Sir James Guthrie HRA PRSA HRSW 1859-1930

For James Guthrie, the summer months of 1882 were crucial. Depictions of steep, grassy hillsides with resting labourers, painted in the open-air, in emulation of Jules Bastien Lepage’s Les Foins, (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) became a favourite motif. However, as his work developed throughout the mid-1880s, Guthrie faced insurmountable difficulties that at one point led him to think of abandoning his career as a painter. The astonishing succès d’estime of his early work could not be sustained and even medium-sized canvases such as Schoolmates (Musée des Beaux Arts, Ghent) took much longer to complete than anticipated, while large works such as Fieldworkers sheltering from a Shower and The Stonebreaker were either delayed, destroyed or dismembered.

We look therefore to the few extant smaller works of these crucial years to gain access to Guthrie’s thinking. They reveal a formidable talent at moments when not under strain. Boy with a Straw, dated 1886, comes from this sequence. Guthrie’s brushwork is sketchy, spontaneous and expressive. The trees may be moving in a light breeze; the haystack and foreground debris are swiftly noted, but the artist sees no reason to sharpen contours or finish forms. This boy might be posing yet, having pulled a piece of straw from the haystack, he now engages both artist and spectator. Guthrie’s important little canvas coincides with Walton’s A Daydream (1885, National Galleries Scotland) and may even have suggested what became its essential mise-en-scène.

The relationship is obvious: Guthrie’s boy, like Walton’s girl, sits facing the spectator with his legs splayed out, and boots upturned. Yet where Walton perfects his picture for exhibition, Guthrie retains that sense of the temporary unfinished encounter. But in that moment of calm in the summer of 1886, when a boy with a straw in his hand marches up a hillside and sits before him, Guthrie’s realisation was complete – and for Glasgow School painters there was now a new visual turn.