Artists

Sir William MacTaggart

PPRSA, RA, RSW
1903-1981

Winter Landscape, c.1925

oil on board
H:30cm W:35cm
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Away to the West, 1963

oil on canvas
H:86.5cm W:111.5cm
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Orry-La-Ville, c.1964

charcoal
H:22.5cm W:32.5cm
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Across the Bay, c.1962

oil on canvas board
H:26.5cm W:38cm
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Orry-La-Ville

charcoal
H:22.5cm W:32.5cm
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The Harbour, 1963

oil on board
H:51cm W:62cm
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Harbour Scene

oil on panel
H:33cm W:43cm
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East Lothian Village

coloured crayon
H:21.5cm W:30cm
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The Studio Window, c.1966

mixed media on blue paper
H:63cm W:47cm
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Edinburgh Castle in the Snow, 1936-7

oil on canvas
H:76cm W:91.5cm
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Ground Swell

oil on board
H:25cm W:25cm
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Sir William MacTaggart

PPRSA, RA, RSW
Born: 1903
Place of Birth: Loanhead
Died: 1981

Born at Loanhead in 1903, Sir William MacTaggart is one of the best-loved and yet least well-understood of Scottish artists. MacTaggart, grandson of the great landscape painter, took his Diploma at the same time as William Gillies and Geissler and followed the same route to Paris. Back in Edinburgh he was a founder member of the 1922 Group (of younger painters), in 1927 he joined the Society of Eight whose members included Colourists Cadell and Peploe and began a consistently successful exhibition career starting at The Scottish Gallery in 1929. A sumptuous painter in oils, he was a prolific draughtsman and preferred pastel to watercolour; instinctively an expressionist and romantic painter his outlook shifted dramatically after the Munch exhibition at the SSA in 1931 (eventually marrying the Norwegian curator Fanny Aavatsmark) and again after studying Roualt in Paris in the early sixties. From his home and studio in Edinburgh’s Drummond Place, some of his best-known works offer a still life, framed by a window, looking east towards Bellvue Church.


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