, c.1959.

Photograph by Audrey Walker

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Lilian Neilson (1938–1998) 30. Catterline Braes, c.1962 oil on canvas, 43 x 64 cm signed lower right

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Lilian Neilson (1938–1998) 31. Last Cottage in Catterline, 1966 oil on board, 28 x 71 cm signed lower right

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Lilian Neilson (1938–1998) 32. A Winter Landscape, Catterline, c.1963 oil on board, 32 x 73 cm signed lower right

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Lilian Neilson (1938–1998) 33. Dark Sky, Catterline, c.1966 oil on board, 42 x 47 cm signed and inscribed on label verso exhibited

Society of Scottish Artists

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Lilian Neilson (1938–1998) 34. Catterline, c.1962 oil on board, 16 x 41 cm signed lower left

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Corn stook at Cloac Farm, Catterline, 1961.

Photograph by Audrey Walker

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Lilian Neilson (1938–1998) 35. Corn Stook, Catterline, c.1967 oil on board, 55 x 48 cm signed lower left

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Joan Eardley (1921–1963)

The Macaulay Children is the only known commissioned painting by Joan Eardley. It is a portrait of the five children of William Macaulay and his wife, a daughter of Sir David Russell of Markinch and Iona. Neither the artist nor the children were enthusiastic about the sittings, and its outcome is a tribute to Eardley’s regard for Bill Macaulay, the senior partner of The Scottish Gallery and her gentle guide through the commercial art world. She tried hard and has made a successful work in the end, capturing the children full of mischief and character.

A great many preparatory sketches and drawings were required and sometimes appear on the market confused as Townhead street children. From left to right appear Madeleine, Amanda, Andrew, Martin, John.

Although the five siblings all admitted to being quite wild as children, they were clean and well dressed as one would imagine coming from a middle-class home in Edinburgh. This is the striking contrast between the Macaulay studies and her many studies of the Townhead children – lives lived in parallel but socially worlds apart.

The Macaulay Children, 1957 oil on board, 60 x 37.5 cm, 60 x 80 cm, 60 x 37.5 cm (three panels) signed central panel, upper right Exhibited: Joan Eardley RSA, 1921–1963, Scottish Arts Council Memorial Exhibition, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow then Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh and subsequent tour, 1964, cat. 34 Provenance: Private Collection

Joan Eardley (1921–1963) 36. Amanda, 1957 pastel on paper, 17.5 x 15 cm provenance

William Macaulay, thence by descent

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Ian Fleming (1906–1994)

Ian Fleming was born in 1906 in Glasgow and attended the School of Art. After re-joining the staff after War service, he moved away from Glasgow with his young family and took the job of Principal at Hospitalfield, in Arbroath, succeeding James Cowie. While lecturing at the Glasgow School of Art from 1931, Fleming met

William Wilson (1905–1972), the Edinburghbased printmaker and stained-glass artist.

They became friends and their work was mutually influential. For the rest of Fleming’s life, he lived and worked in the Northeast of Scotland, teaching at Gray’s in Aberdeen from 1954.

Findochty Findochty (pronounced Finichty in the Doric) lies on the Moray Firth, a few miles northeast of Buckie. It is a distinctive fishing village, with a large c-shaped harbour lined with whitewashed houses, sheltering in the lea of hill and cliffs behind. The town was served until 1968 by the railway from Aberdeen to Elgin so Fleming is likely to have come on the train when he visited in 1962. He has chosen the viewpoint across the harbour, which dries out at low tide revealing a dark beach, looking at a few boats, the village and church on the hill. Fleming was an acute observer of life and records a few telling details, lending a particular, ordinary humanity to the landscape: there are shadows

Ian Fleming (1906–1994) 37. Findochty, 1962/1985 oil on board, 76 x 117 cm signed lower left; inscribed verso provenance

Fine Art Society, Edinburgh, 1989

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of children playing, a man and his dog, curtains are drawn, a window open. Findochty is more than a pictorial representation of a fishing village, this is social realism. Perhaps we can hear the Christian song Will your Anchor Hold.

Village life in 1962 centred around ship building, religion, football and music and by 1985 much had changed – shipping industry gone, railway closed and a much-reduced population.

Fleming’s humanism, concern with the people and history of his kinsfolk, and originality as a composer of a painting were influential in Aberdeen – for example on his younger colleague Robert Henderson Blyth, and more widely as an etcher and watercolourist.

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

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Sir William Gillies (1898–1973)

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Sir William Gillies (1898–1973)

Sir William Gillies (1898–1973) 38. Mount Lothian, c.1952 mixed media on paper, 25.5 x 36 cm signed lower right; inscribed verso provenance

Stone Gallery, Newcastle, 1961

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Sir William Gillies (1898–1973) 39. Quarry, c.1952 watercolour on paper, 25 x 28 cm signed lower right exhibited

William Gillies, Watercolours and Drawings, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1952, cat. 27

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Carola Gordon (b.1940)

Carola Gordon (b.1940) 40. View of Stockbridge, 1984 ink and watercolour on paper, 22 x 33 cm signed and dated lower left exhibited

Christmas Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1985, cat. 180

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Carola Gordon (b.1940) 41. Thomas Carlyle House, Comely Bank, Edinburgh, 1982 embroidery and fabric collage, 42 x 50 cm signed and inscribed lower right

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Robert Scott Irvine (1906–1988) Tribute to a Scottish Watercolour Painter

Watercolour became Robert Scott Irvine’s primary medium of expression and he had the unusual distinction for those days of being elected to this Society at the early age of 28, in 1934. Early in his career, he demonstrated an ability to abstract from a landscape subject and to formalise and compose. He was thoughtful and deliberate as a painter, sensitive to the intrinsic qualities of watercolour and always able to keep it vibrant and luminous.

Jack Firth Robert Scott Irvine known as ‘Otto’ to everyone, grew up in Morningside Drive, Edinburgh and went to school at George Heriot’s from 1916 until 1922. Irvine gained a scholarship to Edinburgh College of Art aged 16 in 1922 and graduated in 1927. He studied painting under Henry Lintott, David Alison, David M. Sutherland, Adam Bruce Thomson and John Duncan. My father was the first Edinburgh College of Art graduate from 1927 to be elected to the RSW (Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour), one of his proudest achievements.

William Glllies (1898–1973) became a great friend and painted two huge life-size portraits of Otto in 1925. He also exhibited with the sculptor Jacob Epstein at the 19th Autumn Salon at the Grand Palais, Paris. Irvine went on to exhibit in Toronto, Canada in 1934 with the RSW touring exhibition, and had further exhibitions at the Salon in Paris and New York in the 1930s, and at the Royal Academy in London in 1940. He painted in France in during the 1920s and also spent time in Morocco in the 1950s – living in

Robert Scott Irvine, Loch Melfort, c.1970 (detail) (cat. 43)

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the Riff Mountains and Tetuan with the late Alexander Graham Munro DA RSA RSW (1903–1985) and his wife Ruth Moorwood (Munro) (1904–1985). My father was one of the very first hill climb rally drivers to race competitively, driving at the Scottish hill climb at the Rest and Be Thankful during the 30s.

Irvine painted a magnificent scene of a crashed German war plane shortly after it was shot down near Humbie in East Lothian after the first air combat of the Second World War was attempted on British mainland territory when German bombers were foiled by the RAF in their attack on the Forth Bridge in October 1939. Deadly Nightshade was the first painting by a Scottish artist to depict the Second World War’s direct effect on Scotland.

It was also the first Scottish war scene to be exhibited publicly in Scotland (at the RSW in the RSA in January 1941).

Inspired by the news that fellow Scottish artist R. Henderson Blyth (1919–1970) had joined the Royal Army Medical Corps, my father joined up with the The Royal Army Service Corps in the spring of 1941 at the age of 35.

He served as a 1st Lieutenant in Port Said in the Middle East where he worked as a Liaison Officer with the Royal Engineers and the 8th Army. He returned to Edinburgh to paint and taught art at George Watson’s College in 1945 until 1971. After the war, he exhibited at galleries in Aberdeen, Arran, Dundee, Dunfermline, Edinburgh and Glasgow.

Henry Scott Irvine

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Robert Scott Irvine (1906–1988)

Robert Scott Irvine (1906–1988) 42. Torgoyle Bridge, c.1940 pencil and watercolour on buff paper, 36 x 55 cm signed lower left

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Robert Scott Irvine (1906–1988) 43. Loch Melfort, c.1970 watercolour on paper, 31 x 25 cm signed lower right, title inscribed on label verso

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Marchlands | Looking Back, Looking Forward The Art of William Johnstone (1897–1981)

Last year, the National Galleries of Scotland opened their new gallery spaces celebrating Scottish art from 1800–1945. A Point in Time, William Johnstone’s monumental masterpiece from 1929–1935 takes centre stage in the entrance gallery…

Johnstone’s background was in the Borders.

‘Mine was the world of farmers and the land; the world of Rembrandt and Vincent van Gogh,’ he wrote in his autobiography ‘Points in Time’.

He was reflecting on his youth and, at that point in his narrative, also on the break he made to become an artist, a break with his father and with his upbringing on a Border farm.

Duncan Macmillan, 1997 William Johnstone was born in Denholm in the Scottish Borders in 1897. His father was a farmer and expected his son to follow the same path but his introduction to the artist Tom Scott (1854–1927) in his teenage years, and the consequences of the Great War, made him resolutely determined to become a painter.

He went on to study 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.

Although he exhibited throughout his life, much of his energy during his London years 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 1947–1960. He was

a visionary art educator and 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. 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 mix of artistic personalities during a post-war explosion in the arts. He wrote two books, the first in 1936, Creative Art in England, and in 1941, Child Art to Man Art which offered a new perspective and insight into art education and techniques. William Johnstone married twice, firstly to the American artist Flora MacDonald in Paris, 1927. He then married his former student, the embroiderer Mary Bonning, in 1944. He had two daughters, Elizabeth, born in 1931, and Sarah in 1945. In 1948-50, Johnstone spent time in America, firstly conducting a survey for the London County Council and then as a lecturer in Colorado. In 1954, he was awarded an OBE for his contribution to art education.

He returned home to the Borders with his family in 1960 to concentrate on painting and return to farming. If to become a painter he left the land, being a painter brought him back to it. In the end the two were not in opposition.

They were simply different perspectives on the same fundamental thing, our relationship with the land we come from. It is perhaps this that Johnstone reflected when he said he was always a landscape painter. It was not a matter of choice. It was not that perhaps he could have been some other kind of painter if he had been

William Johnstone in his studio, 1955.

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so inclined. He meant that even when it had long since ceased to reflect it in any representational way, his painting was still as rooted in the landscape as he was himself.

‘St Boswells has more to do with the business of being an artist than either Dusseldorf, Basle or Venice,’ he wrote, a characteristically defiant assertion of the importance of his roots.

Duncan Macmillan, 1997 When Johnstone returned home to Scotland in 1960, he became friends with Douglas Hall who was a fellow Borderer and first Director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Hall recognised the mystic in Johnstone, regarding him as a pioneer of modernism and encouraged Johnstone to date his pictures, to make recordings of his life and was instrumental in pushing his work into the public arena, acquiring several paintings for the national collection. In 1969, he met Mrs Hope Montague Douglas Scott, a widowed aristocrat who had amassed a picture collection of avant-garde work. Her effortless joie de vivre and unusual eye had a profound effect on Johnstone. She became a major collector and patron and encouraged him to exhibit. She donated the significant A Point in Time (c.1929–1935), to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and, so delighted was she with Edinburgh University for honouring her friend with a doctorate, she donated the majority of her art collection to the Talbot Rice Gallery before setting up the Hope Scott Trust. The 1970s were incredibly productive; exhibitions of large- and small-scale works, ‘automatic’ or Zen paintings derived from tachisme, an intuitive style of painting, with spontaneous brushstroke gesture using oil and turps or black ink on white paper emerged from the studio. For Johnstone, working in

the moment was the only thing that mattered.

Painting was meditation; a concentration of the mind which brought all his experience into one point in time. During this period, he also completed a series using plaster on board and employed the same Zen technique to push the boundary of material. A film was made to capture the scenes. ‘How long did it take you to do that?’ ‘Only ten minutes, I suppose, but it’s taken me seventy years of looking.’

William Johnstone’s work from this period is abstract in the true sense of the word, painted with reference to reality but drawing out characteristics from it, exploring within it, and going beyond immediate appearance. To paint the detail was, for Johnstone, to conceal the essence, but in order to convey this essence a lifetime of looking was needed. Many of his late brush drawings are simply entitled ‘Abstract’.

In each a reality is explored which is direct and impressive: the clutter of verisimilitude is cut away.

Murdo MacDonald, 1991 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.

Christina Jansen

William Johnstone at home in Crailing, the Scottish Borders, c.1977.

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William Johnstone (1897–1981)

The Scottish Borders is steeped in cultural heritage. A walk in the Cheviots, the Eildon Hills, Tweed Valley or high above in the Lammermuirs brings you into direct contact with Neolithic and Bronze Age burials, Iron Age farms and forts, medieval churches and castles, Reiver towers, fateful battlefields, woollen mills that supplied an empire and towns, hamlets and farms which still retain their own unique identity. All of this history, so deeply connected to the land was drawn upon by the artist and distilled into his own language of landscape painting.

William Johnstone (1897–1981) 44. Eildons Composition, 1952 oil on canvas, 35.5 x 56 cm signed and dated verso provenance

Dr Moira Simmons, Ancrum Gallery, Roxburghshire

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What sets William Johnstone apart from other abstract expressionist painters is his background in farming and his working relationship with the land, the changing seasons and the brutality and beauty of extreme weather conditions.

In 1968, the artist lived at Potburn Farm which is near Selkirk, on the way up to the Ettrick Valley.

It is an isolated, rural spot of outstanding beauty with expansive, rolling, uninterrupted views as far as the eye can see. Johnstone understood the harshness of the wild environment and fast changing climate which could bury a flock of sheep in a snow drift in November or May. In Rain, Ettrick he invites the viewer to experience this landscape through his eyes.

William Johnstone (1897–1981) 45. Rain, Ettrick, 1968 oil on canvas, 51 x 76 cm signed, titled and dated verso provenance

Dr Moira Simmons, Ancrum Gallery, Roxburghshire

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Between 1972–73, Johnstone began a series of thick plaster reliefs with George Turnbull as assistant. An exhibition William Johnstone: Genesis, New Works in Plaster was held at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 1973/4.

They acquired Embryonic for their permanent collection. This series was also filmed by Sidhartha Films. The [plaster reliefs] grew from an interest in the properties of plaster, which Johnstone had previously experimented with in paintings during the 1920s, its rough texture forming a contrast to a smooth, painted surface.

Using a trowel to set the plaster in place, he had only a short amount of time to work with the plaster before it set, letting chance play a role on the formation of each work. He explained, ‘I knew that in myself I must produce a condition, relaxed and free from thought or deliberation; that which would be produced through my hands would then be from my inner self and completely unconscious.’

National Galleries of Scotland

William Johnstone (1897–1981) 46. Metamorphosis, c.1973 plaster relief, 126 x 96 cm exhibited

William Johnstone: Genesis, New Works in Plaster, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, 1973 provenance

Dr Moira Simmons, Ancrum Gallery, Roxburghshire

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William Johnstone (1897–1981) 47. Volcanic Landscape Form, c.1975 ink on paper, 16.5 x 24 cm signed lower right provenance

Dr Moira Simmons, Ancrum Gallery, Roxburghshire

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William Johnstone (1897–1981) 48. Sun over Crailing, c.1975 ink on paper, 17 x 24.5 cm signed lower right provenance

Dr Moira Simmons, Ancrum Gallery, Roxburghshire

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Bet Low (1924–2007)

Bet Low was a painter best known for her deceptively simple watercolours of Scottish landscapes. She also produced expressionist drawings of post-war Glasgow, portraits, powerfully atmospheric oil paintings and, later, extremely detailed and haunting pencil drawings. Born in Gourock, she developed an early love for landscape and the sea. At Greenock Academy she had a talent for music and won the Rankin Art Prize. In 1942, she went to the Glasgow School of Art, where one of her tutors was David Donaldson, later the Queen’s Limner in Scotland. Benno Schotz became a friend, as did Joan Eardley, Stanley Baxter, Jack Gerson and Ian Hamilton Finlay. After art school, she spent three months at Hospitalfield, Arbroath. James Cowie, the warden, stimulated her interest in literature, drama, poetry, politics and philosophy, and this early passion for ideas and discussion remained with her all her life. Low attended teacher training college at Jordanhill but found teaching practice and staff rooms depressing until a chance meeting on the street with Stanley Baxter introduced her to rehearsals at Glasgow’s newly formed Unity Theatre. She never returned to college or school. Unity Theatre and the Refugee Centre shared the same building, and Low revelled in being part of a cosmopolitan group that included actors, writers, folk singers and artists.

Living in a cold room in Sauchiehall Street, she supported herself with odd jobs at Unity and

Bet Low (1924–2007) 49. Pansy Patch – Night, c.1983 pencil on paper, 13 x 30 cm signed lower right exhibited

Compass Gallery, Glasgow, 1983

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illustrations for periodicals, painting portraits of actors and stage crew. In 1946, she joined the Clyde Group of Writers and Artists, whose manifesto was to take art to the people; she helped to put on exhibitions and poetry readings all over Glasgow. She wandered the streets herself, producing wonderful drawings which are now a historical record. She exhibited with the Society of Scottish Independent Artists, had paintings accepted by the Royal Glasgow Institute and took part in shows at the New Art Club founded by J D Fergusson, the colourist, and Margaret Morris. They befriended Low and gave support to her and to other independents when, in 1956, they organised the first open-air exhibition at weekends on the railings of the Botanic Gardens. Low had an abiding love of landscape and a particular affinity with Orkney; for a number of years, she and her family spent summers on Hoy. She was a friend of George Mackay Brown and collaborated with him on a poster poem entitled Orkney, the Whale Islands. She has paintings in the collection of the Pier Arts Centre, Stromness. Low joined the Glasgow Group Society in the mid-1960s and thereafter took part in most exhibitions. In 1985, a retrospective exhibition was mounted at the Third Eye Centre, Glasgow.

Edited extract from Bet Low, obituary, The Herald, 2007

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Margaret McGavin (1924–2004)

Margaret McGavin studied at Edinburgh College of Art before the War. Like so many Edinburgh School artists she worked in watercolour and oils becoming a professional member of the Scottish Society of Women Artists and a regular exhibitor with the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour. Her work has a clarity that recalls her near contemporary Barbara Balmer, and she deployed strong colour in the best tradition of Scottish belle peinture.

Margaret McGavin (1924–2004) 50. The Amber Snuff Bottle, c.1989 acrylic on board, 41 x 36 cm signed lower left provenance

Torrance Gallery, Edinburgh

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Ellen Malcolm (1923–2002)

Ellen Malcolm was a sensitive and versatile painter, who exhibited a wide range of subjects from still life and portraiture through landscape and domestic scenes. Malcolm was born in Grangemouth in 1923 and was educated at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen under D. M. Sutherland and Robert Sivell. She lived at Invergowrie with her husband, the artist Gordon Cameron, and was friends with fellow artists and colleagues David McClure and Alberto Morrocco. Ellen Malcolm paints in a female lineage which includes Gwen John, Winifred Nicholson and her near contemporary Joan Eardley, treating her subject with an honesty which prefers simplicity and delicacy to an analysis of form and interior space.

Ellen Malcolm (1923–2002) 51. Red Flowerpiece, c.1964 oil on canvas, 46 x 61 cm signed lower right exhibited

Annual Exhibition, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 1964, cat. 197

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David Michie (1928–2015)

Born in San Raphael, France and the son of painter Anne Redpath, David Michie graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 1953 following a travelling scholarship to Italy with fellow student John Houston. He lectured at Gray’s in Aberdeen and from 1961–1982 at Edinburgh from where he retired in 1990 as Head of School of Drawing and Painting. He died in Edinburgh in 2015, and The Scottish Gallery held his Memorial Exhibition in March 2017. Public collections include HM The King, National Galleries of Scotland, Glasgow Museums and Aberdeen Art Galleries and Museums.

‘If I hadn’t been a painter, I’ve not the slightest idea what I would have done, but I’m pleased I spent my life painting. For better or for worse, I’ve inflicted my paintings on the world but I paint because I’ve had such endless entertainment from what I’ve found around me…’

David Michie speaking to filmmaker Sana Bilgrami, 24th June 2015

Playing Outside the Pompidou Centre, Paris and Playing Bicycle Games It is not insignificant that the two paintings on the following pages share the theme of play. Michie’s was a playful mind, perpetually amused by the unfolding comédie humaine of life but with the artist’s instinct to make his observations into satisfying, beautiful and thought-provoking paintings. Modular, colourful kids play areas are routinely placed in our public spaces. Playing Outside the Pompidou Centre,

David Michie in his Edinburgh studio, c.1980.

Photograph by Robert Mabon

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Paris the complex, famous façade designed by Richard Rogers, has become Michie’s unusual, charming subject, filled with the joyous faces of its child patrons, perhaps releasing energy after the compulsory museum tour. The bikes, in Playing Bicycle Games are tethered to perform continuous circuits, unattended in the evening but the park still bright under its neon illumination.

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David Michie (1928–2015)

David Michie (1928–2015) 52. Playing Outside the Pompidou Centre, Paris, c.1980 oil on canvas, 61 x 93 cm signed lower right

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David Michie (1928–2015) 53. Playing Bicycle Games, c.1980 oil on canvas, 71 x 93 cm signed lower left

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Leon Morrocco (b.1942)

Leon Morrocco, the eldest son of painter Alberto Morrocco, was born in Edinburgh and studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and The Slade before Edinburgh College of Art. He was a lecturer in drawing and painting at Edinburgh College of Art from 1965–1968, and then took up a similar post at the Glasgow School of Art from 1969–1979 before moving to Australia to take up the post of Head of Fine Art at the Chisholm Institute in Melbourne. He has been painting full-time since 1984.

Leon Morrocco, like his father Alberto, enjoys the medium of pastel. For many, like the French Intimiste Vuillard, pastel is a soft, suggestive medium, but for Morrocco the immediacy and strength of pigment produces a clarity of drawing as exemplified here. A simple motif: the still life posed on a hall chair, is in sharp focus while the delicacy and depth of the soft medium is brilliantly deployed.

Leon Morrocco (b.1942) 54. Decorative Chair with Fruit, c.1973 pastel on paper, 104 x 67 cm signed lower right exhibited

Annual Exhibition, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 1973, cat. 388

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Denis Peploe (1914–1993)

Denis Peploe was born in Edinburgh in 1914. He was the second son of Samuel John Peploe and his wife Margaret. At seventeen he enrolled at the Edinburgh College of Art in the same year as Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and Margaret Mellis.

He took to College life, fulfilling early promise to win post-Diploma scholarships to Paris and Florence and then travelled extensively in Spain, Italy and Yugoslavia. In Spain he witnessed political turmoil turn to War and before he had had a first one-man show, Europe was at war again and the young painter found himself in uniform.

He began as an enlisted soldier and finished as a Captain in SOE (Special Operations Executive).

He could have stayed on in ‘The Service’ but instead returned to Edinburgh to pick up his brushes. Perhaps not surprisingly as he started to paint again it was to the West Highlands he was drawn. Just as his father had written to his friend Cadell, convalescing in France in 1917, of how they must go to Iona, to find their innocence again, the wilderness of Knoydart and Applecross had a visceral appeal to the war weary. No surprise either that his first exhibition, in June 1947, was with The Scottish Gallery. The critical reception was very positive, one paper recording: ‘I cannot remember any young artist getting such notices for a first exhibition.’ The Scotsman critic wrote of ‘the great richness and vigour of the work’; The Glasgow Herald said he was ‘an artist born fully armed’; and The Bulletin critic wrote ‘the general impression of the exhibition is that we have in Denis Peploe a vital and adventurous painter.’

He showed again a year later and in 1950 and received much more positive reaction from his first London show with the prestigious Hazlitt Gallery in 1952. He showed at the Annan Gallery in Glasgow the following year and with The Scottish Gallery again in 1954. This was an outpouring of work after the frustration of six years of active service; life opened up for Peploe. He had a new studio in Church Lane, the art master’s position at

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Fettes, a circle of friends who included artists and poets and the possibility of travel. Two friends, Dr John Guthrie and his wife Vivien, herself the daughter of the painter John Duncan, moved to Kyrenia in Northern Cyprus and Peploe made an extended trip in 1951 as evidenced by work in his exhibitions in the early 1950s. He also returned to Spain in 1950, to San Feliu and then Peniscola in 1955 and with his wife Elizabeth on an extended honeymoon based in Cuenca in 1957. With marriage and his position at Edinburgh College of Art, where he began in 1954, life took on a settled pattern and although he did not stop painting he did stop exhibiting, beyond his yearly entry for the Summer Exhibition at the RSA where he became an associate in 1956. Painting was a true vocation for Peploe, he had a modesty that bordered on diffidence and unless persuaded out, he remained a private person content with family and studio.

He was sensitive to comparisons with his father and signed his pictures Denis P to avoid any possible confusion. His reviews never avoided mention of his father but always credited the younger Peploe as being his own man, and this is true; one could never be confused with the other.

However, they had a very similar approach: each picture was a response to a particular subject, either intellectual or emotional: responses to the conundrum of a still life composition or the demands of a particular day in the landscape.

Stylistic variety – from a rich impasto applied with a palette knife for the rugged hillside of Tarskavaig to thin glazes to capture a misty vista at Ambleside – is always made to serve the emotional truth of the subject. In his later career, exhibitions at The Scottish Gallery saw a late flowering of talent with his last three exhibitions receiving rave reviews and despite the accolades, my father remained modest throughout his life.

Guy Peploe

Denis Peploe in his Edinburgh studio, c.1980.

The Scotsman Publications Ltd

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Denis Peploe (1914–1993)

The mountains of Sutherland: Suilven, Stac Pollaidh, Cul Mor and Quinaig need no dramatisation. Rising from sea level to near 3,000 feet, from a barren plane of rock and lochans, the mountains are Scotland’s most dramatic. Few painters have sought to attempt their portraits, content to allow their distant ridges to form horizons. Denis Peploe liked to let his mountains fill the picture space, he liked the harsh, adamantine presence, shrouded with cloud, weather closing in. Often based in Wester Ross, in Plockton at the home of his friends Torquil and Isabel Nicholson, he walked and climbed seeking the familiarity which allowed him to make this ancient landscape his own.

Commando-training in the War had made him tough and confident with map and compass, but always respectful of the unpredictability of the high tops, respect conveyed in each brushstroke.

Denis Peploe (1914–1993) 55. Suilven, Sutherland, c.1960 oil on canvas, 49.5 x 59.5 cm signed lower right

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Denis Peploe still life has much in common with the still life of his father S. J. Peploe (1871–1935).

Sometimes he varies into interior and exterior setting or entirely eradicates a conventional picture space in favour of the three-dimensional objects floating on a two-dimensional surface.

Here he is closer to Peploe père, posing his objects on a tip-tilted surface, contrasting the delicacy of his flower arrangement and pierced pottery compotier with the solidity of the mangoes and grapes. A ‘difficult’ and unusual green drape behind demands a careful colour composition which he achieves with panache.

Denis Peploe (1914–1993) 56. Jugs, Grapes and Mangoes, c.1985 oil on canvas, 58.5 x 49 cm signed lower left exhibited

Denis Peploe Memorial Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1995, cat. 54

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S. J. Peploe’s Cassis S. J. Peploe first visited the Mediterranean in the summer of 1913. He travelled to Cassis, between Marseilles and Toulon with Margaret and their child Willy. He had expressed reservations to J. D. Fergusson about the heat of the south for the boy, who had been born in August 1910 in Royan, but was persuaded, in Fergusson’s recollection, by the chance of seeing a paper with the word ‘Cassis’ on it outside his studio apartment on Blvd. Raspail.

Willy’s third birthday was celebrated along with Fergusson and his American partner Anne Estelle Rice, ‘We had his birthday there and after a lot of consideration we chose a bottle of Chateau Lafite rather than champagne. Chateau Lafite to me now means that happy lunch on the verandah overlooking Cassis Bay, sparkling in the sunshine.’ (J. D. Fergusson, Memories of Peploe, Scottish Art Review, vol VIII, no. 3, 1962) But Peploe was there to work, he had an exhibition arranged in London in the spring of 1914 and had had little time to paint after the logistics of the move back to Edinburgh, the distractions of fatherhood and finding a new studio and place to live. As with the stimulation of a new subject in Royan three years previously, Cassis proved an inspiration.

Cassis is surrounded by a landscape covered in pine and maquis with dramatic mountains behind; the cliffs above the village are called the Couronne de Charlemagne where a ruinous castle remains adamant. The coast to the east is one of deep fjords called calanques. Its natural harbour could take sizeable schooners and had picturesque three-storey buildings on the front. In 1913, it was a fishing village with only two hotels, including the Panorama where the Scots party stayed. Many different subjects appealed to Peploe: the boats in the harbour,

S. J. Peploe, A Street in Cassis, 1913 (detail) (cat. 57)

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the wild wooded landscape beyond and, in particular, the narrow streets behind the front and those falling steep from the massif above, where the train station brought everything from Marseilles. Signac had worked here in 1888, urging Van Gogh to join him, describing it as ‘white, blue and orange handsomely scattered through lovely landscapes. All around rhythmically curving mountains.’ Peploe would return in 1924 and again in 1928 and 1930 when he painted larger, lyrical landscapes. In 1913, he was productive, responding to the immediacy of all this new and information with colour and structure to produce joyful, expressionist works which can be seen now to consolidate all his work thus far as a modernist and colourist.

The show in London with John Baillie at his eponymous gallery in Bayswater included 39 paintings, more than half of Cassis and was reviewed in The Studio.

Among English painters who have been affected by post-impressionism Mr SJ Peploe holds one of the first places. It would seem that the theory of post-impressionism is too strong for an English artist’s head. Mr Peploe affords us the rare instance of an artist whose head is stronger than the theories he has embraced, he uses them rather than artificially succumbing to them. Consequently, he gets the best out of them, gaining from them what license for freedom of line and abandonment of colour he may require, but preserving always evidence of contact with life as well as theory, retaining vitality and the power to convince where so many under the same influence have entirely lost these.

Studio vol LX, 1914, p.323

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S. J. Peploe (1871–1935)

A Street in Cassis may well have been included in a 1914 London exhibition, but was retained subsequently in the family until the thirties when it was acquired, along with another of a similar subject, by Stanley Cursiter (illustrated in Peploe, An Intimate Memoir by Cursiter, plate 17, 1947). Cursiter (1887–1976) was an important Scottish painter and polymath, becoming Keeper of the National Gallery of Scotland from 1930. He was a great advocate for the Colourists and Peploe in particular, acquiring several key works for the Nation and writing his book on Peploe in 1947. He lent both works to the Memorial Exhibition at The Scottish Gallery in 1936. The gallery sold A Street in Cassis to an Edinburgh architect in the exhibition noted below in 1977 and it has returned to us by descent, completing a 110-year provenance.

A Street in Cassis is made in brilliant afternoon light, the sharp profile of the shadows across the street providing essential building blocks of tonal composition, the shadow not elusive but definitive. The technique is impressionistic; deft strokes, but not of uniform length, and the colour, based in the reality of the experience (remember Signac), is pushed to the point of expressionism. The tiles and beams of the roof structures are zingy orange, the walls white in the heat and yellow in the shade. The road curves into a hairpin to the left, inviting us to walk down. The view of the hill beyond is hot and mineral and the blue sky unleashes heat, making us hope that the artist has at least set up his easel in the shade.

S. J. Peploe (1871–1935) 57. A Street in Cassis, 1913 oil on panel, 41 x 33 cm signed lower left exhibited

Memorial Exhibition of Paintings by S. J. Peploe, 1936, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, cat. 63 Dr Stanley Cursiter ‘Recent Acquisitions’, April–May 1977, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, cat. 93 provenance

The Collection of Stanley Cursiter CBE, FRSE, FRIAS, FEIS (1877–1976)

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Robin Philipson (1916–1992)

Robin Philipson (1916–1992) 58. Still Life with Two Bottles, 1957 oil on board, 18.5 x 21 cm signed lower right

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Robin Philipson (1916–1992) 59. Men Observed, 1982 pastel on paper, 22.5 x 27 cm signed and titled on label verso exhibited

Robin Philipson Retrospective, Edinburgh College of Art, Festival 1989, cat. 118 provenance

Ancrum Gallery, Roxburghshire

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Girl Approaches II was exhibited with The Gallery in August of the long, hot summer of 1976 and the heat that this sophisticated painting in luscious watercolour radiates is palpable. Philipson uses a favourite device as he divides his picture into panels, here five.

The central panel, a picture within a picture, depicts a zebra, exotic and wild. Flanking are female and male figures, he naked, turned away, his hand to his face; she moves forward approaching, barely clothed, eroticised.

Our nature is exposed, passion curtailed or suspended, civilisation a veneer over our animal instinct.

Robin Philipson (1916–1992) 60. Girl Approaches II, 1976 watercolour on paper, 67.5 x 67.5 cm exhibited

Robin Philipson, Festival Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1976, cat. 7

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Carlo Rossi (1921–2010)

Eugenio Federico Carlo Rossi was born in Johnstone, Renfrewshire in 1921. He was part of a large Italian community who had migrated to the area to provide services for industries such as coal mining, thread-making, cotton weaving, and engineering. The Bianchi, Deghelli, Giaconelli, Parducci, Rossi, and Tomei families were a close-knit community. Life in the Rossi household revolved around all things Italian. A precocious talent was evident from an early age – at four, Rossi’s father gave him his first commission: to make three drawings to advertise the pianola in the family café. His family encouraged Rossi to follow his artistic path and he entered the Glasgow School of Art in 1938. His teachers in the Mackintosh building included Hugh A. Crawford and Henry Young Alison. The latter had the unnerving habit of standing, accompanied by his pet terrier, behind a student busy working on a canvas, and suddenly exclaiming in a loud voice for all to hear: ‘See you, you canna paint, ma wee dug can paint better’n you’. These excoriating verbal castigations were often accompanied by the violent obliteration of the offending image. Despite such helpful advice, he was encouraged by J. D. Fergusson (1874–1961) to follow his own path to art. During his time at art school, he became friends with Joan Eardley, Alfredo Avella, and Margo Sandeman.

Rossi’s oil paintings of this period were carefully balanced compositions in soft muted tones.

During the war, Rossi met his future wife Vittoria

Carlo Rossi (1921–2010) 61. Still Life with Amarone, 1979 mixed media, 48 x 67 cm signed and dated upper left provenance

Torrance Gallery, Edinburgh

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Bertoncini who had come to Scotland from Italy as a student. They married in 1944 and had two children, Paolo and Mario. In 1947, Rossi travelled to Italy for the first time and three days after leaving the cold, grey surroundings of Glasgow the train emerged from the pass at Ventimiglia into the intense light of northern Italy. The sight of the pink and ochre painted houses with their terracotta tiles, surrounded by vines, set amid stands of cypress and pine trees along the west coast rail line to Pisa were a revelation. Barga would become his spiritual home; perched on the summit of a peak in the middle of the Tuscan Apennines, Rossi’s paintings of the hill-town are filled with warm colours depicting the red-roofed buildings, luxuriant foliage and represent the full impact of the atmosphere of an Italian midsummer's day. On his return to Scotland, he would transfer images recorded in Italy to canvas. Rossi applied the paint with great virtuosity, tempered always with a sensitive and poetic nature. Another everpresent aspect of Rossi’s paintings was music; he often compared his works to the music of Bach, describing his paintings as carefully orchestrated fugues of shapes and colours tied together by the geometry of line. He was elected a member of The Royal Scottish Society of Painters Watercolour and the Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts.

Edited extract from Paolo L. Rossi, 2011

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Margaret Kemplay Snowdon (1878–1965)

Margaret Kemplay Snowdon was born in Leeds, Yorkshire, in 1878. Her parents were Richard Kempley Snowdon, Head Curate of St John’s, Leeds, and Mary Louisa Milnes-Wright. She was called Margery by the family and this name stuck for the rest of her professional and social life. She became a close friend of Vanessa Bell when they studied together at the RS Schools and extensive correspondence between them is kept in the National Archives. Virginia Woolf referred to her as ‘old Snow’. Snowdon was an active exhibitor for twenty years after the Great War, when with enfranchisement and emancipation flowing from the Armistice, woman artists found a new-found confidence to pursue their artistic careers. Margery and her two sisters never married. Neglect continued to be the common experience for many woman artists and after the Second

World War Snowdon’s association with the Bloomsbury Group seemed ‘old hat’. She lived in relative obscurity, dying in Cheltenham in 1965, recorded by the London Gazette as ‘spinster’. Why? Her painted still lifes are both beautiful and beautifully crafted, her subjects more than dry, studio props: baskets of fruit, cut flowers, a Staffordshire figure painted with lively strokes and perfect tonal understanding.

Still Life with Mushrooms is a very fine example, making a compelling comparison with William Nicolson (1872–1949) whose Mushrooms were acquired by the Tate in 1940. Snowdon is ripe for rediscovery, her trajectory making her an ideal pick for any survey of British easel painting trying to redress the misogyny which has characterised the art world for much of the last century.

Margaret Kemplay Snowdon (1878–1965) 62. Still Life with Mushrooms, a Vase of Flowers and Pottery Flatback, 1935 oil on canvas, 45 x 45 cm signed and dated lower right exhibited

Royal Institute of Oil Painters, London, 1938

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Ethel Walker (b.1941)

Ethel Walker was born in Ayrshire in 1941 and studied at the Glasgow School of Art from 1959 to 1964. She works from her studio in Argyll and her recent practice is preoccupied with capturing the fleeting effect of light on the landscape. I hope to encapsulate a visual instant – a sense of immediacy and imminent change but also a sense of enduring place. Working in a muted palette, Table Top, which was painted in the mid 1980s, displays Walker’s skill in compositional design, and an energetic and free use of her chosen medium. She has exhibited continually since 1972, predominantly between Edinburgh and London. Her works are held in a number of public collections including the Lillie Art Gallery, the Edinburgh City Art Centre and Argyll Council.

Ethel Walker (b.1941) 63. Table Top, c.1986 gouache and pastel on paper, 55 x 75 cm signed lower right exhibited

Torrance Gallery, Edinburgh, 1986

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Carel Weight (1908–1997)

Carel Weight, CH, CBE, RA was born in London in 1908. His parents placed Weight with a foster mother, within a working-class district. He would spend weekends in his parents' middleclass household and became acutely aware of the contrast between deprivation and affluence.

From an early age he was sensitive to the unexpected – the shock of burning buildings or a bus mounting the pavement; these early experiences became part of his visual territory and informed his social realism. Irish Cottage is an astute observation of a rural farming community and the working houses which serve the farms. There is a partially obscured couple in the foreground wearing country attire, Carel Weight is quoted as saying: ‘Even when I paint a landscape out of doors, and I say I’m not going to put any figures in; when I get back to the studio I always paint in figures; it would be too lonely without people.’ Weight studied at the local Hammersmith School of Art (1928–30).

He taught art at Beckenham School of Art (1932–39). He exhibited at the Royal Academy

and the Royal Society of British Artists and was a committee member of the Artists International Association, which helped artists fleeing Nazi Europe. After being called up to the Royal Engineers, he taught with the Army Education Corps (1944–45) before being sent to Italy as an official War Artist (1945–46). After the War, Weight was invited to teach at the Royal College of Art, London, where students included David Hockney and he became Principal of Painting there in 1957. Sir Robin Philipson, Principal at Edinburgh College of Art 1960–1982 invited Weight to be an external assessor in the late 1960s. He was awarded a CBE in 1962. The following year he painted the mural Christ and the People for Manchester Cathedral, and in 1965 was elected RA, and was honoured with a one-man exhibition at the Academy in 1982.

His work is held in public collections: Tate, London; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Imperial War Museum, London, and the Government Art Collection. His work was in the private collection of David Bowie.

Carel Weight (1908–1997) 64. Irish Cottage, c.1977 oil on board, 39 x 54 cm signed upper left exhibited

Business Art Galleries, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1978

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Gordon Hope Wyllie (1930–2005)

Gordon Hope Wyllie was born in Greenock in 1930, where he was educated at the Highlanders Academy and later Greenock High School where he became Principal Teacher of Art and Design.

He studied at the Glasgow School of Art from 1949 to 1953, under the tutelage of William and Mary Armour, and later with Ian Fleming at Hospitalfield in Arbroath. Whilst at Glasgow, Wyllie was awarded a post-diploma and received both the RSA Award and the Newbery Medal. Wyllie was elected to RSW in 1967 and enjoyed a long exhibiting career including the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh and the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine

Gordon Hope Wyllie (1930–2005) 65. Long Landscape, 1984 watercolour on paper, 12.5 x 76 cm signed and dated lower right provenance

Torrance Gallery, Edinburgh

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Arts amongst others. Wyllie was an outdoors enthusiast, and as a keen cyclist and climber, his interest in the landscape came from a familiarity with the geography and atmosphere around his home in Argyll and the high Northwest.

His great skill was combining detailed draughtsmanship with an expressive language, suited to capture the drama of light and weather.

His late works, which are concerned with man’s interaction with nature, often feature the motif of rural architecture, with cottages seemingly dwarfed by the vast wildness of the landscape beyond.

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Published by The Scottish Gallery to coincide with the exhibition Modern Masters XVI January 2024 Exhibition can be viewed online at www.scottish-gallery.co.uk/modernmasters ISBN: 978-1-912900-78-7 Produced by The Scottish Gallery Designed by Kenneth Gray Photography by John McKenzie Printed by Pureprint Group 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. All essays and picture notes copyright The Scottish Gallery.

Cover: David Michie, Playing Outside the Pompidou Centre, Paris, c.1980, oil on canvas, 61 x 93 cm (cat. 52) (detail) Inside front cover: S. J. Peploe, A Street in Cassis, 1911, oil on panel, 41 x 33 cm (cat. 57) (detail) Inside back cover: Pat Douthwaite, Flowers in a Vase, 1982, pastel on paper, 29.5 x 20.5 cm (cat. 24) (detail)

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