For many years, Scottish artists found it necessary to travel south to make their names and careers in art, but with the increasing importance of the cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow from the end of the 18th Century an independent Scottish art scene became possible.  These developments will be traced through the work of individuals such as Sir Henry Raeburn, the first artist to find success whilst remaining in his native Scotland and Sir David Wilkie, important as one of the first to truly export Scottish art. 

The first part of the day will also include a look at the work of Scottish architect, designer and artist, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, who is now a well-known name and a major draw for the tourist industry in Glasgow, with several of his buildings still existing, as well as his designs for Tea Rooms.  However, his work was not always so well received, and, following some early success, which included his architectural masterpiece, the Glasgow School of Art, his prospects floundered.  In this lecture, we track him from that early success in his native Glasgow, through the years of doubt and struggle, ultimately to the South of France where he enjoyed the last few years of his life travelling with his wife and collaborator Margaret and reinvented himself as a watercolour painter.  With a wonderful array of beautifully designed buildings, furniture and interiors to enjoy along the way, we explore the life and career of Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

In the second part, we go on to explore the work of ‘The Glasgow Boys’, a group of radical young artists who challenged the art establishment and the dominance of classical subject matter in Scotland.  In the early 1880s, united by their disillusionment with academic painting, they painted contemporary rural subjects, often working outside, directly in front of the motif.  This allowed them to produce paintings that were true to nature and to paint realistic objects in their natural environment. They were influenced in this by the social realism of certain Dutch and French artists, particularly the naturalist painter, Jules Bastien-Lepage.  Their scenes of Scottish rural life challenged the art promoted by the Edinburgh oriented Scottish art establishment of the time and began a shift to Glasgow as the epicentre of art, which was supported by a group of wealthy industrialists in that fast-growing and industrialising city.  They were always a loose grouping of artists, who provided each other with support, but all of them also continued to look elsewhere for inspiration.  By the late 1880s, several of them began to take an interest in Celtic design and Japanese prints, so that the early rural naturalism evolved in many separate and distinct directions, often in stark contrast to their early work.

Our final session will focus on The Scottish Colourists, four artists (John Duncan Fergusson, Francis Cadell, Samuel Peploe and George Leslie Hunter) who, in the early 1900s turned their attention to Paris.  Influenced by the French Fauves and Post Impressionists, they combined strong, vibrant colours with the painterly traditions of Scottish art, to produce innovative still life paintings, landscapes and portraits.  This lecture will look at those bright, colourful works, but also at each individual’s development, as they worked towards the artistic language that would come to define them.

Throughout the period covered, we will look at the parallels between Scottish and other European art, as well as periods of divergence.