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Raeburn's formative
influence, in the domain of portraiture, on the rising Scottish school, is
apparent in the work of his contemporaries and successors—of George Watson,
Watson Gordon, Graham Gilbert, and Daniel Macnee. George Watson became the
first president of the Scottish Academy on its formation in 1826, and his
portraiture has so much superficial resemblance to Raeburn's that in the
judgment of Mr Caw, "the unscrupulous will some day pass off the best of his
portraits (that of himself and of Benjamin West, the President of the Royal
Academy, for instance) upon the unwary as examples of the greater painter."
"Workmanlike and worthy of respect," is the estimate of the same critic. The
finest of those of Watson Gordon, on the other hand, are said to approach
Raeburn's in merit. He certainly fell heir to Raeburn's popularity and
painted many of the notables of his time up to his death in 1864. He reached
his highest level in his later period in his portraits of Lord Cockburn,
Henry Houldsworth, the Provost of Peterhead, David Cox. He was elected a
member of the Royal Academy in 1851 and became President of the Royal
Scottish Academy in 1850 in succession to Sir William Allan. Graham Gilbert,
who, after his marriage to a Glasgow heiress, settled in the western city,
came near in his "James Hamilton" and "John Gibson" to challenging Watson
Gordon's supremacy, and, as his "Love Letter" shows, excelled him in the
portrayal of feminine charm, in which the latter was distinctly weak. Daniel
Macnee long shared with Graham Gilbert the patronage of the western city
before becoming President of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1876, when he
removed to Edinburgh. He has been described as "an understudy of Rafburn,"
and his best work, of which his portraits of Dr Ward-law, Charles Mackay as
Bailie Nicol Jarvie, and "The Lady in Grey" are the finest examples,
deserves the description: "None of them," says Dr McKay, in reference to the
successors of Raeburn, "take equal rank with the founder of the school, but
three of the group may be said, by the addition of individual qualities, to
have widened the scope of native portraiture. If a selection of the more
notable works of Watson Gordon, Graham Gilbert, and Macnee were aligned with
an equal number of representative Raeburns, though the former would suffer
by contact with Sir Henry's masterly technique—the brilliant ensemble that
takes one by storm—there would nevertheless be found an advance in that
intimacy of observation and characterisation which is a dominant note in the
best production of recent times."
Like Raeburn in portraiture,
David Wilkie (1785-1841) exercised a formative influence on Scottish
painting in the department of genre, i.e., in the depicting of scenes or
subjects from life. Born in 1785 in the "manse of Cults in Fifeshire", he
became a pupil of John Graham in 1799, when Raeburn was already famous. At
the age of 19, after he had finished his training under Graham, he gave in "Pitlessie
Fair " a foretaste of his genius as a genre painter. In 1805 he went to
London to study in the schools of the Royal Acadcmy, and in the following
year sprang into fame with his "Village Politicians," which he sent to the
Academy's Exhibition. Three years later he was elected an associate, and in
1812 a member of the Royal Academy. These distinctions, to be followed later
by the appointment of Painter in Ordinary to George IV., and a Knighthood
from William IV., were richly merited by the developing mastery revealed by
"The Blind Fiddler," "The Rent Day," "The Village Festival," which belong to
the years between 1800 and 1812, and show the influence of Toniers and
Ostade on his work. In the following year the Exhibition contained what is
perhaps the most popular of all his creations—"Blind Man's Buff." In the
next ten years he produced most of his characteristic work, including "The
Penny Wedding," in 1819; "The Reading of the Will" in 1820, and "The Chelsea
Pensioners" reading the news of Waterloo in 1822, for the Duke of
Wellington. A sojourn on the Continent for reasons of health, which lasted
several years, led him to essay the grander style of the Spanish masters and
to devote himself to portraiture and pictorial subjects. The change of style
is pronounced by the critics to be a lapse into an atmosphere in which the
real Wilkie is not in his true element. "In those life-size portraits and
illustrations of long past or recent history," says Dr McKay, "one
recognises many admirable artistic qualities, but no longer the unique
Wilkie." Even in his true sphere—that of reflecting the homely incidents of
real life—he has his limitations. "Although," says Mr Caw, "he drew his
subjects from the life of the Scots peasantry, he only touched it at certain
points." It may be said, nevertheless, that he did for old Scottish life in
the realm of art what Scott did for it on a grander scale in that of
fiction, and Burns in a more restricted degree in that of poetry. He
depicted its characteristic features at a time when character and custom
were undergoing a transition in keeping with change in the social and
industrial life of the country. True, his settlement in London enlarged the
scope of the subjects treated, which include characteristic scenes of
English life. "The Village Festival," for instance, is characteristically
English, and the setting of "Blind Man's Buff" is also English. But there is
no mistaking the Scottish flavour of such productions as "The Blind
Fiddler," "The Penny Wedding," "The Rent Day." They were and have continued
to be extremely popular in Scotland, and exercised a marked influence on the
work of Scottish genre painters of his own and the immediately succeeding
generations, such as Alexander Fraser, John Burnet, and William Kidd. Later
in the century this influence was perpetuated in the humorous scenes of
Erskine Nicol (1825-1904), and the pathetic presentations of Thomas Faed
(1820-1900).
William Allan (1792-1850),
the second President of the Scottish Acadamy, may be described as the
pioneer of the historical genre in Scotland. In early life he spent some
years in Russia, and later, besides revisiting Russia, travelled in Italy,
Greece, Asia Minor, and Spain. He portrayed scenes of oriental life
suggested in the course of his travels. His intimacy with Scott quickened
his interest in the history and romance of his own land, which found
pictorial expression in a series of scenes from the lives of Bruce, Knox,
the Regent Murray, etc. " They are not distinguished by any great artistic
merit, and his work is more interesting as inaugurating a new development in
Scottish painting than on its own account." As the master of Harvey, Duncan,
and Scott Lauder, who studied under him in the Trustees Academy, his
influence in this respect was considerable. All three drew largely on the
Waverley Novels for their historic material. Duncan, who died in 1845 at the
age of 38, excelled as a colourist in his dramatic representations of
episodes in the life of Prince Charles, which gained him the associateship
of the Royal Academy, and his "Martyrdom of John Brown of Priest-hill." Sir
George Harvey (1806-76), who succeeded Watson Gordon as fourth President of
the Royal Scottish Academy, also reached a high level in his most telling
historic pictures ("Drum-clog," "Quitting the Manse," "The Sabbath in the
Glen"), and, besides, treated genre subjects with remarkable spirit in "The
Schule Scailin'," "Sheep Shearing," etc. Lauder was more distinguished as
master of the Trustees Academy than as a painter, but he scored one striking
success in "The Trial of Effie Deans."
As in the case of Thomas
Duncan, David Scott's career (1800-49) was cut short by a comparatively
early death, and was, besides, clouded by melancholy begotten of ill-health
and ill-deserved lack of recognition. A brilliant colourist with a powerful
imagination, but defective draughtsmanship, he also may be classed among the
historical painters of the earlier nineteenth century, though his
predilection was for the abstract rather than the concrete side of his
historical material. Pictures like " The Traitor's Gate " and " The Spirit
of the Storm," of which the Duke of Gloucester and Vasco da Gama are
respectively the subjects, are instinct with the meaning which it was his
main purpose to convey. It was the significance of action, rather than the
action itself that interested him, and in these pictures he succeeded in
giving expression to the thought and emotion underlying the scene with
powerful effect. Later in the century the historical or semi-historical
subject found capable exponents in Sir Noel Paton (1821-1901), Robert
Herdman (1829-88), and Sir W. Fettes Douglas (1822-91). "Luther at Erfurt"
is one of Paton's finest creations. But his main interest was in religious
allegory and in the realm of fancy, and the pictures in which he gave
expression to religious and moral verities, such as "The Pursuit of
Pleasure," or sought to visualise the fairy world ("Oberon and Titania ),
display an exuberant imagination and a richly inventive faculty, and won an
enormous popularity. Herdman also successfully used history with a moral
purpose in such pieces as "A Conventicle Preacher before the Justices,"
"After the Battle," and "St Columba Rescuing a Captive." Fettes Douglas, who
became President of the Academy in 1882, had a predilection for the
recondite realm of alchemy and astrology, and his antiquarian interest
appears most characteristically in "The Alchemist," "The Visit to the False
Astrologer," "The Rosicrucian."
Scottish landscape painting
takes its rise with Alexander Naysmyth and his pupil John Thomson
(1778-1840), minister of Duddingston, and the friend of Walter Scott. In
spite of the varied grandeur and beauty of Scottish scenery, the feeling for
nature was long dormant. English travellers in the seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries were repelled by the wild vistas of mountain and moor,
and among the strange criticisms of things Scottish in which they indulge
none astonishes the modern reader more than their obtuse judgments of the
landscape north of the Tweed. The treeless Lowlands in those days might ill
compare with the sylvan beauties of England. But even the magnificent
panoramas of the Highlands fail to impress the eye of Captain Burt, for
instance, who pronounces the mountains "disagreeable"—the more so when the
heather is in bloom and the day is clear! Scotsmen themselves for the most
part had lost the sense of nature, to which the Scottish poets of the
Renaissance period had given expression. In the later eighteenth and the
early nineteenth centuries there came a marked awakening of the aesthetic
sense, and the new feeling for nature found appreciative expression in The
Seasons of James Thomson, in Ossian, Allan Ramsay, Burns, Scott, Hogg, and
Byron. From literature this appreciation passed into art in the landscapes
of A. Naysmyth, John Watson, and especially of the Duddingston minister. The
Rev. John Thomson, whilst failing to shake himself free from the
conventional manner, was "the first to seize and express fitly the true
character of Scottish landscape." Horatio M'Culloch (1805-67), who shows his
influence, put on the canvas many striking studies of Highland landscape,
though his art is still, like that of Thomson, hampered by the conventional.
The same may be said of his less popular, but eminently deserving
contemporary Milne Donald. With Sir George Harvey, who in his later years
devoted himself to landscape, and J. C. Wintour, it became more realistic,
truer to nature, more intimate and personal. This feature is increasingly
apparent in the works of Sam Bough— the most vivacious of men and
artists—and his intimate associate Alexander Fraser, who, "in determination
to paint everything from the thing itself," rivalled the most fervent of the
Pre-Raphaelites, and whose art is the outcome of how he saw nature, and a
record of what he most admired.
Compared generally with the
painting of the first half of the nineteenth century, that of the succeeding
period becomes less conventional, and more naturalistic and individualist.
This feature is already apparent to some extent in the work of some of the
painters already mentioned. It becomes more marked in that of the pupils of
Scott Lauder in the sixth decade of the century, to whose teaching it owed
much. This period saw, too, the rise of the Glasgow School, which developed
independently on impressionist lines, and attained a European reputation and
influence. Lauder's pupils are distinguished by the feeling for colour with
which their master inspired them from the great Venetian colourists.
Brilliancy of colour and the pictorial sense are distinctive features of the
works of Crehardson, Pettie, Chalmers, M'Taggart, Cameron, M'Whirter, Peter
Graham, and others, in the various branches in which they practised. Other
notable painters, though not belonging to this brilliant group, such as Sir
George Reid, Robert Gibb, William Hole, Martin Hardie, Ogilvy Reid, J. R.
Reid, J. E. Christie, Robert M'Gregor, Robert Alexander, Denovan Adam, have
lent distinction to Seottish art in recent times in the departments of
historic-domestic genre, landscape, portraiture, animal painting. The
Glasgow School was the result of a strongly realistic revolt from artistic
tradition, and was influenced by French realism. It took definite shape in
Scotland in the eighties, and among its pioneers were .Tames Guthrie, James
Paterson, George Henry, W. Y. M'Gregor, E. A. Walton. John Lavery, Alexander
Roche.
It fought its way to
recognition with all the verve of ardent conviction against the prejudice of
the Academy, and succeeded by force of merit in winning a leading place in
art exhibitions at home and abroad.
Scotland has thus within 100
years steadily developed an art which is strong in the delineation of
Scottish character, domestic life, history, and landscape. It reflects the
national temperament, and though foreign influences—Italian, Dutch, Spanish,
or French—are traceable throughout, the national element is un-mistakeable.
"No one familiar with the history of painting in Scotland," says Mr Caw in
the luminous resume which concludes his highly competent and suggestive
review of Scottish Painting Past and Present, " since it became a living art
in the pictures of Raeburn, Wilkie, and Thomson, will find it difficult to
trace a more or less connected development, and to find in its successive
phases qualities, subjective, emotional, and technical, eminently
characteristic of the Scottish people." For a small country to have produced
so much in this domain of culture within little more than a century is a
remarkable achievement. Still more remarkable that so much of it has
attained a very high level of excellence, and that in more recent times it
has commanded the homage of Europe as "one of the few and original
manifestations in modern painting."
To the work of Raeburn and
Wilkie is mainly due the early development of art in Scotland as a
distinctive feature of Scottish culture and an influence in the national
life. Some share of the merit belongs, however, to the Trustees Academy, and
especially to the teaching of John Graham, who became master in 1798, and
among whose pupils were David Wilkie, William Allan, and John Watson Gordon.
Originally a school of applied art, it become under Graham also a school for
the training of artists, and under his successors Andrew Wilson and Sir W.
Allan, who was appointed master in 1826, when accommodation was assigned to
it in the Royal Institution, this feature of the instruction was continued
and developed. The appointment of Scott Lauder in 1852 greatly increased its
formative influence. In 1808 a beginning was made in the direction of
professional organisation by the formation at Edinburgh of the Society of
Incorporated Artists. The Society held annual exhibitions for several years,
and these exhibitions tended to arouse a wider interest in painting.
Hitherto, according to Lord Cockburn, there had been no public taste for
art, and, except for Raeburn's works, no market for the productions of
Scottish artists. A marked change for the better now set in, and these
exhibitions were a distinct success. In five years' time a sum of £1800 had
been accumulated. Unfortunately, the majority of the members resolved in
1813 to distribute this sum among themselves instead of devoting it, as
Raeburn and others advised, for the purpose of establishing a permanent
body. The enterprise accordingly lapsed, though the annual exhibition was
continued till 1810. Three years later another organisation took shape in
the "Institution for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts in Scotland," which
proposed to attain this end by holding annual exhibitions of ancient
masters, and devoting the proceeds to the relief of deserving, but
impecunious artists. The ancient masters in Scotland were, however, too few
to furnish an attractive exhibition, and ere long it was found necessary to
include the works of living artists. In 1820 it found a location in the
Royal Institution which the Roard of Manufactures had built on the Mound.
Unfortunately, friction arose between the management and the resident
artists, who were allowed no voice m the administration, and in this year
the latter determined to establish a separate professional organisation or
academy, and to apply for a royal charter. The request was refused, and the
boon accorded instead to the Institution. The artists, nevertheless,
persevered in their undertaking, and for a couple of years rival exhibitions
were held by the two bodies. In this struggle the artists, backed by the
public support, emerged victorious. The Royal Institution agreed to confine
its attention to the acquisition of "ancient pictures as a nucleus of a
national collection," and left to their rivals the exhibition of
contemporary works. It was from this clash of rival organisations that the
Royal Scottish Academy, which received its charter in 1837, was evolved. The
Academy held its exhibitions in the Royal Institution, and there was further
friction with the Board of Manufactures until in 1855 it at last obtained,
through Government intervention, the benefit of a separate establishment in
the National Gallery on the Mound, which was erected from funds furnished by
Parliament and the Board respectively.
Like Edinburgh, Glasgow also
had its difficulties in promoting the interests of art. The Diletante
Society commenced a series of exhibitions in 1838 which continued annually
for about a decade. An Art Union was started in 1841, and later the West of
Scotland Academy came into a struggling existence. These attempts proved,
however, ultimate failures, and "it was not till the Institute of the Fine
Arts was founded in 1861 that the advantages of well organised and
representative annual exhibitions were secured for 'the second city.'" Six
years later the Glasgow Art Club was started, and ultimately became the
centre of art life in Glasgow with its own annual exhibition. The Royal
Scottish Water Colour Society, founded in 1878, has also its headquarters in
Glasgow. Other artist societies have come into existence in both Edinburgh
and Glasgow—the Society of Scottish Artists, the Glasgow Society of Artists,
the Society of Lady Artists—and also at Aberdeen, Dundee, and other
provincial towns.
Art collections, so necessary
for the cultivation of the public taste as well as for the education of
artists, are available for both purposes in the National Gallery on the
Mound, the National Portrait Gallery in Queen Street, due to the enlightened
generosity of Mr Findlay of Aberlour; in the Corporation Museum of Art at
Kelvingrove, Glasgow; and in the Art Galleries of Dundee, Aberdeen, Stirling,
and other towns. Art education has also undergone a marked development. In
1858 the Trustees Academy was affiliated to the Science and Art Department
in London, the life class being transferred to the Royal Scottish Academy.
In 1899 the function of the Science and Art Department iu Scotland passed to
the Scottish Education Department, and with its co-operation the Edinburgh
Town Council took the lead in establishing a new and thoroughly equipped
College of Art by providing the site on which the new building was erected
from a fund derived from a large Government grant, supplemented by public
subscriptions. Glasgow has not been behind Edinburgh in the provision of a
first-class art school, which since 1890 has provided a comprehensive art
training, and, like the Edinburgh School, it is recognised by the Scottish
Education Department as a central institution for Glasgow and the West. The
well equipped Aberdeen School possesses the same status, and performs the
same function for the northern district. Edinburgh is the only University
which possesses a chair of the Fine Arts, but art teaching is included in
the curriculum of a considerable number of secondary schools. |
