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James Cumming’s painting The Seaforth was included in touring exhibition, Fourteen Scottish Painters, an important survey of Scottish painting in the early sixties, a year after his first major exhibition with The Scottish Gallery. The subject remains enigmatic, a bust portrait of a man, using techniques derived from cubism, a palette knife used to incise sharp lines and paint scraped back to reveal glowing colour in a lower layer. But his title allows us an in: The Seaforth, a Highland soldier from a regiment steeped in blood and glory for a hundred years, a decorated warrior with a glint in his eye, a man from the harsh Highlands transformed into the cutting edge of the British army, bent to the British colonial project, but still fiercely independent. Cumming’s experiences as a post-dip student in Lewis, his deep sympathy for a simple, hard life on the fringes of Scotland persists in this soldier portrait.
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