When the galleries began buying modern French art,
they had a very tiny budget of £1,000 a year
and so they relied very much on gifts and bequests from generous donors.
Among the earliest collectors to buy Impressionist art were in fact
Scottish Industrialists
and during the 1890s, Alex Reid one of the most influential dealers,
who set up his gallery in Glasgow in 1889,
succeeded in selling works by Manet,
by Monet,
Pissarro, Sisley and Degas to a large number of collectors.
One of the great appeals
to collecting art in the past has always been
the concept of having a brand on your wall.
Typical collector would just become absolutely passionate
about a certain period in history
or a place
or a person.
That artistic taste is so driven by fashion,
by what we think is good
and it’s really important and it's very difficult to do
that when you're properly judging a work of art
you've got to step back from fashion and taste.
The market is always moving,
things can really vary in terms of popularity.
So what was maybe very, very popular for a long time
can then start to sort of wane
and then something new comes into fashion
and then it takes a long time
to really have a sense of whether that will pan out,
feels very, very cyclical.
With the Van Gogh there is almost
an innocence in the painting and maybe to the untrained eye
you could maybe disregard his technical ability.
Doing the remakes and try to do them justice.
In this day and age we’re all caught up in validation and social media
and Van Gogh never really had any of that
but continued to paint
and paint in that technique
where he has belief,
that perseverance.
The exhibition has two main themes,
on the one hand,
it looks at the development of modern French art.
And on the other hand,
it focuses on the pioneer collectors who bought these pictures
in the late 19th Century and the early 20th Century.
A good example of the generosity of some of these donors
is the collection which was left by Hugh Laird,
which you can see in the first room.
Scottish collectors were really quite remarkable
in the way that they developed a taste for
modern French painting in the second half of the 19th Century
and they were prepared to take a punt on contemporary art.
The Alexander Reid is a personal favourite and the story
about him living with Van Gogh.
He takes two of Van Goghs
one of them is in the Kelvingrove before the boom,
before anything,
so he was switched on
and had a very good eye, Alexander Reid.
There’s always two types of art markets I think,
there’s the collectors who want to buy art and then there's collectors
and speculators who buy something
because they think it's a good investment.
And there's always a tension between those two.
So, for example, you've got museums and curators
who want to buy a painting because it has a cultural value
and they're never going to sell it.
So they're competing against the people
who want to buy a Monet
because, actually it's quite a good place to store your money.
So there's always scope for the museum, who is fleet of foot
to identify artists who may become valuable
or celebrated in decades time.
And that's part of the game
that museums and curators have always had to play.
A surprising number of women collected
modern French art
during the late 19th century and the early 20th Century.
We have several examples in the exhibition.
One of the most intriguing is a woman called Rachel Beer.
She was known as the First Lady of Fleet Street
because she was editor of the Sunday Times and The Observer.
She was the first woman to hold a position like that.
The little Millet that you can see in the first room
was actually bought by her.
One of the most fascinating women collectors
is Evelyn Fleming,
who was married to Valentine Fleming of Fleming's Bank
and that was the source of her wealth.
She later became the lover of Augustus John,
who encouraged her to buy modern French art
and in her collection she had Van Gogh's Head of a Peasant Woman.
Now Evelyn Fleming is probably better known
to many people as the mother of Ian Fleming,
who was the creator of the James Bond novels.
Some people say that the contemporary art market,
half of it is fake.
I don't think I believe that.
But fakers have always been there.
I think one of the things that's so fascinating about fakes
is it introduces that concept of a whodunit into art
and there's a sort of
there's a bit of rebelliousness in there that the faker is trying to
to demonstrate that,
you know, the slightly snooty people at the top of the art world
don't always know what they're talking about.
Michelangelo's
the first work of art that Michelangelo ever sold was a fake.
He made a fake of an ancient Roman sculpture.
So they've always been with us
and the mere taking away of a correct attribution from an artwork
can change its value from $10 million to $1000,
which is crazy if you think about it
because it's still the same object
at the end of the day,
it's just got a different name attached to it.
There was a real industry for producing fakes on the back of
this expanding art market.
The galleries often relied on dealers to bring works for purchase,
the dealers were themselves were not always foolproof
and there were a number of fakes on the market,
especially in the 1920s.
Levels of connoisseurship were just not as great as they are today.
And on one particular occasion, the Galleries were sold
a work by Jean-François Millet,
which turned out to have been produced by a forger,
a man called Cazot,
who was working in collaboration with Millet’s grandson.
Today,
Impressionism and Post-Impressionism
still fetch huge prices at auction.
An example is the recent sale of a Monet Haystacks
painting for $100 million at Sotheby's in New York
and also a sale of a Gauguin painting from the Tahitian period
which was sold privately for $300 million fairly recently.
Obviously, with the Impressionist market
it's just been rising and rising for decades
and new world records are being set all the time.
They've just recently set a Degas record in May,
so people love to talk about investing in art
but it's a tricky business.
We saw during the pandemic that the art market
just keeps on functioning
and if you look at the First World War and the Second World War,
the auction houses, they keep on going.
People need to sell art, they want to buy art still.
Quite healthy in a long term art historical point of view
to have that sort of churn
where things change hands and tastes evolve.
You know there's quite wide ranging influence
on what people are interested in
or how they get introduced to artists or how they kind of
come back on their horizon.
So yeah, things like big exhibitions
and then once people are excited,
at auction, there's no ceiling on what you can pay.
You just need two people to be in love with a picture and that's that.
And kind of yeah, interest builds
in specific artists or specific movements
and then that is what reflects on prices.
In the exhibition, you can see
is the collection of Hugh led.
The development of a taste
for modern French art really began in Scotland
in the second half of the 19th century.
The rise of a new type of collective,
the industrialist collector who was much more kind of adventurous
in his purchasing
than the previous generation, tended to stick to old masters.