Home / What's On / Portrait of a Gallery

Portrait of a Gallery

3 May 2017 - 3 June 2017

Union Jack, 2014

oil on board
H:51cm W:61cm
View Details

Kinnoul Hill

watercolour
H:40cm W:53cm
View Details

A Fife Farm near Burntisland, c.1952

ink on paper
H:33cm W:45cm
View Details

Draco, 2016

mixed media on wood panel
H:80cm W:60cm
View Details

Nets and Tarpaulins, Lunan Bay, c.1950

oil on canvas
H:62cm W:76cm
View Details

Butterfly of the Mind, 1990

oil on board
H:60.9cm W:45.7cm
View Details

Night Garden, c.1968

oil on canvas
H:71cm W:91cm
View Details

The Sicilian Cart

oil on board
H:56cm W:85cm
View Details

In the Country, 1930

watercolour
H:22cm W:23cm
View Details

The Sea Wall, c.1960

oil on board
H:70cm W:105cm
View Details

Countryside in Wartime – Broomhill, 1923

oil on board
H:73.7cm W:63.5cm
View Details

Traigh Geal, Erraid – Argyll, c.1925

oil on panel
H:36.5cm W:45cm
View Details

Margaret and Willy Peploe at the Hotel Panorama, Cassis

oil on canvas
H:61cm W:56.5cm
View Details

Juan-les-Pins, c.1928

ink and crayon
H:30cm W:37cm
View Details

Boy Sleeping in Blue, c.1962

pastel on glass paper
H:22cm W:28cm
View Details

Scorpio Series 2, No.15, 1996

acrylic on paper
H:56.5cm W:76cm
View Details

Numinous Tree, 2010

Oil on panel
H:71cm W:76cm
View Details

Children Playing on a Terraza, Venice

coloured woodblock print
H:42cm W:58cm
View Details

Grytviken, South Georgia

etching and aquatint, edition of 12
H:22.5cm W:55cm
View Details

Girl with Monkey, 1972

coloured etching
H:35cm W:25cm
View Details

Self Portrait in Hospital II, 1988

etching, edition 2 of 20
H:45cm W:50cm
View Details

Death Knell, 1972

framed etching
H:47cm W:47cm
View Details

Italian Offerings

lithograph
H:57cm W:70.5cm
View Details

Against the Light, Warmer Change, 2015/16

monoprint
H:57cm W:67cm
View Details

Two Cups On A Ground, 2017

porcelain, coloured porcelain, clear glaze, valchromat, lime, marble powder and pigment
H:17.5cm W:20.5cm D:10cm
View Details

White Reticello Acorn, 2010

blown glass
L:25.5cm D:30.5cm
View Details

Six Faces, 2010

Cast bronze, platinum leaf interior
H:18cm W:14.5cm D:11.5cm
View Details

Pleated Necklace, 2016

18ct gold with side hook fastening
H:18cm W:15cm
View Details

Matrix X Pin, 1993

Gold
H:16.6cm W:8cm
View Details

Moon Dreamer Ringset

7 part set: 18ct yellow with moonstone on turned acrylic stand
View Details

Hedera Poetica, 2017

Corten steel
H:154cm W:43cm D:30cm
View Details

Block Stool by Jim Partridge and Liz Walmsley, 2017

Scorched Oak
H:38cm W:85cm D:33cm
View Details

Goodbrush Hill, Landscape Pod Series, 2016

Salix Lasiandra
H:28cm W:30cm
View Details

Tall Vessel, 2016

Willow
H:90cm D:61cm
View Details
Born: 1835
Died: 1910

One of Scotland’s most famous landscape painters, William McTaggart’s paintings are typified by loose, energetic brushwork and a deep concern for the effects of light. The Scottish Gallery was McTaggart’s main dealer in his lifetime, selling many of his greatest works to the likes of Robert Wemyss Honeyman and Andrew Carnegie.

Born: 1864
Place of Birth: Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, Australia
Died: 1933

Shortly after he was born his parents left Australia for Kirkcudbright in Scotland, where he remained for most of his life. He studied for three years at Edinburgh College of Art, and for two years at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp under Professor Verlat. Returning to Scotland in 1885, he met George Henry and associated himself with the Glasgow Boys.

Hornel and Henry collaborated on many projects and in the early 1890’s the two artists spent a year and a half in Japan, where Hornel learned much about decorative design and spacing. Towards the close of the decade, his colours preserving their glow and richness, became more refined and more atmospheric, and his drawing more naturalistic, combining sensuous appeal with emotional and poetic significance. In 1901 he declined election to the Royal Scottish Academy. A member of Glasgow Art Club, Hornel exhibited in the club’s annual exhibitions.

In 1901 he acquired Broughton House, a townhouse and garden in Kirkcudbright, which was his main residence for the rest of his life with his sister Elizabeth. There he made several modifications to the house and designed garden taking inspiration from his travels in Japan. he also made an addition of a gallery for his paintings. On his death the house and library were donated and Broughton House is now administered by the National Trust for Scotland.

Died: 1904

Melville who was rightly regarded as the most brilliant watercolourists of his period, developed a stunning and idiosyncratic technique. He attended the RSA schools and from 1878 studied in Paris where he was impressed by the work of the French Realist painters and the Barbizon School. Associated with the Glasgow Boys he was however a restless traveller and soon moved from their Scottish urban and pastoral subjects to more exotic fare from Egypt, Persia and Spain attracted by strong light, brilliant colours, the drama of the bullfight or the bustle of the eastern harbour.

Born: 1945

Victoria Crowe studied at Kingston School of Art from 1961-65 and at the Royal College of Art, London, from 1965-68. At her postgraduate show, she was invited by Sir Robin Philipson to teach at Edinburgh College of Art. For thirty years she worked as a part-time lecturer in the School of Drawing and Painting while developing her own artistic practice. She lives and works in West Linton, Edinburgh, and Venice. Her first one-person exhibition, after leaving the Royal College of Art, was in London and she has subsequently gone on to have over fifty solo shows.

Victoria Crowe’s first solo exhibition at The Scottish Gallery was in 1970. In August 2018, we held a major exhibition of paintings at The Scottish Gallery. This coincided with The Scottish National Portrait Gallery’s retrospective of Victoria Crowe’s portraits. In 2019 The City Art Centre held a retrospective entitled 50 Years of Painting. This exhibition embraced every aspect of Crowe’s practice and featured over 150 pieces.

Victoria Crowe is a member of the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) and the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolours (RSW). She has exhibited nationally and internationally and undertaken many important portrait commissions, including RD Laing, Peter Higgs and Jocelyn Bell Burnell. She has received many bursaries and research awards and her work is held in numerous public and private collections worldwide.

In 2000, her exhibition A Shepherd’s Life, consisting of work selected from the 1970s and 80s, was one of the National Galleries of Scotland’s Millennium exhibitions. It received great critical acclaim. The exhibition toured Scotland and was re-gathered in 2009 for a three-month exhibition at the Fleming Collection, London. Victoria was awarded an OBE for Services to Art in 2004 and from 2004-2007, she was appointed Senior Visiting Scholar at St. Catherine’s College, Cambridge. The resulting work, Plant Memory, was exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy in 2007 and subsequently toured Scotland. In 2009 she received an Honorary Degree from The University of Aberdeen and in 2010 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

In 2013, Dovecot Studios wove a large-scale tapestry of Victoria’s painting Large Tree Group. This collaborative tapestry was acquired for the National Museums Scotland. In 2015, Victoria was an invited artist at Dumfries House and in 2016 a group of work by the artist was acquired by the National Galleries of Scotland. Victoria was commissioned by the Worshipful Company of Leathersellers’ in 2014, to design a forty-metre tapestry for their new hall in the city of London, which took over three years to weave and was installed in January 2017. Dovecote worked with Victoria Crowe to produce a new tapestry inspired by a detail from her painting Twilight, Venice, 2014. The new tapestry, Richer Twilight, Venice was completed and unveiled at the end of September 2019.

To view Victoria Crowe’s prints please click here

Born: 1978

Geoff Uglow is a British painter, born in 1978 in Cornwall. He studied at Falmouth and graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2000.  He became a Rome Scholar in 2002 living and working in the illustrious British School at Rome for two years. He remained in Italy for a further two years before returning to his permanent studio on the dramatic coast of the south west peninsula of Cornwall.  He won the prestigious Alastair Salvesen Art Scholarship for painting and travel in 2009 and used his time to journey around the coastline of Scotland in the footsteps of famous eighteenth-century painter William Daniell. This body of work was exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. He has exhibited both in the UK and internationally, has won numerous awards and his paintings are held in both public and private collections worldwide. The artist currently works between his home and studio in Cornwall and in Italy.

Uglow looks to nature for inspiration.  Out of the turbulent depths of a life lived, he gives harbour to fleeting moments of perceived beauty, in contemplation of painting. And then, into the eddy and flow of wet on wet colour by way of brush or hand, he emulsifies a fathomless feeling with impressions of light and air and motion. These paintings exude a visceral current, forcing the viewer to experience all six degrees of freedom. There is a warmth and generosity in his approach and his practice holds a message of promise.

The artist often diarises the passing year with painted colour notes expressing the passage of the seasons by pinning the essence of a particular day. Other major projects have included his Quercus series, using the oak tree as a vehicle to chart the changing rhythms, cycles and seasons of the British landscape. Uglow also finds his subject in his rose garden, which he had cultivated from seed. He describes each painting as ‘a handwritten letter, a moment, which can suspend disbelief, a fragment of vanished beauty.’

The Scottish Gallery has represented Geoff Uglow since the late 2000s and we are hosting a major presentation of his work as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival in 2024.  Dialogue will include works from a series made in Edinburgh both past and present as well as Italian landscapes, Rose Garden and Seascapes.

Born: 1919
Place of Birth: Glasgow
Died: 1970

Bobby Blyth was a close friend of Gillies, who recruited him to the College staff after the War. They also worked together on the east coast of Scotland and their style at times became very similar, both favouring a pen and wash technique. Blyth was a brilliant draughtsman who made distinctive choices on the information he would include. Much of his work on paper has a relationship with English Neo-Romanticism, in particular Paul Nash, Graeme Sutherland and John Minton. Later, based in Aberdeen, his work became more ‘colour-field’ with the drawing becoming less important.

Born: 1931
Place of Birth: Falkirk
Died: 2021

Elizabeth Blackadder was born in Falkirk in 1931. She studied at ECA from 1949 until 1954 under Robert Henderson Blyth and William Gillies inter alia and earned travelling scholarships to southern Europe and Italy. In 1956 she married artist and fellow Scottish Gallery exhibitor John Houston and began teaching in Edinburgh. She taught at Edinburgh College of Art from 1962 until her retirement in 1986. One of Scotland’s greatest artists, she also garners recognition and success in London. In 1972, Blackadder was elected member of the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh and in 1976 she gained entry at the Royal Academy, London – the first woman to be elected into both institutions. In 2001, Elizabeth was made the first female Artist Limner by HRH The Queen, a position within the Royal Household unique to Scotland. One decade later, in 2011 (the year she turned 80) a major retrospective of her work opened at the National Galleries of Scotland.

To view prints by Elizabeth Blackadder please click here

Born: 1952

Ian Howard specialises in painting, drawing and printmaking. He is an Academician of the Royal Scottish Academy of Art and Architecture and an Emeritus Professor of the University of Edinburgh. Formerly, he was Dean of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, University of Dundee; a member of the Faculty of the British School at Rome; and the former Principal of Edinburgh College of Art.

His particular research interests include art and science, alchemical symbolism, hermeticism, emblems, and medieval and renaissance iconography. He lives and works in France.

“Howard’s work characteristically involves the intuitive interweaving of figurative, abstract and symbolic forms and is inspired by Renaissance and Early Modern imagery of an arcane nature. Such imagery reached the height of its complexity in seventeenth-century illustrations to treatises on alchemy, such as those by Heinrich Khunrath (1527-1604) and John Dee (1527-1608). These illustrations often provided labyrinthine allegories of spiritual transformation, or even hieroglyphic stimulants to revelation, as much as they provided practical instructions for changing base metals into gold. Howard is partly attracted to the enigma of alchemical imagery for its own sake, and the subject of his work is likewise less revealed through straightforward depiction than experienced in the exploration of visual connections. He deconstructs, reconstructs and repeats forms so as to amplify, dissolve and extend their hieroglyphic ‘references’. Through this process and through the notion of physical art as alchemy, Howard relates magical symbolism to modernist practices.”

— Notes from Sorcery, Victoria and Albert Museum Collection.

Born: 1915
Place of Birth: Hankow, China
Died: 1999

William Crosbie studied at the Glasgow School of Art from 1932-5. A travelling scholarship took him to Paris, where he worked under Fernand Léger, and took classes in History of Art at The Sorbonne and in drawing with Maillol. Crosbie was part of a group of artists and writers who were very active immediately before the Second World War painting portraits. Later in his career it was by working with architects, decorating firms and painting murals that he was able to make a living, and continue to create the paintings that he wanted to paint.

Through his career he excelled in an extraordinary variety of subjects: straightforward landscapes of Scotland, England and France; still life, the female nude, a sort of modern fête champêtre; surrealism; religious painting; portraiture, both intimate and official and the self-portrait.

“As a painter I have always worked in the belief that once you have mastered a technique or perfected a style, that’s the time to stop. Each piece of work should be a fresh beginning as far as possible.” William Crosbie, 1974.

Born: 1913
Place of Birth: Maybole, Ayrshire
Died: 1966

Robert MacBryde was a still life and figurative painter and a theatre set designer. Born in Maybole, he came from a poor working class family and worked in a shoe factory before gaining a place at Glasgow School of Art (1932-37). At art school he met fellow painter Robert Colquhoun, with whom he established a life long relationship and jointly they became known as ‘The Two Roberts’. They moved to London in 1939 and MacBryde had his first solo exhibition at the Reid & Lefevre Gallery in 1943.

Robert Colquhoun died of heart failure in 1962. Soon after MacBryde moved to Ireland, and for a time shared a house with Patrick Kavanagh, Robert MacBryde died in 1966 in Dublin as a result of a street accident.

Click here to view prints by this artist

Born: 1940
Died: 2023

Byrne studied at both Edinburgh and Glasgow Schools of Art in the late 50s and early 60s. A superb painter and draughtsman, the multi-talented Byrne is also a first-class playwright (‘The Slab Boys’, ‘Tutti Frutti’), his ear for dialogue is as acute (and witty) as his eye for detail. Much of his subject matter in both disciplines is overtly autobiographical, he often includes or refers to the Teddy Boy/Rock and Roll era of his youth. Byrne has designed record covers for Donovan, The Beatles, Gerry Rafferty and Billy Connolly. His work is held in major collections in Scotland and abroad. Several of his paintings hang in The Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, the Museum of Modern Art and the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow.

View John Byrne prints here.

Born: 1917
Place of Birth: Aberdeen
Died: 1998

Alberto Morrocco was born in Aberdeen to Italian parents in 1917. He attended Gray’s School of Art from the prodigious age of fourteen, tutored by James Cowie and Robert Sivell, and won the Carnegie and Brough travelling scholarships, affording him opportunity to paint and study in France, Italy and Switzerland in the late 1930s. After serving in the army between 1940-46 he devoted his time to painting. His subject matter varied from the domestic interior, landscape, imaginings of Italian life, still life and many commissioned portraits. Combining his talent with abundant energy he became one of the most dominant figures in the Scottish artworld in the second half of the 20th century. David McClure succinctly explained: ‘Alberto painted as an Italian operatic tenor sings, that is with a passionate theatricality and always con brio. Alberto Morrocco was the subject of a centenary exhibition at The Gallery in August 2017.

Born: 1946

Alan Robb was born in Glasgow and brought up in Aberdeen He graduated Grays School of Art in 1969 and from the RoyalCollege of Art, London in 1972. Robb was appointed assistant art master at Oundle School in Northamptonshire and in 1975, relocated to Cork, Ireland as painting tutor at the Crawford School of Art. In 1980 he became head of Diploma Studies and as well as Painting Printmaking and Sculpture, his remit included Art History, Stained Glass and Violin making. In 1983 he was appointed Head of the School of Fine Art at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee and was awarded a personal chair in 1989. Robb retired as Professor Emeritus of the University of Dundee in 2007. He was elected a member of the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour in 2010 and a member of the Royal Scottish Academy in 2011.

“As I review my practice and resulting body of work it seems like a speculative circular journey, based almost wholly on intuitive choices and a growing understanding of what I can do. The motivation and momentum comes from unexpected discoveries and the hundreds of small decisions, which give each work its resolved identity.” — Alan Robb

His collection of work Sacred & Profane is a painterly exploration is made of material gathered from churches and museum collections to market stalls and specialist “magic shops” or the artist’s collection of Christian votive figures, Macumba and Candomble figures in wood, metal or plaster. The resolution of each painting is a combination of reference and invention. There is latitude for interpretation as in all popular iconography and religious art, which is where the real interest lies.

Born: 1886
Place of Birth: Aberdeenshire
Died: 1956

Born in Aberdeenshire, Cowie studied at Glasgow School of Art. He later taught at Bellshill Academy, near Glasgow, followed by the position of Warden at Hospitalfield House. It was here Cowie taught Joan Eardley, with whom he famously clashed over their different approaches to painting. Cowie’s style of painting was precise and linear. A great admirer of artists like Poussin and the pre-Raphaelite painters, he felt he shared their classical values of self-restraint and objectivity. He had a meticulous way of working and believed that art was a product of thought and reason.

 

Robbie Bushe is a graduate of Edinburgh College of Art; he subsequently lectured at Aberdeen School of Art and University College Chichester. A painter in oils and mixed media of witty, enigmatic narrative figure paintings. Images which stick in the mind.

Born: 1897
Place of Birth: Denholm
Died: 1981

William Johnstone, born the son of a farmer in the Scottish Borders, was at the forefront of British art world throughout the twentieth century. He became one of the first British artists to break with representation and paint purely abstract pictures; he also had evolutionary impact on art education. He was Principal at Camberwell College of Art from 1938- 1946 and then Principal at Central School of Arts and Crafts from 1947 to 1960. He developed the Basic Design course which stemmed from the Bauhaus and his instinct to defy convention and his eye for talented staff made Central a tour de force. Alan Davie, Anton Ehrenzweig, Patrick Heron, Earl Haig, John Minton, Eduardo Paolozzi, Victor Pasmore, Gordon Baldwin, William Turnbull all worked for him – which made for an explosive, creative mixture of artistic personalities. He received an OBE for his contribution to art education in 1954 then returned home to the Borders in 1960 to concentrate on painting and return to farming.

Born: 1883
Died: 1937

Cadell was twelve years younger than S.J. Peploe but just as precocious and was producing very capable watercolours and drawings in his early teens. Half French, he was taken to France and Munich by his mother for artistic education and some very fine, freely painted farmyard paintings date from this early period. Despite his sophistication, Cadell’s most natural habitat was the west Highlands, Iona in particular, and he made only a few painting trips to France after the War. He produced some of his most brilliant Colourist works while staying with the Peploes in Cassis in 1924. Very fashion conscious, his work before 1914 had an Edwardian opulence and breadth unique in Scottish painting. By the twenties his work had a hard edge with clear colour, chiming with the jazz-age, and the compositions have a deco stylishness full of sophistication of concept and originality of palette. He is as original and distinctive a voice as any in Scottish painting.

We have more available works by Cadell. Please contact the Gallery if you would like to arrange an appointment to view the works we currently have available for sale. Furthermore, should you have any work you would be interested in selling please do contact the Gallery on 0131 558 1200 or email Guy Peploe.

Born: 1874
Place of Birth: Leith, Edinburgh
Died: 1961

Born in Leith, J.D. Fergusson’s studies took him to Paris in the 1890s where he studied the Impressionists and attended the Académie Colarossi. He exhibited in London in 1905 and settled in Paris in 1907 working in a Fauvist style then later in a more Cubist manner. He had four works exhibited in Post-Impressionist and Futurist Exhibition in London in 1913. His first solo show in Scotland was in 1923 and was followed by an exhibition with the three other Scottish Colourists, Peploe, Cadell and Hunter. The Colourists were very important in furthering the influence of certain aspects of continental Modernism on Scottish Painting.

We have more available works by J.D. Fergusson. Please contact the Gallery if you would like to arrange an appointment to view the works we currently have available for sale. Furthermore, should you have any work you would be interested in selling please do contact the Gallery on 0131 558 1200 or email Guy Peploe.

 

Born: 1921
Place of Birth: Sussex
Died: 1963

There is an enduring fascination for Joan Eardley far beyond her unconventional life and early death at the age of forty-two. Born in 1921 in Sussex, Joan Eardley’s family moved to Scotland in 1939 and a year later she joined the Glasgow School of Art. She found subjects in the shipyards of Clydebank and the slums of Townhead, at first the run-down tenements and buildings and later the children and streetlife around Rottenrow where the character of the people and the place became the vital subject of her work. Her art education was finished with scholarship visits to Paris and the cities of Renaissance Italy and back in Scotland she ventured with her art school friends to Arran and back to the south of France. By the fifties, Joan Eardley divided her life between her studio in Townhead and the fishing village of Catterline, a place she had discovered in the North East of Scotland. Eardley felt at ease in these two contrasting localities and over the succeeding decade, as if by accident, she created an epic vision of the world from no more than two streets and one small fishing hamlet. The slums of Townhead are no more, the harsh realities memorialised by the honesty of her vision, the spirit of the people invested in its children captured, enduring like no other example in the history of art. Catterline remains unchanged and the village is inevitably a place of pilgrimage for the thousands who admire the artist’s deep-felt engagement with nature on the Kincardineshire coast. The Scottish Gallery held its first Joan Eardley exhibition in 1961 and later her memorial in 1964.

Born: 1912
Place of Birth: St Andrews
Died: 2004

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham was born in St Andrews and attended Edinburgh College of Art 1932-7. She moved to St Ives in the 1940s, where she joined the artist societies of Newlyn, St Ives and Penwith and became friends with Nicholson, Hepworth and Gabo. A trip to Switzerland in 1948 inspired her Glacier Series and further significant travel to Italy in 1955 highlighted her strong draughtsmanship. She divided her time between St Andrews and St Ives from 1960 and produced various significant series of abstract works from the geometric to the more organic. Later in her life, her work took on a colourful, painterly flourishing in tandem with magnificent printmaking with Graal Press, consolidating her place as a major Modern British figure.

Please click here to view prints by the artist.

Born: 1871
Place of Birth: Edinburgh
Died: 1935

Born in 1871, he is the senior of the four artists now known as The Scottish Colourists. S.J. Peploe had his first exhibition at The Scottish Gallery in 1903 and a life long association with us until his untimely death in 1935. He lived in Paris from 1910 until 1912, where his work changed radically from paintings reminiscent of Manet and Sargent to brilliant Fauvist works which placed him in the vanguard of British Modernism. By the time of his early death aged sixty-four in 1935, he was recognised as a great painter but only by a small coterie of collectors and curators, like Ion Harrison and Stanley Cursiter and it has taken a further fifty years for his national and international significance to be fully appreciated.

We have more available works by S.J. Peploe. Please contact the Gallery if you would like to arrange an appointment to view the works we currently have available for sale.

Furthermore, should you have any work you would be interested in selling please do contact the gallery on 0131 558 1200.

Guy Peploe is the world’s leading authority on the work of S.J. Peploe.

 

Born: 1930
Place of Birth: Kirkcaldy

Born in Kirkcaldy in 1930 Frances Walker studied at Edinburgh College of Art and then took up a post as visiting teacher of art for the Hebrides. This experience engendered in her a life-long love of wild and desolate places and since then she has chosen to depict the most remote landscapes, her compositions usually based on coastal reaches, craggy rocks and deserted beaches. Moving to Aberdeen, Walker took up a post at Gray’s School of Artwhere she taught for many years. After retirement she has since divided her time between Aberdeen and the Western Isles, especially Tiree, where she owns a thatched cottage, but more recently has also travelled further afield – her latest inspiration being the even wilder and more desolate landscape of the Antarctic and South Georgia. A suite of Antarctic paintings were recently bequeathed and exhibited as part of a major exhibition, Among the Polar Ice at The McManus in Dundee (September 2019 – March 2020).

Click here to see prints by the artist.

Born: 1862
Place of Birth: Aldershot
Died: 1920

Mackie was an artist who is notoriously hard to categorise in relation to British art of the time due to his catholic range of influences. He travelled to France for his honeymoon in 1892, where he famously befriended Sereusier and Gauguin. His contact with Gauguin and the Pont Aven school was to have drastic effect on the rest of Mackie’s career, most notably in his use of colour and technique. After discussions with Gauguin, Mackie began to use Japanese oak blocks for his printing; he had previously used cut linoleum.

Born: 1942
Place of Birth: Port Seton
Died: 2013

John Bellany was born in 1942 in the Scottish fishing village of Port Seton. He attended Edinburgh College of Art from 1960 to 1965 and the Royal College of Art from 1965 to 1968. His early work in Northern European Expressionist-Realist tradition allied to personal symbolism and iconography, often drawn from his family’s sea-faring past.

His work is often highly challenging and at times autobiographical as epitomised by a series of brutally unflinching self portraits produced in hospital following a liver transplant in the 1980s. He is considered an artist of international standing, with works in both MOMA and Metropolitan Museum in New York as well as the Tate Gallery, London. He was elected to the Royal Academicians in 1991. In 2016 the National Galleries Scotland hosted a major retrospective of his work to mark the artist’s 70th birthday.

Please click here to view prints by the artist


Sign up to our news and events