HISTORY OF THE NEW
1 JUNE - 29 JULY
EDINBURGH & LONDON
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Our summer show brings together artists who found themselves working at the threshold of the modern. It was this self-awareness and urge to make it new that motivated them as individuals and, for some, brought them into movements. They rejected the received wisdom of their day in favour of forging new ways of making art. They saw the world around them differently and made their mark telling us how. Amongst the myriad paintings and objects that will be on display in our two galleries in Edinburgh and London this summer are works from the 19th and 20th centuries; British and Scottish artists who worked as pioneers and whose work came to define a moment.
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Keith Vaughan (1912-1977), Landscape with whistling boy, Yorkshire, 1945 (detail) -
Sir John Lavery RA RSA (1856-1941), A Lady in Grey and Black, 1901 (detail)
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We are delighted to be participating in Portrait Mode, a nationwide celebration marking the reopening of the National Portrait Gallery, London, this June. Portraiture is quite unlike other genres. The best of it admits us a view on a character for better or worse, a person who has played a decisive part in history, a society we don’t know or understand. All this quite apart from the sensory pleasure of the object itself. If you can, please visit us, and see these wonderful objects in person. We look forward to welcoming you.
EMILY WALSH
Managing Director
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WAISTEL COOPER (1921 – 2003)
A group of sgraffito stoneware, 1950s
with incised sgraffito lines and oatmeal satin-glazed interiors
signed or initialled to the base
Waistel Cooper, along with his contemporaries Hans Coper and Lucie Rie, were a major force in the evolution of ceramics, instigating what would become a revolution in the forms of pottery. Elaborate Victorian pots were eschewed in favour of rough, textured, sculptural pieces.
Cooper’s route to making pots in Devon was circuitous. From Ayr Academy he attended Hospitalfield College of Art in Arbroath. In 1939 he was awarded a scholarship to Edinburgh College of Art and in 1945 he moved briefly to London – all the while a painter more than a potter - before settling in Reykjavik a year later where he built a kiln and prospected for clay.
He returned to the UK in 1950 and Henry Rothschild, the owner of Primavera - an influential gallery - began to stock Waistel’s work and included three pieces in the first exhibition of contemporary British studio ceramics: Engelse Keramiek, at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in 1954. A solo exhibition at Primavera came the following year, followed by commercial success at the department stores of Liberty’s, Dunn’s of Bromley, and Heal’s. He reached even greater heights in 1959, with his inclusion in the British Artist Craftsmen exhibition organised by the Council of Industrial Design and the Smithsonian, where his pottery was shown alongside works by Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, John Piper, Sir Jacob Epstein, Ben Nicholson, Elizabeth Frink and Graham Sutherland. The exhibition toured North America, introducing British contemporary art to a new audience. Waistel had eradicated the distinction between pottery and art.
He moved to Culbone in Exmoor in 1956 and there, in the isolated Culbone Lodge, Waistel started using a kick-wheel and installed an oil-fired kiln. He overlooked the smallest parish church in England and was surrounded by ancient forest, in which he found new inspiration in the ferns, fungi and other organic forms that he incorporated into his work.
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This is almost certainly when he painted Palalda, Pyrénées-Orientales and, possibly, the view of the farmhouse at Mont Alba. The village of Palalda cascaded down the hillside and Mackintosh took a distant viewpoint from across the Tech, looking up towards the village. In fact, the painting is a combination of views from several separate points and Mackintosh was obviously feeling confident enough, after a year in France, to make these painterly decisions rather than produce a straightforward topographical view. He even went as far as carefully cutting out pieces of paper to stick over some of the houses to change or re-arrange aspects of the composition. The hillside behind the town is omitted completely – a view only possible from the riverside – and the red tile roofs of the houses have been changed to grey and black, perhaps to suit the cold light of the winter’s day when Mackintosh was working here. These are sophisticated decisions, actions of an artist, not those of an architect making notes in a sketchbook. In this painting Mackintosh crosses the divide between artist and tourist, immersing himself in his subject, taking control of it.
With thanks to Roger Billcliffe
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From 1876 McTaggart returned annually to his native Kintyre in the west of Scotland. Caw describes pictures painted in the summer of 1908 as having “attained very wonderful effects of light and colour and atmosphere by an economy of means and subtlety of handling greater even than he had hitherto used”. He had life-long interest in the depiction of children from early on. His childhood scenes have a wistful air that suggests nostalgia for the exuberance of youth, depicting the feel of childhood rather than its paraphernalia. Late in his life, his figures became so absorbed into their landscape settings that they are often invisible at first glance.
The sense of energy in the weather - such as in an approaching storm - is evident in his broad handling of palette-knives, variety of brushstrokes and spattering of paint on the canvas. This sense of movement and texture, albeit impressionist, are qualities which relate more closely to the work of Constable than to Monet. It is, however, through an acknowledgement of a certain formal Expressionism that McTaggart finds his poetic vision. -
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Looking back over recent Salon exhibits in 1905, the French critic, Camille Mauclair, reflected upon John Lavery’s ‘deep tenderness and profound sense of feminity’. He addresses, said Mauclair, ‘the problem of summoning life from the depth of shadows’ and brings it to a solution. ‘Everything possesses stability and raison d’être …’1 There was, in short, a kind of perfection in artist’s recent paintings of female models that had compelled the French State to acquire its second Lavery, Printemps (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) in 1904. That sense of an emergent being, a young woman who traverses the picture plane and looks round at the spectator, was however, something that had been seen two years before in the beguiling A Lady in Grey and Black, the present canvas.
Originally exhibited as A Lady in Black and White in 1901, and identified as Miss May Robbins by Walter Shaw Sparrow, a certain mystery surrounds John Lavery’s retitled Gris et Noir, as it was known to the Paris audience when exhibited the following year. Sometimes thought to represent the artist’s German model, Mary Auras, and mis-dated 1902 by Shaw Sparrow, contemporary illustrations of works contained in the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers exhibition reveal that the work was painted in the preceding year and despite its subsequent change of title, and the artist’s proclivity for reworking pictures after they had been in exhibitions, it remains unchanged since that first outing. 2
The reason is simple. When first shown, the picture was much admired, and, one of four recent Laverys on display, it was regarded as one of the ‘most notable features’ of a show that contained works by Whistler, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir and other international exhibitors.3 What was described as ‘a very pretty study’ was praised for its spontaneity and ‘true artistic touch’.4 In Paris, where anglomanie was the rage, Lavery was applauded for ‘his cursive and flexible way of measuring out the tones and his beautiful handling of blacks.’5
Whether ‘black and white’ or ‘grey and black’, Lavery’s title, alluding to tonal harmony, placed him in the Whistler camp at a time when the two artists had evolved a close working partnership as President and Vice-President of the International Society. It was Lavery’s job to manage Whistler, and indeed, on at least one occasion, provide overnight accommodation when the American was visiting London. Exchanges that had first occurred in 1887 and were then renewed in Whistler’s Paris studio in 1892, were resumed in Lavery’s studio in 5 Cromwell Place, at the end of the decade. While the older artist proffered his opinions they were not always taken to heart.6 Although he had every appreciation of Whistler and indeed had his own close encounter with the American’s sources in Velázquez, Lavery’s visual eclecticism was more diverse.7
Referring to the present canvas in 1902, James Stanley Little declared that it had ‘much of the tenderness and grace of Romney’.8 While Gainsborough and Lawrence were invoked by others, patrons sometimes approached Lavery with a specific Old Master prototype in mind, presumably because they knew he was highly visually literate.9 By 1914, the painter’s sources even extended to Reynolds and Hoppner, as well as Romney, but whether this was so, or merely a critic’s attempt to impress, is conjecture.10 One can see in the classic ‘Romney’ pose of A Lady in Grey and Black, intimations of what was to come in the tiny A Lady in White c.1903 and the grand full length, Hazel in Black and Gold 1916.
What remains supremely important in A Lady in Grey and Black, however, is to observe the confident placing of the figure, the sensitive tonal harmony and overall, the delicate whiff of romance – what a Belgian critic, adroitly characterized as ‘belle allure’.
With thanks to Kenneth McConkey
Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of Northumbria
1. Camille Mauclair, ‘John Lavery’, L’Art et Les Artistes, 1905, Tome 2, pp. 6-7; ‘On apercoit que peu à peu la grande tendresse, le profonde sens de féminité … le probleme de la vie ailleurante appelée du fond des ombres … Tout a sa consistanée, sa raison d’être …’
2. The quality of reproduction in 1901 clearly makes a definitive judgement impossible.
3. ‘Notes and Comments’, The Yorkshire Post, 7 October 1901, p.4
4. ‘Our London Letter’, Cambridge Daily News, 5 October 1901, p.3; ‘The Picture Galleries’, Lloyds Weekly Newspaper, 6 October 1901, p.4
5. ‘Le Salon’, Gazette des Beaux Arts, Tome 27, Periode 3, 1902, p.464; ‘…sa manière cursive et souple de filer le ton et son beau maniement des noirs.’
6.See for instance Kenneth McConkey, ‘No tampering, no faking no artifice, Her First Communion by John Lavery’, British Art Journal, vol.xxi, Spring 2020, pp. 54-59. Her First Communion (National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin) was shown alongside Gris et Noir in the Salon in 1902.
7. Lavery registered as a copyist in the Prado for two works by Velázquez in May-June 1892.
8. James Stanley Little, ‘A Cosmopolitan Painter: John Lavery’, The Studio, vol.xxvii, 1902, p.118
9. See McConkey 2010, p.94.
10. Hugh Stokes, ‘The Art of Mr Lavery’, Country Life, 13 June 1914, p.890
11. L’Art Moderne, Treizième Année, no.40, October 1893, p.314
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Born to a wealthy family in Morpeth, Crawhall was able to devote his life to his two passions: hunting and painting. His father was a cultivated man and an amateur artist and he encouraged his son to draw. Following the marriage of his sister to the architect brother of EA Walton, Crawhall moved to Glasgow to continue his studies. In 1879, Guthrie, Walton and Crawhall worked together at Roseneath and Brig o’Turk, repeating the exercise in 1881 with Harry Spence. Up until 1882, Crawhall had been working in oil, but after a spell in Paris, he returned to watercolour. From 1882-83, he worked closely with the Glasgow Boys at Cockburnspath, and in 1884, visited Lavery in Morocco. He was thus closely involved in the early years of the Glasgow School, despite differing from the other 'Boys' in his preference for gouache and body-colour, rather than oil. Crawhall was an unorthodox artist: he would work in short bursts following long periods of inactivity, and rarely worked from nature, relying instead upon his extraordinary visual memory. Most at home in the country, Crawhall developed a fluent, almost calligraphic way of painting, where each cursive brushstroke creates an individual mark. This artistic talent, combined with his deep understanding for animals, turned Crawhall into one of the greatest draughtsmen of his generation.
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The Falls of Clyde were a popular destination for travellers on Scottish tours. It is the collective name of four waterfalls on the River Clyde near New Lanark: they comprise the upper falls of Bonnington Linn, Corra Linn and Dundaff Linn, together with the lower falls of Stonebyres Linn. Many Romantic painters and poets, including Coleridge and Sir Walter Scott, were drawn to their natural splendour and Corra Linn was immortalised by William Wordsworth and J. M. W. Turner.
The Falls were painted many times by Nasmyth and it is recorded that by 1791, Nasmyth had undertaken three sets of Clyde waterfalls, each of 3 pictures. Robert Riddell, a contemporary writer, recorded that: “Mr. Nasmyth painted for Lady Miller the Three falls on Clyde viz: Stonebyres Linn, Corrhouse Linn, and Bonnington Lynn. He also painted the above falls of Clyde for Sir Alex Ramsay. He painted them also for the Duchess of Buccleuch.”
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