The Wonderful World of James McBey: The Fine Art Society and Fettes Fine Art

McBey’s artistic pursuits were overshadowed by expectation during his early life in Scotland. Though he received prizes for his art at school, he left at fifteen to work at the North of Scotland Bank in Aberdeen. His free hours were spent at the public library, reading his way through their books on painting and etching. Printmaking appealed to him: “Etching had one advantage,’ he later said. ‘It did not necessitate the carrying about of bulky gear. I had not dared to sketch or paint out of doors… To spend time and energy on the study or practice of art was considered frivolous – the diversion of a trifler...” A self-taught artist, McBey’s earliest proofs were etched into plumber’s copper with a darning needle and printed using a household mangle while he worked on crafting a better press, based around the discarded piston of a marine engine.

In 1901, he made use of the public holiday marking the funeral of Queen Victoria to paint his first portrait in oil: an intimate portrayal of his grandmother that is now in the collection of Aberdeen Art Gallery. The same year he took evening classes at Gray’s School of Art, followed by a few private lessons. Two years later, a promotion at the bank saw McBey seconded to branches around Scotland, allowing him to sketch further afield and build a portfolio of work. By 1905 he had sufficient experience to submit work to the Royal Scottish Academy and Royal Glasgow Institute; both accepted and McBey became an exhibited artist.

At age 27, following his first exhibition at John Kesson in Aberdeen, he left the bank and moved to London with the intent to become a full-time artist. He admitted he “had not the slightest cause to imagine I might be able to earn a livelihood as an artist, but to founder quickly on the high seas appealed to me a better fate than to decay slowly in harbour.” In London he quickly found success: through his first exhibition at Goupil’s he had sold 77 works within a month and soon attracted the attention of print-world heavyweights Campbell Dodgson, Malcolm Salaman and Martin Hardie. With the help of his dealers, he found and leased a house and studio at Holland Park Avenue which he later bought. Though he would soon leave London, he kept the property and would return regularly throughout his life.

McBey’s first visit to Europe was in 1910 was driven by his artistic ambitions: he travelled to Holland and spent the next two months painting, sketching, and studying the etchings of Rembrandt in the Rijksmuseum. He sourced large quantities of characterful antique paper for his etchings which he used throughout his career. The following year he made his first visit to Spain, with the best work of his early London exhibitions inspired by the drama of bullfights. On this visit the works of Velasquez would serve has his inspiration.

In 1916 he was accepted into the Army Printing and Stationery Department at Rouen. He would soon leave for the Middle East, but made use of his posting by creating a series of etchings of Boulogne. Following his wartime excursion he took views of Holland, Belgium and the English Coast. The summers of 1924 and 25 were spent in Venice, where McBey rented a palazzo on the Grand Canal with Martin Hardie – who would later complete a catalogue raisonné of McBey’s work – and the art critic Duncan Macdonald. McBey sketched extensively in Venice and in the latter half of the 1920s produced three sets of Venice etchings, considered some of his finest work. Hardie would later comment that “…never have I known anyone with such untiring energy and passion for work. It began at dawn… at night he would be out again in gondola working on a copper plate by the light of three tallow candles in an old tin… I have known a day’s bag of an oil sketch, a brace of watercolours, several pen studies and an etching.”

McBey never lived in mainland Europe, but would continue to visit throughout his career as bases in England and Morocco provided easy access. Our 1927 oil of Villefranche shows an unusually loose and impressionistic street scene and is indicative of his move toward painting later in his career. The market for etchings declined in the 1930s and, like most prominent printmakers of the time, McBey adapted his practice to focus on painting and watercolour. Beyond economics, McBey’s transition to painting was also a response to his surroundings. Increasingly, he chose to spend time in the brighter, more colourful climes of North America and Morocco and adapted his work to suit the vibrancy of these environments.

Critic Duncan Macdonald, who had accompanied McBey and Hardie in Venice, arranged McBey’s first American exhibition at Knoedler’s in Chicago and visited with him in 1929. The two travelled from Chicago to Boston, Philadelphia and Washington. The exhibition coincided with the start of the Great Depression and was not a commercial success, though McBey met several contacts and patrons including Lessing Rosenwald and Harold Havelock Kynett. He returned to London with a new market unlocked and by the end of the following year was back in America. He established a Philadelphia studio in November 1930, and on December 3^rd of that year his diary reads “Taken by Sesslers to dine with Joseph and Beatrice Winokur. Met Marguerite.”

McBey and Marguerite Loeb, an artist-bookbinder from a wealthy family, married a little over three months after they met, and two days later sailed for England. The McBeys would return to America each winter to carry out portrait commissions; the outbreak of the Second World War during a visit to Marguerite’s family in Philadelphia would keep the couple stateside for seven years. McBey set up a second American studio in New York and they travelled widely within America during this time, including Florida, North Carolina – where he completed his sympathetic portrait of seven-year-old Vessie Owens in 1940 – and California.

McBey was particularly taken with the Pacific Coast; their visit lasted two months. He stated that “San Francisco is breathtaking in her loveliness. With the exception of that prospect from The Mountain in Tangier, I have seen nothing like it in all my wanderings.” In 1942 he became an American citizen, having been briefly accused of being a spy while undertaking his panoramic view of San Francisco they year prior. The scene included the positions of US battleships in the harbour which had aroused the suspicions of onlookers.

H H Kynett of Philadelphia followed McBey’s work closely after his first visit to America. After McBey’s death he donated his unrivalled collection of McBey’s work to Aberdeen Art Gallery. His advice and example inspired Marguerite to do the same, and to provide the gallery with a print room and library in memory of her husband.

McBey first visited Morocco in 1912 with Scottish-born Canadian artist James Kerr Lawson who he had met in London. Their journey was centred around Tangier and the market city of Tétouan, and the pair were captivated by the strong light, people and architecture. “It is really a wonderful place,” wrote McBey. “From an artist’s point of view the material is unlimited but it would take years to tap it, if it could be managed at all.” On the final day of their trip, they took note of a hillside property overlooking the Strait of Gibraltar that would one day become McBey’s home.

Twenty years after this first visit, James and Marguerite McBey crossed to Morocco during a visit to Spain and soon made arrangements to live there. They first stayed for the winter months but increasingly Morocco became their preferred country of residence. Their first properties at Tangier and Marrakesh served as preludes for ‘El Foolk’, the house McBey had seen in 1912 and purchased with 30 acres of garden in 1949. Much of the last decade of McBey’s life was spent here working on the house and garden, which the two documented extensively through photographs and sketches.

Like Spain and the coasts of America, the light of Morocco was particularly suited to McBey’s use of watercolour. Rather than using layers of pigment with free brushwork, his preference was to combine detailed pen and ink drawing with washes of pure pigment. The resulting works are light and clear, combining the draughtsmanship of his etching with the vibrancy of his surroundings. While the landscape served McBey well, Islamic teachings made it difficult to find sitters for his portraiture. He travelled to London and New York for Western commissions, while his Moroccan models were largely street vendors and prostitutes. In 1936 he convinced a young acrobatic performer and his five-year-old sister, Zohra, to sit for him, and the children became friends with the McBey family. Zohra would continue to sit for McBey for many years in some of his most sensitive paintings: a portrait of her hangs in The American Legation at Tangier, and another in this exhibition.

McBey’s attempts to enlist for the First World War were at first rejected due to his poor eyesight, and his 1916 assignment to the Army Printing and Stationery Department at Rouen looked like it would be his only involvement. The following year, however, he was recommended as an official war artist for the British Expeditionary Force in Egypt by Campbell Dodgson, then Keeper of the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum. “I can think of no artist more suitable for drawing in Egypt than James McBey,” he wrote. “He has made a considerable reputation as an etcher and also as a water-colour artist. As a draughtsman he first attracted attention by a fine set of drawings of Morocco in pen and ink outline and water-colour.”

This was a role that McBey relished, and he set off for Egypt in May 1917 with a press correspondent’s armband cut from a billiard tablecloth. He was attached to the Australian Camel Patrol, first in the Sinai Desert which served as a striking backdrop to the sketches he would later work up as etchings. From here they travelled on to Arabia, Jerusalem, Syria, Damascus, Aleppo and beyond. McBey’s wartime depictions were comprehensive; he portrayed the grim realities of fighting and death along with the landscape, architecture and local inhabitants of the places he visited.

By the end of the war his sitters included the prince who would become King Faisel I of Iraq and Lawrence of Arabia, and from his drawings in the desert he developed some of his most famous prints, fetching record prices for a contemporary etcher. At the end of his service, McBey was gifted with a ceremonial dagger – included in this exhibition – to mark his time with the Egyptian Expeditionary Force.