TWENTY TWENTY | 25 September - 24 November 2020 | The Fine Art Society Ltd

EDINBURGH

25 SEPTEMBER - 14 NOVEMBER
BENNY HIGGINS, CHAIRMAN

Fra Giovanni Giocondo, a late 15th, early 16th century priest and scholar who designed the bridge at Notre Dame said, 'The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach, is joy. There is radiance and glory in the darkness could we but see - and to see we only have to look.' As we approach the autumnal reopening of The Fine Art Society in London at our new gallery on Carnaby Street, there has never been a more important time to relish the visual arts and furniture. We will combine our specialism in the Edinburgh and London galleries to bring you the best of Scottish art across the centuries and British art, design and furniture from the 19th and 20th centuries.

As we present the best of both galleries together, we have taken the opportunity to combine the websites to make your visiting experience, we hope, easier and more engaging.

EMILY WALSH, GROUP MANAGING DIRECTOR

This autumn sees The Fine Art Society re-open its London doors. Also the bringing together of our operations in the north and south. At our core, however, remains the same ethos: to present art and design from all over Britain. Of great importance to me is the cultural relevance and value of what we promote and its preservation for future generations. By shining a spotlight on areas that fall off the beaten track as well as on all that is current and fashionable, we aim to enrich, support and expand the market for Scottish and British historical fine art and design. As one of the oldest fine art dealers in the UK we have long been part of this story. 2020 has thrown us an interesting proposition. And so begins a new chapter in the Fine Art Society’s story.
WILLIAM GOUW FERGUSON (1632/3 – after 1695)

STILL LIFE WITH PARTRIDGE AND SONG BIRDS ON A STONE LEDGE

oil on canvas

67.9 x 54.6 cm 26 3/4 x 21 1/2 inches

Provenance: Col. Ralph Sneid, 9-11-1923, no.28

William Gouw Ferguson worked in a time when there were only a handful of native-born Scottish artists. It isn’t known where Ferguson trained but given how closely his work relates to Flemish and Dutch still life painters, it is probable that he was taught on the continent and not in Scotland. In any case, the market for his work in Scotland was small. His paintings are often compared to contemporary Dutch painters and signatures of Willem van Aelst and Jan Weenix have been found on painting since attributed to him. As was the case with our picture: a specious addition of 'Weenix' has been removed. He is recorded in Utrecht between 1648 and 1651; he was at the Hague between 1660 and 1668; and in 1681 he was living in Amsterdam, the centre of European art trade. This was important for an artist who specialised in a field other than portraiture and who needed to make use of the large, efficient international art market which the city provided. Gouw Ferguson specialised in painting dead games birds, arranged around the implements of the chase. Notable in the picture illustrated here are the soft, downy feathers of the partridge and its dead-weight slump on the stone ledge.

The continuing presence of so many of Ferguson’s works in old Scottish collections suggests that he kept in contact with his native country. His only recorded commission was for a Scottish family: overmantels, still in situ, were painted in 1673 for the Duchess of Lauderdale at Ham House. Beside private commissions, the other outlet for sales of his work was auction. The place and date of his death is unknown and although the last known dated painting bears the year 1689, he may have returned to Scotland as twelve of his painting were sold at auction in Edinburgh between 1692 and 1693.

Reference: James Holloway, Patrons and Painters: Art in Scotland 1650-1760 (Edinburgh, 1989)
DAVID MARTIN (1737 – 1798)

PORTRAIT OF BARBARA LAING

inscribed in another hand verso 'Mrs Chisholm born Barbara Laing in Orkney / Sister to Mrs F Cowan & Mother of Mrs R[...] Bruce Jackson / Property of M J Dyatt. Nov. 1880 by inheritance'

oil on canvas

76 x 63.5 cm 30 x 25 inches

Provenance: M J Dyatt, Nov. 1980 by inheritance

From the early 1750s, David Martin was working in the studio of Allan Ramsay and in 1755 Martin joined him in Rome, probably returning with him to London two years later. He worked as Ramsay’s chief assistant, producing copies of the coronation portraits of George III and Queen Charlotte. Although continuing to work for Ramsay, he appears to have had his own portrait practice as well. One of Martin's earliest independent works is of Benjamin Franklin (1767), which now hangs in The White House, Washington D.C. Franklin was greatly admired by the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers, David Hume and Lord Kames, and he visited Scotland on two occasions while he was a long-time resident of London.

Martin had settled in Edinburgh by 1780 where he continued his successful portrait practice. It was a move marked by his admittance to the Royal Company of Archers. In 1785, he was appointed principal painter in Scotland to the Prince of Wales.

Of our portrait there is little known of the sitter other than what the inscription verso states. Barbara Chisholm (née Laing), has been shown in a flattering and fashionable way. Presented in a feigned oval, she looks modestly to her left. Dressed finely, pearls punctuate the chiffon neckline and sleeves. During the 1760s and 70s hair styles became higher, with hair combed over a padded roll or worn over a frame. The scarf intertwined in her hair is braided with gold and effectively catches the light that falls upon her from the right.
SIR HENRY RAEBURN ra (1756 - 1823)

FRANCIS JEFFREY, LATER LORD JEFFREY (1773-1850), c.1812

oil on canvas

90.2 x 70.5 cm 35 1/2 x 27 3/4 inches

Provenance: The Misses Raeburn by descent (not in studio sale); Earl of Rosebery; Rosebery Sale, Christie's, 5 May 1939; Barbizon House; Sotheby's, New York, 4 June 1980, lot 159

Exhibited: Royal Scottish Academy, Exhibition of the Works of Sir Henry Raeburn ra, Edinburgh, 1876;

Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Inaugural Exhibition of Scottish National Portraits, Edinburgh, 1884

Literature: James L. Caw, Scottish Portraits, with an Historical and Critical Introduction and Notes, (2 vols.) (Edinburgh, 1903) vol.2, pp. 119-123; David Mackie, Raeburn Life and Art, PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh (1993)

Francis Jeffrey founded the Whig periodical the Edinburgh Review in 1802. As its editor and leading contributor between 1803 and 1829, Jeffrey was one of the most influential commentators on matters of art, politics and science. Known as a ruthless critic, he was not an appreciator of Wordsworth and his circle whom he named, sarcastically, the 'Lake School'. He was slow to appreciate the Romantic nature of work by of Scott, Keats and Byron. The latter was provoked to satirise Jeffrey in his poem English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809). In spite of this, John Gibson Lockhart, biographer and son-in-law of Walter Scott said that, 'Of all the celebrated characters of this place [Edinburgh], I understand that Jeffrey is the one whom travellers are commonly most in a hurry to see'.

Jeffrey attended the University of Glasgow and studied at Oxford for a year but disliked it there; he was admitted advocate in 1794 but as a Whig he had little chance of success at the Bar. By the late 1820s his political party was more successful so that in 1829 he was elected Dean of the Faculty of Advocates and became an MP. He accepted a judgeship in 1834.
In Raeburn’s obituary this, or perhaps another version of the picture, is mentioned as part of Raeburn’s own collection of portraits which he executed 'for his private gratification'. There is a simplicity to Jeffrey’s portrayal. Set against a buff coloured background, there are no attributes to describe Jeffrey’s position or status as was often the case with men of his professional class. The relaxed but direct gaze of the sitter gives an immediacy and presence, as if he has just taken his seat, glove still in hand. Raeburn’s genius for revealing the person is evident here. For all that Jeffrey’s garb of black overcoat and white stock couldn’t be simpler, Raeburn has deftly painted them in broad distinctive strokes.
REV. JOHN THOMSON OF DUDDINGSTON hrsa (1778 – 1840)

A HIGHLAND LANDSCAPE WITH LOCH

oil on canvas

74.9 x 106.7 cm 29 1/2 x 42 inches

Provenance: Private collection, Rome

Although largely self taught, Thomson briefly attended the classes of Alexander Nasmyth and, like Nasmyth, he believed in working from nature. He was a major figure of the Scottish Romantic landscape tradition. Though Raeburn and Turner both, undoubtedly, influenced Thomson, it was the writing of Sir Walter Scott, his lifelong friend, that most informed him. As Duncan Macmillan writes, 'it is Thomson’s painting that is closest to a pictorial expression of Scott’s own interpretation of landscape … Thomson likewise broke with the descriptive limitations of the topographical art of the Nasmyth tradition.'

A contemporary wrote of him, 'His landscapes are intensely Scotch in their character, and yet scarcely one of them approaches to a facsimile of any known locality.' For all that this painting describes, very specifically, a dramatic mountainous landscape, a lochside village and a bridge, we’ve been unable to identify it. It’s possible that his landscapes are painted from imagination, or composite elements. The mountainside that dramatically falls horizontally into the loch uncompromisingly takes the central point in the composition and is typical of Thomson. So too are the very broadly handled passages, in places to complete abstraction, that contrast with detail and narrative of the picture like the pair of riders on horseback that emerge from the road over the bridge.

Reference: Duncan Macmillan, Scottish Art 1460-1900 (Edinburgh, 1990) pp.222-5
REV. JOHN THOMSON OF DUDDINGSTON hrsa (1778 – 1840)

DUDDINGSTON LOCH LOOKING EAST

oil on canvas

74.9 x 106.7 cm 29 1/2 x 42 inches

Provenance: Private collection, Rome

Thomson takes his view from the lower slopes of Arthur’s Seat on the north side of Duddingston Loch. Our eye is taken first to Duddingston Kirk, where he was minister from 1805 until his death, and beyond to North Berwick Law, marking the furthest point on the horizon. On the coastline are the towers of the potteries at Portobello. Here was an area with which Thomson was intimate. The bright sky over the North Sea lends the summer landscape a luminosity. Wildfowl taking flight from the loch and a couple taking a leisurely walk further underscore the heavenliness of the vista. For all these bucolic ideals, this was a place where great minds came: James Hutton made studies from these rocks which were the basis for his Theory of the Earth and what we understand as deep time. It was also the place where J.M.W. Turner stayed with Thomson and where his close friends, Scott and Raeburn, regularly visited.
LAWRENCE MACDONALD (1799 – 1878)

PROFILE OF J. AINSLIE

inscribed 'J. Ainslie. L. MacDonald. me fecit / Roma 1833'

marble

30.5 x 21.6 x 6.3 cm 12 x 8 1/2 x 2 1/2 inches

This small marble portrait relief was executed in Rome in 1833, Macdonald having moved there to study in 1822. Born at Findo Gask in Perthshire, he came to Edinburgh with an introduction to the architect James Gillespie Graham, for whom he worked as an ornamental sculptor. In early 1822 he entered the Trustees’ Academy, Edinburgh, and later that year moved to Rome. In 1823, Macdonald became one of the founding members of the British Academy of Arts in Rome. This marble relief is characteristically assured and carefully executed. Macdonald adhered to neo-classical principles of idealised form and high finish and veered away from strongly individualising his sitters. Of his subject, J. Ainslie, we unfortunately know nothing.

Macdonald returned to Edinburgh four years later but in 1832 he went back to Rome and settled there permanently. He moved into Bertel Thorvaldsen's former studio in the Piazza Barberini in 1844, by which time he had established himself as the leading bust portraitist for British visitors. According to the Art Journal, his studio was filled with 'the peerage done into marble, a plaster galaxy of rank and fashion.' These might be considered his ultimate aim and portrait busts the means by which to do them. Examples such as the reclining figure of the Countess of Winchilsea (1850, Victoria and Albert Museum, London), and A girl and a carrier pigeon or Messenger (1835, Russell-Cotes Museum, Bournemouth) are among many fine examples.

Reference: Fiona Pearson (ed.), Virtue and Vision: Sculpture and Scotland 1540-1990 (Edinburgh, 1991)
WILLIAM CLARK OF GREENOCK (1803 – 1883)

YACHTS OFF THE SCOTTISH COAST

indistinctly inscribed; artist's label verso reads 'W. Clarke / Marine Painter / D. Cross Shore Street / Greenock.'

oil on canvas

33 x 48.3 cm 13 x 19 inches

Clarke was fortunate to live during the heyday of Clyde shipbuilding when commissions from owners and masters ensured a steady supply of work. He was born in Greenock, near Glasgow, and stayed there all his life. As the Clyde shipyards moved from the production of sailing ships to steamers, Clark charted it through his painting.

Clarke had established himself as an artist by 1830 and, though he may have had lessons from a professional painter, there is no evidence. Robert Salmon (c.1775-c.1851) worked in Greenock from 1811 to 1822 and, although it is unknown if they ever met, Clark would have been familiar with his work. It is more likely that Clark knew John Fleming (1794-1845) who worked in Greenock until his death.

Here, Clark has painted what looks to be a regatta. The white ensign indicates that these are boats belonging to the Royal Yacht Squadron. Day-racing boats, with their limited cabin space and agile manoeuvreability afforded Clark the opportunity to convey their speed and movement - stylistically typical of his later work in the 1850s and 60s. The elements are closing in to the left of the picture and seabirds, taking full advantage of the wind, wheel and tumble around the boats.
EDWARD ARTHUR WALTON rsa prsw (1860 – 1922)

NOVEMBER

signed and dated 'E. A. Walton 83'; signed and inscribed 'November by E. A. Walton 134 Bath St Glasgow' on canvas verso

oil on canvas

107.3 x 152.4 cm 42 1/4 x 60 inches

Provenance: Mr R. J. Stannard, London, by 1901; Private collection, England, 1995

Exhibited: Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts, Glasgow, 1882, no.404; Royal Academy, London, 1883, no.394; Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 1885, no.441

Literature: Fiona MacSporran, Edward Arthur Walton (Glasgow, 1987) pp. 24-25

While the precise origins of November remain obscure, its importance in Walton’s oeuvre and the wider development of the nascent Glasgow School is undisputed. Coming at a time when the hackneyed tourist landscape of hill and glen, was common, this was an audacious re-shaping of a stagnant sub-genre. Likely to have been painted in the fields around Brig o’ Turk, it was one of two works entitled November, shown in the Glasgow Institute in 1882.

During this period when he was still a relatively inexperienced exhibitor, Walton gave his address as 134 Bath Street in central Glasgow – that of William York MacGregor’s studio. This was currently acting as a hub for painters who had recently emerged from the Haldane Academy, as Glasgow’s School of Art was known. MacGregor, five years older than Walton, had completed his studies at the Slade, the London art school run on French atelier lines, and back in Glasgow, close to the Art Club, radicalism flourished. In Walton’s case, the present work, his largest to date, marked a departure from the Dutch and Barbizon Naturalism of his earliest Institute exhibits. Unsold in the Institute, Walton may have reworked the picture for submission to the Royal Academy in 1883, where it accompanied James Guthrie’s To Pastures New (1883, Aberdeen Art Gallery).
The impact of this picture was clearly felt beyond the Cockburnspath coterie in the works of allies such as Alfred East and James Paterson who embraced grand manner plein-airisme. Its ripple effect would reverberate in later west of Scotland canvases by the likes of George Henry and Robert Macaulay Stevenson, who painted hillsides with snaking paths and streams. With thanks to Professor Kenneth McConkey
EDWARD ARTHUR WALTON rsa prsw (1860 – 1922)

THE CLOCKTOWER, GATEHOUSE OF FLEET, 1922

signed

oil on canvas

67.9 x 103.5 cm 26 3/4 x 40 3/4 inches

Provenance: The artist's family

Exhibited: Aitken Dott, Castle Street Edinburgh, no.162; Walker Art Gallery Liverpool, Autumn exhibition: the fifty-first, Liverpool, 1923, no.56; Winnipeg Art Gallery, Canada, no.56

Literature: Fiona MacSporran, Edward Arthur Walton (Glasgow, 1987) ill. pg.90

In the years preceding the First World War, Walton and his family spent many summers in Suffolk. When movement became restricted Walton was issued a Defence of the Realm Permit to sketch and paint in Galloway. He was to became a frequent visitor to the area. His first trip, during war time, was to New Abbey, then in 1920 to New Galloway and, in 1922, to Gatehouse of Fleet, where this picture was conceived. It was also his final picture and was still on the easel at his premature death in 1923.

Typical of Walton is the economical use of paint, with parts of the canvas left untouched to good effect. The boys gathering hay in the foreground look out, including us in their space. The nebulous, closely-toned palette of the picture nods to the influence of his friend and one time neighbour, J.M.W. Whistler. So too the chalky white highlights of the town’s buildings. Walton’s studio was on Cheyne Walk from 1894 until 1904 and Walton led a campaign to persuade Glasgow City Corporation to buy Whistler's portrait of Thomas Carlyle (1795 -1881), the first of his works purchased by a public body.
JOHN DUNCAN FERGUSSON rba (1874 – 1961)

THE QUAY AT DINARD, c.1920

signed on canvas verso

oil on canvas

66 x 54.6 cm 26 x 21 1/2 inches

Provenance: Alex Reid & Lefevre, Glasgow; Private collection; Christie's, 19 April 1974, lot 63; The Fine Art Society 1985; Mr and Mrs Alan Fortunoff, USA

Exhibited: National Galleries of Scotland, Fergusson: The Scottish Colourist, Edinburgh, 2013-14, no. 70

The Quay at Dinard was painted c.1920 when Fergusson and his partner Margaret Morris went to the fortified town on the Normandy coast near St Malo. Morris was a talented and innovative dancer who held annual summer schools to teach her expressive form of dance. Very few of the pictures painted during this trip are known.

Fergusson, the most outspoken of the four Colourists, was the only British artist to be a member of the circle in Paris that pioneered the modernist movement in the years before the outbreak of the First World War. His paintings in those critical years were highly original. He shared the ideas that inspired Picasso, Braque, Matisse and others to break with age-old traditions in painting, but he interpreted them in his own way. Fergusson’s style become more abstract and the geometric lines and curves of the harbour walls and the hull of the steamer moored offshore compare to the remarkable series of pictures of submarines at Portsmouth Harbour made in 1918.

The delicate rose pinks and mauves recall the palette of earlier years but colour was always forefront: 'Everyone in Scotland should refuse to have anything to do with black or dirty and dingy colours and insist on clean colours in everything. I remember when I was young any colour was considered a sign of vulgarity. Greys and blacks were the only colours for people of taste and refinement. Good pictures had to be black, grey, brown or drab. Well! let’s forget it and insist on things in Scotland being of colour that makes for and associates itself with light, hopefulness, health and happiness.'

Reference: John Duncan Fergusson, Modern Scottish Painting (Glasgow, 1943)
AGNES MILLER PARKER (1895 – 1980)

THE UNCIVILISED CAT, 1930

signed and dated 1930; inscribed 'The Uncivilised Cat' and signed on board verso

tempera on board

52.7 x 47.6 cm 20 3/4 x 18 3/4 inches

Miller Parker's early paintings, often in tempera, reflect the short-lived group, the Vorticists, active in London in the 1920s. Miller Parker and her husband, Glasgow School of Art contemporary William McCance (1894–1970), moved to London in 1920. They were among the few Scottish artists to engage with modernism. The artist William Roberts lodged briefly at their Earls Court home; his influence upon Miller Parker's painting was significant throughout the decade and it easy to see Roberts' influence in her sculpturally volumetric figures.

Miller Parker is best known, however, for wood engravings and in 1930 she and McCance moved to Wales to be artist-illustrators of the Gregynog Press which produced fine books in limited editions. The Fables of Esope (1932) and XXI Welsh Gypsy Folk-Tales (1933) illustrated by her engravings are among the finest of the period.

The Uncivilised Cat captures the animal’s restlessness and alarm. It has landed upon the open pages of a book where, just visible is the title: Love’s Creation by Marie Stopes. Published in 1928, the year all women obtained the right to vote, the novel works through the debates which Stopes addressed both in her personal and public life: relations between men and women, the link between the arts and sciences and the quest for female sexual fulfilment. The clawed pound note perhaps acknowledges the female plight for financial freedom. A toppled vase of calla lilies and a Venus statuette point to the story of the goddess of love, seeing the lilies for the first time. Jealous of their beauty, she cursed them by placing a large yellow pistil in the middle. The calla lily, in this context, represents lust and sexuality.
The spine of the green book indistinctly reads Good-Bye to All That (1929), Robert Graves’ autobiography. It describes the passing of an old order following the cataclysm of the First World War; the inadequacies of patriotism; the rise of atheism, feminism, socialism and pacifism; and the changes to traditional married life. McCance was a conscientious objector and, in 1955, he and Miller Parker parted ways. How much this still life points to their relationship at this stage of their marriage is conjecture. It does, however, bring to the fore concerns and debates around women’s rights of the time.
'In those days – and I don’t know how I did it – I had a way of putting on paint and then rubbing something all over it to soften the image and then sharpening it all up by careful reworking. I let the paint make the suggestions into something more solid. In other words these were abstractions which gradually were turned into realist pictures. The concept was abstract but the means was realism.'
JAMES McINTOSH PATRICK obe rsa (1907 – 1988)

WINTER IN PERTHSHIRE, 1938-1939

signed and dated '38/39'

oil on canvas

74.5 x 99.5 cm 29 3/4 x 39 1/8 inches

Provenance: The Fine Art Society, London, January 1944, where bought by C.F.J. Beausire, Wirral; Private collection, England, 1974 and thence by descent

Exhibited: Royal Glasgow Institute, Glasgow, 1940, no.512; Royal Academy, London, 1940, no.311; McManus Galleries, Dundee, Aberdeen Art Gallery and Walker Gallery Liverpool, McIntosh Patrick: An 80th Birthday Tribute, 1987, no.61

Literature: Roger Billcliffe, James McIntosh Patrick (London, 1987) ill. pg.45, plate 14

The financial crash of 1929 and the demise of the print market forced Patrick to look to other ways of making a living: he taught, took publishing commissions and returned to painting. By the end of the decade his paintings had gone into the permanent collections of many national and international museums including the Tate (London). In 1934, he began a lifelong association with The Fine Art Society.

Throughout the 1930s he painted several snowy scenes, all different but sharing the same compositional device of a road or path descending into the foreground. Our eye is drawn down a path into a snow-covered village, across a bridge and beyond, until the horse-drawn cart in the distance is about to round the corner. The limited range of colour, almost a pattern of black and white, light and dark, echoes his prints of the period. The 'strangeness' of the etchings was imported into the painting by the use of the deliberate perspective which he had first used in his graphic work. Instantly familiar, the scene is actually an amalgam. Patrick preferred landscape that was 'man-made, not God-made', even to the extent that he invented scenes of his own jigsawing together of sketches made from across the country of bridges, vernacular farm buildings and copses of trees.
JAMES McINTOSH PATRICK obe rsa (1907 – 1988)

DECEMBER SUNSHINE, ANGUS, 1949

signed

oil on canvas

75 x 100.5 cm 29 1/2 x 39 1/2 inches

Provenance: The Fine Art Society, London, October 1950, no.1379, where bought by C.F.J. Beausire, Wirral;

Private collection, England, 1974 and thence by descent

Exhibited: McManus Galleries, Dundee, Aberdeen Art Gallery and Walker Gallery Liverpool, McIntosh Patrick: An 80th Birthday Tribute, 1987, no.85

Literature: Roger Billcliffe, James McIntosh Patrick (London, 1987) ill. pg.58, plate 30

Before the war, Patrick’s studio had a high window which gave a good north light but no view and this, he thought, concentrated his visual memory on the canvas in front of him. In 1939 he moved to a house by the Tay and into a south facing studio. On his return from the war, Patrick was forced to adapt the way he worked and he started to paint it. In 1948, he saw an exhibition of Vincent van Gogh in Glasgow and was struck by the immediacy of van Gogh’s landscapes. To Patrick, it was as if you the viewer were present and it brought to him a desire to make the countryside and weather as real as possible. He persisted with the same device of a road or path leading into the landscape, but discovered that 'rhythmic ideas are inside you and so you go around looking for landscapes where the countryside fits a preconceived idea that you have inside you, which you recognise when you see it.'
'Realism, or naturalism, is much more difficult than what I was painting in the 1930s . It’s much easier in lots of ways to make up a picture than to paint nature as it appears before us… I have a deep feeling that nature is immensely dignified when you’re out of doors. I’m struck by the dignity of everything.'
GERALD LAING (1936 – 2011)

AN AMERICAN GIRL, 1978

number 6 from the edition of 10 + 2 APs; signed and inscribed on back

bronze

64.8 x 58.4 x 78.7 cm 25 1/2 x 23 x 31 inches

Provenance: The artist; Private collection, Scotland, 2004; Private collection, Edinburgh, 2017

Exhibited: Bourne Fine Art, Gerald Laing: From 1963 to the present, Edinburgh, 2004, no.18

Literature: David Knight, Gerald Laing: Catalogue Raisonné of Painting and Sculpture (London, 2007) ill. pg.399

In 1973 Laing began what was to become a series of variations of his wife’s head and body. Unlike the Pop Art he produced in 1960s New York and the abstract sculptural pieces that had preoccupied him latterly, the Galina series looked towards figuration and stylistically back to a period of modernism and in particular its mannerist forms.

'An American Girl can be seen as the culmination of the Galina series of sculpture in which I worked through various formal and abstract figurations, absorbing all sorts of influences, in my search for a viable method of depicting the human figure;

'The pose of An American Girl is Romantic, driven by the expression of expressive consumerism. She is disruptive to the viewer: confident, seductive and relaxed.'

Gerald Laing
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