The Art Of Today

(via The Outline of Art) Frank Rutter writes:

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Since Pettie and Orchardson Scotland has always been strongly represented in the Royal Academy. The younger Scottish school originated in Glasgow, whither about fifty years ago a very large number of fine pictures by the French romanticists found their way into public and private collections. In the appreciation of Corot and his contemporaries, Scotland was far ahead of England, and since Whistler also found favor more quickly in the north than in the south, the Scottish painters were, generally speaking, more advanced than their English confrères during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Of the group of painters known as the Glasgow School, it may be broadly said that the figure painters were chiefly influenced by Whistler, the landscapists by Corot and the French romanticists. Among the most distinguished of the figure painters are Sir James Guthrie, born in 1859 and elected President of Royal Scottish Academy in 1902, who adds much of the robustness of Raeburn to a Whistlerian elegance and color harmony; Sir John Lavery, born at Belfast in 1857, who has developed in his own way the graceful style and dainty coloring of Whistler, whether in portraying manly dignity, feminine loveliness, or in painting landscapes; Mr E A Walton, equally at home in portrait and landscape, Mr Harrington Mann, Mr George Henry, and Mr Edward Hornel, who with thick, enamel-like paint, has invented a new style in which children are usually seen decoratively disposed amid flowery gardens of a semi-tropical luxuriance. In this school a place apart was held by the late Joseph Crawhall, whose animal paintings, and particularly his watercolors on brown holland, had an inevitability of line and simple grandeur of design which related his work to that of the greatest oriental artists.

Among the Glasgow landscape painters, most of whom, like W Y Macgregor and David Gauld, followed either the Barbizon or Modern Dutch Schools, the premier place has now been won by Mr D Y Cameron, R.A. Born at Glasgow in 1865, Mr Cameron has made a foremost place for himself as an etcher, rivaling Mr Muirhead Bone in his masterly interpretation of architectural and landscape subjects, while he has also developed a most personal style as a painter, depicting the hills and lakes of Scotland and the picturesque houses in her cities with a fine simplicity of design and clear, translucent color. While in his use of delicate hues, harmonised with subtelty, Mr Cameron shows more than a passing acquaintance with Impressionism, in his emphasis of line and tendency towards simplication he exhibits in a mild and restrained form that reaction from Impressionism which ran to excess in Paris.

While there has never been a definite Edinburgh school, several modern painters of distinction have been associated with the Scottish capital, among them being Mr James Pryde, one of the most original and gifted artists of our time. Born in 1869, Mr Pryde is the son of the late Dr David Pryde of St Andrews and subsequently of Edinburgh. Though nominally he received his training, like so many others, at the Atelier Julien in Paris, very little French influence appears in his work. He learnt the decorative value of the silhouette from Whistler, something about the effective disposal of masses, perhaps, from the brilliant French poster-designer Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), and a good deal about dramatic composition from Hogarth. In other words, Mr Pryde made his own choice among the masters and built up his own art by affinities and observation. It was by poster work that Mr Pryde first roused the attention of the public. He had a sister, Mabel Pryde, who married another artist, William Nicholson, and the brothers-in-law, working under the pseudonym of ‘Beggar staff Brothers’, produced a series of posters in the ‘nintees which electrified London by their outstanding artistic qualities.

The Art Of Today (continued)