Head Study, Girl, 1925-30

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.

James Cowie was one of the finest draughtsmen of his generation: drawing was the very essence of what he did, but his drawing was never showy, no mere display of virtuosity like the work of Augustus John, for instance, which he loathed. Rather for him drawing was a way of raising something observed into a visual idea that has its own energy and integrity on the page and subsequently, too, on the canvas, for he always worked through drawing to painting. Nor is it fanciful to put it that way, it merely paraphrases his own words; to copy nature, he said, is to me not enough for a picture, which must be an idea, a concept built of much that in its total combination it would never be possible to see and to copy. Such a stern ambition took a great deal of thought and so he worked out his ideas on paper. He made studies for compositions to be painted and of figures and other details that occur in them, but also too of things that simply caught his eye. He did make drawings that are compositions in themselves, especially latterly when he was inspired by the enigmatic work of the surrealists, but even when an idea eventually became a finished watercolour, he made numerous preparatory drawings. Duncan MacMillan, 2015

The Scottish Gallery exhibitions: 1956 (Memorial), 1986 (Retrospective), 2015