We are delighted to announce an exhibition of works on paper by James Cowie. Cowie can be seen as one of the most individual Scottish painters and teachers of the 20th century. Unlike many of his contemporaries Cowie did not follow in the Colourists tradition but drew great influence from Poussin and the Pre-Raphaelites school of 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, rather than a spontaneous reaction to the subject. There is an elusive quality that in the past has been defined as ‘ambiguous’, romantic or surrealist. Through his teaching at Hospitalfield he had great influence on a further generation of artist including Joan Eardley, Robert Colquhoun and Macbryde and Ian Fleming. This important body of work has been consigned directly from the Cowie family.

Gallery Director Guy Peploe, gave a talk on the works within this exhibition, click here to view the edited highlights.

James Cowie

Born: 1886

Place of Birth: Aberdeenshire

Died: 1956

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

Insights

James Cowie

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