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A long life, good health, and a strict work ethic are necessary ingredients for a productive life. Add to the recipe a considerable talent and you have a description of Adam Bruce Thomson. He died in 1976 and The Scottish Gallery continued a productive relationship with his daughters, Margaret and Mary leading to his Centenary show in 1985 and a major reappraisal retrospective in 2013. Now the Thomson girls have passed also but a substantial body of work is still intact allowing us to focus on different aspects and periods of the artist’s output and here we look again at his watercolour. Like his friend William Gillies he had his favoured locations, and the Scottish Borders and West Highlands are revisited as well as forays to the outer isles, Berwickshire coast and of course the hills of his home city, Edinburgh. His early pastel, gouache and tempera gave way to watercolour as his dominant medium after the War and his distinctive, free technique, vigorous descriptive drawing and strong local colour have become an essential contribution to The Edinburgh School.
Bruce Thomson – or ‘Adam B’, as he was often called – was a painter of great integrity whose long, productive life tells the story of Scottish painting for the first three quarters the twentieth century. Thomson was born in 1885, attending first the Trustees Academy and then the newly established Edinburgh College of Art where he received diplomas in both Drawing and Painting, and Architecture before scholarships took him abroad to Spain and then Paris. He was an accomplished etcher and lithographer and he also sought expertise in the difficult media of pastel and watercolour. By the 1920s, his technique was closest to S.J. Peploe, Cadell and other contemporaries favouring the technique of painting on a gesso ground with an oil-reduced vehicle so the subjects tended to be treated in flat areas of colour.
Thomson served in the Great War before returning to the College where he taught etching, composition and still life to the painting school and colour theory to the architecture students. His association with Edinburgh College of Art continued until his death as, although he retired from teaching in 1950, he continued as an examiner and a Trustee. His links with both the RSA, where he was Treasurer for seven years and the RSW, where he served as President for a further seven years from 1957 were very important to him. He was awarded an OBE in 1963. In 2024 the City Art Centre in Edinburgh is holding a major retrospective of his work, The Quiet Path, his first major exhibition in a public institution, to coincide The Gallery will honour Thomson with an exhibition in September 2024.
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