In recent decades Glasgow has probably hot-housed more successful artists than any other UK city (London excepted, of course); 2010 Turner Prize winner Susan Philipsz among them. At the end of the nineteenth century it was a similar story, illustrated by this significant showing of paintings by the group of male artists known as ‘The Glasgow Boys’. For the record there was also a group of more design-oriented female artists at the time, known as ‘The Glasgow Girls’.
As a brief primer, ‘The Boys’ were a loose bunch of young painters based in and around Glasgow who, for a short period, painted and socialised together, and who included Joseph Crawhall, James Guthrie, John Lavery and Arthur Melville. They took inspiration from contemporary French painters (many of them also studied in Paris), in particular Jules Bastien-Lepage, whose work was typified by down-to-earth subjects such as peasants in landscape and the naturalistic effects of painting en plein air (outdoors). As a result, the paintings of The Glasgow Boys display both a looser, lighter representation of both rustic Scottish life and international subjects including landscapes and life in Europe and Japan.
While some images of ruddy cheeked children may, for contemporary tastes, tip over into chocolate box territory, there are plenty of stand-out works to justify the ‘pioneering’ in the exhibition’s title. One is Guthrie’s ‘A Hind’s Daughter’, in which a young girl cutting cabbages stares unsentimentally at the viewer, wielding a knife in one hand, and with an unsettling gaze reminiscent of ‘American Gothic’. Another is James Paterson’s landscape ‘Autumn in Glencairn, Moniaive’, where the light on the water appears both luminous and magical.
Perhaps most striking is George Henry and EA Hornel’s ‘The Druids – Bringing in the Mistletoe’. This painting shows a procession of Celtic pirests descending a hillside in celebration of the winter solstice. It is unusual not only for being a collaboration but for the artist’s use of a far more decorative aesthetic. The rich use of pattern and colour, including gold leaf, evokes a more mystical representation of Scottish life, that of its mythology and folklore.
If one had to choose a Turner Prize winner among the artists here, however, it would have to be Arthur Melville, for his three very different but equally stunning watercolours of Scottish, Spanish and Persian subjects. Although disappointingly dark and dull in the catalogue reprodution, these vibrant works really glow in the flesh.