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A Shepherd’s Life centres on Jenny Armstrong, born in 1903 at the farm of Fairliehope, who spent her life working as a shepherdess in the Pentland Hills. In a series of remarkable paintings made over twenty years and based on close observation, Victoria Crowe, one of Scotland’s foremost painters, pays tribute to the life and work of this exceptional woman. In spite of their different ages and backgrounds, the two women came to value each other’s company and it was through the shepherdess that the artist learned how to interpret the surrounding landscape. At the same time the paintings depict an ancient way of living that has been long in the decline and which, at the start of a new millennium, may be finally disappearing.
Victoria Crowe studied at Kingston School of Art from 1961-65 and at the Royal College of Art, London, from 1965-68. At her postgraduate show, she was invited by Sir Robin Philipson to teach at Edinburgh College of Art. For thirty years she worked as a part-time lecturer in the School of Drawing and Painting while developing her own artistic practice. She lives and works in West Linton and Edinburgh. Her first one-person exhibition, after leaving the Royal College of Art, was in London and has subsequently held over fifty, one person shows.
Victoria Crowe’s first solo exhibition at The Scottish Gallery was in 1970. In August 2018, The Gallery held a major exhibition of paintings to coincide with The Scottish National Portrait Gallery’s retrospective of Victoria Crowe’s portraits. In 2019 The City Art Centre held a retrospective entitled 50 Years of Painting. This exhibition embraced every aspect of Crowe’s practice and featured over 150 paintings, works on paper and sketchbooks and several films of the artist were commissioned.
Victoria Crowe is a member of the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) and the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolours (RSW). Crowe has exhibited nationally and internationally and undertaken many important portrait commissions, including HRH The King, RD Laing, Peter Higgs and Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Crowe’s work is held in numerous public and private collections worldwide.
In 2000, Crowe’s exhibition A Shepherd’s Life, consisting of work selected from the 1970s and 80s, was curated for the National Galleries of Scotland’s to mark the Millennium. The exhibition toured Scotland and was re-gathered in 2009 for the Fleming Collection, London.
Crowe was awarded an OBE for Services to Art in 2004 and from 2004-2007, she was appointed Senior Visiting Scholar at St. Catherine’s College, Cambridge. The resulting work, Plant Memory, was exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy in 2007 and subsequently toured Scotland. In 2009 she received an Honorary Degree from The University of Aberdeen and in 2010 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
In 2013, Dovecot Studios wove a large-scale tapestry of Crowe’s painting Large Tree Group. This collaborative tapestry was acquired for the National Museums Scotland. In 2015, Crowe invited as artist-in-residence at Dumfries House and in 2016 a group of work from the residency was acquired by the National Galleries of Scotland. Crowe was commissioned by the Worshipful Company of Leathersellers’ in 2014, to design a forty-metre tapestry for their new hall in the city of London, which took over three years to weave and was installed in January 2017. Dovecot worked with Victoria Crowe to produce a new tapestry inspired by a detail from her painting Twilight, Venice, 2014. The new tapestry, Richer Twilight, Venice was completed and unveiled at the end of September 2019.
Following a residency in Orkney in 2022, the Pier Art Centre in Stromness held a major exhibition of new work, Touching the Surface from August to November 2024, in which she looked specifically at the contrasting light around the summer and winter solstices.
The Scottish Gallery exhibitions: 1970, 1973, 1977, 1982, 1995, 1998, 2001 (Festival), 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010 (Festival), 2012, 2014 (Festival), 2016, 2018 (Festival), 2019, 2021, 2023, 2025 (Festival, 80th)
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