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The MacTaggarts visited the town of Humbie in East Lothian regularly, particularly in winter, where he would produce charcoal sketches en plein air to later develop in the studio into finished oils. This painting, which features a low winter sun hanging over the distant Pentland Hills, conveys the mood and atmosphere of an East Lothian landscape in the gloaming, which MacTaggart, who had grown up in Loanhead, was so familiar. Like many of his later works this painting, completed with a palette knife, has a poetic quality in which MacTaggart heightens the abstract qualities of the landscape ‘to enrich the experience of the spectator… To create some kind of mood that somebody else responds to.’ This painting is one of the finest he produced and was exhibited at both major MacTaggart retrospectives at the National Galleries of Scotland in 1968 and 1998.
Born in Loanhead, near Edinburgh, Sir William MacTaggart was the grandson of the landscape painter William McTaggart (1835–1910). He studied at Edinburgh College of Art from 1918 to 1921, at the same time as William Gillies, and travelled to Paris after graduating. He was a founder member of the 1922 Group and in 1927, he joined the exclusive Society of Eight whose members included Colourists F.C.B. Cadell and S.J. Peploe and began, ahead of his contemporaries a successful exhibition career at The Scottish Gallery from 1929. A sumptuous painter in oils, he was instinctively an expressionist and romantic painter. His outlook shifted dramatically after visiting the Edvard Munch exhibition at the Scottish Society of Artists in 1931 (he eventually married the Norwegian curator, Fanny Aavatsmark) and again after studying Rouault in Paris in the 1950s. From his home and studio in Edinburgh’s Drummond Place in the New Town, some of his best-known works offer a still life, framed by a window, looking east towards Bellevue Church. MacTaggart was president of the RSA from 1959–1969 and was knighted for his services to art in 1962. From 1951, MacTaggart and his wife travelled the short distance to the Johnstounburn Hotel at Humbie for the Christmas Holidays. East Lothian and the Borders became a favourite landscape and the inspiration for some of his most engaging work.
The Scottish Gallery exhibitions: 1929, 1953, 1959 (Festival), 1966 (Festival)
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