This room contains the highlights of our Scottish Collection at the Scottish National Gallery.
It contains works dating from the mid-nineteenth century through to around the beginning of
the twentieth century.
It’s a diverse group, but a really interesting one, and sheds light on many different aspects
of Scottish painting of this time.
Some of the earliest works here are by William McTaggart who is seen now as one of our great
landscape painters.
When he started painting, he was very much interested in people in the landscape and
you get a very good sense of his detailed attention to every blade of grass, the sort
of expressions of the young girls in this picture. This selection on this wall gives
a really good sense of a detailed interest in things that are real but also fantastic
in a way.
This beautiful painting which is one of our most favourite pictures by William Bell Scott
who’s a very interesting artist who was born in Edinburgh, painted this painting ‘Una
and the Lion’ which is based on a sort of fantastic renaissance story and yet he places
it, very much in a real setting, in a wooded glade that I think many people would recognise,
not least because of the oak leaves which are turning because it’s autumn but because
of things, details like the rowan berries that Una is carrying. It’s a really I think
very evocative work and it’s something that lots of people find I think great solace in,
it is a very beautiful picture.
This is a painting of Glencairn in Moniaive by James Paterson who’s known now as one
of a group of artists called the Glasgow Boys, some of whom were very closely knit together
and spent parts of their career working and experimenting together. And then others who
had more loosely been associated with the Glasgow boys.
This is a place he represented many, many times, took sketches, worked from photographs
and this is one, in a sense, of the greatest representations that he produced of this beautiful
glen on a crisp autumn day with its reflections of the sky, it’s one of our real stunning
works.
Next to that is another landscape and it’s a well-known landscape and it’s a landscape
that has had a hugely long and very interesting history by Waller Hugh Paton. Waller Hugh
Paton has more in common I think in a way with William Bell Scott in the sense that
he’s interested in detail in minutia in capturing the landscape by painting every
single detail and creating a very evocative, a very dramatic, almost quite romantic view
of Dunnottar Castle.
On visiting the gallery at the end of the Second World War the great central European
artist, Oskar Kokoschka was really taken by this painting, he was shown round the gallery
by Stanley Cursiter, who was Director of the Gallery at that time. It was this picture
by William York Macgregor that Kokoschka felt was the one that would stay I n his mind after
he left, it was the one that really made his day. And it’s very exciting to think that
one of our, what seems to be a very mundane picture in some respects is one of the great
Scottish works in our collection.
This really does show a great observation of the everyday stuff of life. It looks so
effortless but a lot of thought has gone into creating this composition and it’s one that
has dramatically changed over the life in which it’s come together.
So, speaking of modern art brings us to this fantastic painting by Arthur Melville who’s
often seen as one of the great modernists in Scottish art. This is a relatively recent
acquisition and in the context of what we’ve been looking at so far, it’s a really interesting
painting.
It’s yet another landscape, but it’s a landscape that looks completely different
from everything that we’ve seen so far. It’s a chalk cutting with, probably, trains
in the centre but because it seems almost abstract, it’s very difficult to work out
the exact reality of what you’re looking at and it shows a real attempt to try and
capture a feeling, almost a sensation of light. It shows the distance that artists in Scotland
travelled technically over the course of just 50 years in the nineteenth century.
So another very interesting work by a woman artist we have in this room is this small
painting by Flora MacDonald Reid now as her name suggests, Flora MacDonald Reid had Scottish
parents but she was born in London and she spent time in Scotland and trained in Edinburgh
with her brother, but then she’s one of a number of artists, such as others in this
room, who travelled a lot in the late nineteenth century and her work reflects that travel.
The group that we’ve already talked about the Glasgow Boys, many of them went to France
to try and discover a different way of painting in the late nineteenth century and Flora MacDonald
Reid did the same. This rather beautiful little picture is of a little market scene in Bruges,
what’s now modern day Belgium, and if anyone has spent time at one of the sort of weekly
markets they have in these places, you get a real sense of the atmosphere that she’s
captured very beautifully here.
It’s a very clever painting, it’s a recent gift to the gallery and it’s enabled us
to think in a sense about the different experiences and training the women had and also their
exposure to many different types and schools of art.
If we think about landscape and Scottish artists, we really have to focus on William McTaggart,
and this is a tremendously exciting work from the end of his career. It doesn’t just show
the techniques for which he is often seen as being one of great forerunners of the twentieth
century, but it also shows a very important subject and that subject is the subject of
emigration.
It’s one of our few pictures in our collections, sadly, which focusses on the clearances which
is one of the traumatic events, in a way, of nineteenth century history. It’s something
that McTaggart doesn’t treat lightly in the sense that he’s from a part of Scotland,
from Argyll, that had seen the emigration of whole communities of people of the course
of the nineteenth century.
This is from the very end, it’s from 1895, and very often people are in two minds about
whether this is a nostalgic picture, looking back to an earlier period and in a sense giving
a sense with the sailing ship of people going away in the past, or whether it’s something
that’s still capturing an ongoing trend of people leaving and going to shores far
away.
It’s his treatment of the sea and the landscape and the skies that are often seen as being
very modern in a way but in every, just about every, McTaggart painting you see people and
people are central to his idea of nature.
Anna Traquair is a bit like McTaggart in the sense of someone that really did their own
thing in the late nineteenth century and one of the interesting female artists that are
on display. I suppose really from the 1880’s onwards is when we begin to see more women
artists producing work that is then sold and acquired in the galleries because it’s really
only from that period that women are able to have a more professional training.
This is a little painting, oil and canvas, and why it’s so interesting in comparison
to the McTaggart is that it shows a view of the borders and the Leaderfoot Viaduct which
was a part of Scotland that we know that Traquair really loved because it pops up in so many
of her enamels and paintings. It comes up again and again at the Song School, one of
her mural projects.
She was an artist that worked in many, many different types of art. She produced paintings,
she produced embroideries, we have representation here of works that people are perhaps more
familiar with, which are currently resting because we’re saving them for something
for the future. She produced enamel, book covers, illuminated manuscripts, she was just
one of these really interesting people form the late nineteenth century who did, at a
very high degree of quality, produced incredible work.