Until October the National Galleries of Scotland present Impressionism & Scotland, an exhibition of over 100 paintings, pastels and watercolours which explores the Scottish taste for Impressionism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and assess the impact of modern European art on Scottish art and artists.
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Pierre Auguste Renoir The Bay of Naples,1881The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Julia W. Emmons, 1956 |
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Highlights of the exhibition include Renoir’s The Bay of Naples (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), the first Impressionist painting to be bought by a Scot; Degas’s L’Absinthe (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) and Sir John Lavery’s The Tennis Party (Aberdeen Art Gallery), a rare example of Scottish modern life painting. Other major Impressionist works will be on loan from private and public collections in the UK, Germany, the USA and Australia. Artists represented in the show will include Cézanne, Degas, Gauguin, Manet, Matisse, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley, Toulouse-Lautrec and Van Gogh, as well as the Glasgow Boys and the Scottish Colourists.
Edgar Degas The Rehearsal,1877 Burrell Collection, Glasgow |
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In the late nineteenth century Scotland was a powerful industrial nation and Glasgow was second city of the British Empire. A rising generation of rich industrialist and mercantile collectors developed a taste for avant-garde European art, many of them acquiring works which are now of international importance. For example, in Aberdeen collectors initially forged links between the artists of the Hague School – the so-called Dutch ‘Impressionists’ – and Scots artists such as George Reid and William McTaggart. Many Scots collectors also acquired the work of Camille Corot and the artists of the Barbizon School; and in Glasgow – under the influence of the art dealer Alexander Reid – they were among the first to invest in the work of Degas, Manet, Monet, Renoir and Whistler. Pictures acquired by such collectors were frequently lent to public exhibitions and were seen by contemporary Scottish artists.
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Sir John Lavery The Tennis Party, 1885 Oil on Canvas 77 x 183.5 cms © Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums |
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Exposed to these works in the 1880s and 1890s, artists of the ‘Glasgow School’, such as John Lavery, James Guthrie and E.A. Walton, began to emulate their European contemporaries. They painted in the open air, depicting both rural and modern-life subjects, but they avoided the controversial café scenes of Manet and Degas. They were commonly referred to by critics, sometimes pejoratively, as ‘Impressionists’, even though their essentially tonal style of painting was quite different from the ‘scientific’ Impressionism of Monet and his contemporaries. In the early twentieth century a new generation of artists emerged in Scotland – S.J. Peploe, J.D. Fergusson, Leslie Hunter and F.C.B. Cadell, later known as the Scottish Colourists. These artists all travelled to France and their early interest in Manet and Impressionism was soon superseded by a fascination with the decorative expressionism of Matisse and the ‘Fauves’. After the First World War Scottish collectors learned to appreciate the Colourists’ brilliant colour and expressive handling and, partly through their influence, turned to Post-Impressionism, acquiring works by Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec and Matisse.
This exhibition will highlight some astonishing parallels between the work of Dutch, French and Scottish artists, whose work will be hung side by side: Corot and Walton; Bastien-Lepage and Guthrie; Degas and Crawhall; Manet and Fergusson; Matisse and Hunter. It will demonstrate that, in addition to absorbing these powerful influences, Scottish artists developed their own instinctive brand of Impressionism, quite unlike the more analytical approach of the French Impressionists.
More information
Impressionism & Scotland
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