Barbara Balmer

Born: 1929

Place of Birth: Birmingham, England

Died: 2017

Barbara Balmer studied at Coventry College of Art before enrolling in The Edinburgh College of Art.She first exhibited her work in 1953 after completing a travelling scholarship to France and Spain. Her work is held in many private and public collections, including a large mural in Cumbernald Town Hall. She worked in landscape, still life and portraiture in oil, watercolour and lithograph. Balmer was the subject of over twenty solo exhibitions in her lifetime, and she was a regular exhibitor at The Royal Scottish Academy, The Society of Scottish Artists and The Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour. Read her obituary here.

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham

Born: 1912

Place of Birth: St Andrews

Died: 2004

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912–2004) was a leading member of the St Ives group of artists and made an outstanding contribution to the advancement of post-war British art. Last year, filmmaker and director Mark Cousins directed a new film A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things, which is a cinematic immersion into Wilhelmina Barns-Graham’s art and life. The film will be on general release in 2025. Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, known as Willie, was born in St Andrews, Fife, on 8 June 1912. Determining while at school that she wanted to be an artist, she set her sights on Edinburgh College of Art, where she enrolled in 1932 and graduated with her diploma in 1937. At the suggestion of the College’s principal, Hubert Wellington, she moved to St Ives in 1940. Early on she met Borlase Smart, Alfred Wallis and Bernard Leach, as well as Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo who were living locally at Carbis Bay. Her peers in St Ives include, among others, Patrick Heron, Terry Frost, Roger Hilton, and John Wells. Barns-Graham’s history is bound up with St Ives, where she lived throughout her life. In 1951 she won the Painting Prize in the Penwith Society of Arts in Cornwall Festival of Britain Exhibition and went on to have her first London solo exhibition at the Redfern Gallery in 1952. She was included in many of the important exhibitions on pioneering British abstract art that took place in the 1950s. In 1960, Barns-Graham inherited Balmungo House near St Andrews, which initiated a new phase in her life. From this moment she divided her time between the two coastal communities, establishing herself as a Scottish artist as much as a St Ives one. Wilhelmina Barns-Graham was represented by The Scottish Gallery throughout her career. Important exhibitions of her work at the Tate St Ives in 1999/2000 and 2005, and the publication of the first monograph on her life and work, Lynne Green’s W. Barns-Graham: A Studio Life, 2001, confirmed her as one of the key contributors of the St Ives School, and as a significant British modernist. She died in St Andrews on 26 January 2004.

The Scottish Gallery exhibitions: 1956, 1960, 1981 (Festival), 1989 (London), 2016, 2019, 2022

Please click here to view prints by the artist.

Elizabeth Blackadder

Born: 1931

Place of Birth: Falkirk

Died: 2021

Elizabeth Blackadder was born in Falkirk in 1931. She studied at ECA from 1949 until 1954 under Robert Henderson Blyth and William Gillies inter alia and earned travelling scholarships to southern Europe and Italy. In 1956 she married artist and fellow Scottish Gallery exhibitor John Houston and began teaching in Edinburgh. She taught at Edinburgh College of Art from 1962 until her retirement in 1986. One of Scotland’s greatest artists, she also garners recognition and success in London. In 1972, Blackadder was elected member of the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh and in 1976 she gained entry at the Royal Academy, London – the first woman to be elected into both institutions. In 2001, Elizabeth was made the first female Artist Limner by HRH The Queen, a position within the Royal Household unique to Scotland. One decade later, in 2011 (the year she turned 80) a major retrospective of her work opened at the National Galleries of Scotland.

To view prints by Elizabeth Blackadder please click here

Donald Morison Buyers

Born: 1930

Place of Birth: Aberdeen

Died: 2003

Donald Buyers was born in 1930 in Aberdeen where he attended the Grammar School and then Gray’s School of Art after which he assisted his tutor Robert Sivell in the murals at the University Union in Schoolhill. His was a quiet life, well lived, throughout which family and painting were his twin loves. A honeymoon in Paris turned into an extended stay and the School of Paris was always present in his work. Back in Aberdeen he began to teach in schools: Robert Gordon’s and eventually as a visiting lecturer at Gray’s, but he never stopped working and exhibiting.

John Byrne

Born: 1940

Died: 2023

Byrne studied at both Edinburgh and Glasgow Schools of Art in the late 50s and early 60s. A superb painter and draughtsman, the multi-talented Byrne is also a first-class playwright (‘The Slab Boys’, ‘Tutti Frutti’), his ear for dialogue is as acute (and witty) as his eye for detail. Much of his subject matter in both disciplines is overtly autobiographical, he often includes or refers to the Teddy Boy/Rock and Roll era of his youth. Byrne has designed record covers for Donovan, The Beatles, Gerry Rafferty and Billy Connolly. His work is held in major collections in Scotland and abroad. Several of his paintings hang in The Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, the Museum of Modern Art and the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow.

View John Byrne prints here.

Doug Cocker

Born: 1945

Doug Cocker was brought up in rural Perthshire and comes from a long line of farmers and blacksmiths. He taught sculpture at Nene College, Northampton and Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen and over a period of twenty years he was visiting lecturer at Edinburgh University, Edinburgh College of Art, The Glasgow School of Art, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee, Tyler University, Philadelphia, Georgian College, Ontario and Newcastle Polytechnic from 1992–1998. He was elected to the Royal Scottish Academy in 1984.

Cocker has undertaken many public sculpture commissions including the Ben Lomond Memorial at Rowardennan and the Glasgow Bouquet in the Merchant City, Glasgow. Doug Cocker’s sculpture is the artist’s response to the landscape and natural environment around him. Working predominately in wood, his studio in Lundie, outside Dundee, is a magnificent thinking space where the walls are littered with evolving ideas.

Public commissions include:

Perth, Glasgow, Dundee, Ayr, Oldbury, Cardiff, Bristol

Public collections include:

Aberdeen Art Gallery; Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre; The McManus: Dundee’s Art Gallery and Museum; City Art Centre, Edinburgh; Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow; Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow; Greenshields Foundation, Montreal; Peterborough Art Gallery; Royal Scottish Academy of Art and Architecture, Edinburgh; Northampton Art Gallery; Kirkcaldy Galleries; Perth Museum and Art Gallery; The Ballinglen Archive, County Mayo; Robert Gordon University Collection, Aberdeen; University of Dundee; Boswell Collection, University of St. Andrews; Arts Council of Great Britain; Old Hawkhill, City of Dundee, Dundee; University of Stirling; Hospitalfield, Arbroath; University of South Wales Art Collection Museum

Victoria Crowe

Born: 1945

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, Edinburgh, and Venice. Her first one-person exhibition, after leaving the Royal College of Art, was in London and she has subsequently gone on to have over fifty solo shows.

Victoria Crowe’s first solo exhibition at The Scottish Gallery was in 1970. In August 2018, we held a major exhibition of paintings at The Scottish Gallery. This coincided 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 pieces.

Victoria Crowe is a member of the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) and the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolours (RSW). She has exhibited nationally and internationally and undertaken many important portrait commissions, including RD Laing, Peter Higgs and Jocelyn Bell Burnell. She has received many bursaries and research awards and her work is held in numerous public and private collections worldwide.

In 2000, her exhibition A Shepherd’s Life, consisting of work selected from the 1970s and 80s, was one of the National Galleries of Scotland’s Millennium exhibitions. It received great critical acclaim. The exhibition toured Scotland and was re-gathered in 2009 for a three-month exhibition at the Fleming Collection, London. Victoria 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 Victoria’s painting Large Tree Group. This collaborative tapestry was acquired for the National Museums Scotland. In 2015, Victoria was an invited artist at Dumfries House and in 2016 a group of work by the artist was acquired by the National Galleries of Scotland. Victoria 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. Dovecote 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 (Fesitval, 80th)

To view Victoria Crowe’s prints please click here

Alan Davie

Born: 1920

Place of Birth: Grangemouth

Died: 2014

Alan Davie was born in Grangemouth and studied at ECA (1937-40). He performed as a jazz musician after war service but also wrote poetry, designed textiles and made jewellery.

From 1953 to 1956 Davie taught in London at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, where he became interested in African and Pacific art. He first visited St. Lucia in 1971 and began to spend six months a year there, bringing a Caribbean tone to his art.

Further influence on his work over the years include Paul Klee, American Abstract Expressionism, Zen Buddhism and Indian mythology. A major international figure, his Edinburgh Festival exhibition Magic Pictures was held at The Scottish Gallery in 1979.

David Donaldson

Born: 1916

Place of Birth: Lanarkshire

Died: 1996

David Donaldson was born in Lanarkshire and studied at Glasgow School of Art from 1932 to 1937. He was awarded a travelling scholarship to Florence and Paris which he fitted in around his part-time teaching at the GSA from 1938-44. He took on a full-time position from 1944 and became the highly influential Head of Drawing and Painting there from 1968. Donaldson was appointed Her Majesty’s Painter and Limner in Scotland from 1977 until his death in 1996. With a scope of subjects covering still life and landscape as well as literary, biblical and allegorical subjects – not forgetting being a leading portrait painter – it was with great honour that The Scottish Gallery hosted Edinburgh Festival Exhibitions of his work in 1973 and 1982.

Joan Eardley

Born: 1921

Place of Birth: Sussex

Died: 1963

There is an enduring fascination for Joan Eardley far beyond her unconventional life and early death at the age of forty-two. Born in 1921 in Sussex, Joan Eardley’s family moved to Scotland in 1939 and a year later she joined the Glasgow School of Art. She found subjects in the shipyards of Clydebank and the slums of Townhead, at first the run-down tenements and buildings and later the children and streetlife around Rottenrow where the character of the people and the place became the vital subject of her work. Her art education was finished with scholarship visits to Paris and the cities of Renaissance Italy and back in Scotland she ventured with her art school friends to Arran and back to the south of France. By the fifties, Joan Eardley divided her life between her studio in Townhead and the fishing village of Catterline, a place she had discovered in the North East of Scotland. Eardley felt at ease in these two contrasting localities and over the succeeding decade, as if by accident, she created an epic vision of the world from no more than two streets and one small fishing hamlet. The slums of Townhead are no more, the harsh realities memorialised by the honesty of her vision, the spirit of the people invested in its children captured, enduring like no other example in the history of art. Catterline remains unchanged and the village is inevitably a place of pilgrimage for the thousands who admire the artist’s deep-felt engagement with nature on the Kincardineshire coast. The Scottish Gallery held its first Joan Eardley exhibition in 1961 and later her memorial in 1964.

The Scottish Gallery exhibitions:
1955 (Festival), 1958 (Festival), 1961, 1964 (Festival and Memorial), 1981, 1983, 1984, 1988, 1990, 1992, 1996, 2007, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2021 (Centenary)

J.D. Fergusson

Born: 1874

Place of Birth: Leith, Edinburgh

Died: 1961

2024 marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of one of Scotland’s greatest artists, John Duncan Fergusson. He was an exceptionally gifted man with an uncompromising vision of what it meant to be an artist: emotional truth was paramount. Free from the constraints of academic tradition or the conventions of bourgeois life, he was a man for whom his work was his manifesto and wide intellectual engagement was the basis for his art.

Born in Leith, Fergusson’s studies took him to Paris in the 1890s where he studied the Impressionists and attended the Académie Colarossi. He exhibited in London in 1905 and settled in Paris in 1907 working in a Fauvist style then later in a more Cubist manner. He had four works exhibited in Post-Impressionist and Futurist Exhibition in London in 1913. His first solo show in Scotland was in 1923 and was followed by an exhibition with the three other Scottish Colourists, Peploe, Cadell and Hunter. The Colourists were very important in furthering the influence of certain aspects of continental Modernism on Scottish Painting.

We have more available works by J.D. Fergusson. Please contact the Gallery if you would like to arrange an appointment to view. Furthermore, should you have any work you would be interested in selling please contact The Gallery.

Ian Fleming

Born: 1906

Died: 1994

Ian Fleming was born in Glasgow in 1906 and studied at Glasgow School of Art during the 1920s. He began printmaking at art school, where his skill was quickly noticed, with Glasgow Art Gallery purchasing two of his prints while he was still a student. He joined the staff at Glasgow School of Art in 1931 and soon met the Edinburgh-based printmaker William Wilson through their mutual acquaintance Adam Bruce Thomson. Wilson and Fleming struck up an important friendship, sharing views on printmaking technique and subjects, their influence on each other was of mutual benefit to both their practices. During his time at Glasgow School of Art Fleming painted a portrait of the two Roberts – Colquhoun and Macbryde – who were his students at the time (alongside a young Joan Eardley). During the War, Fleming served first as a reserve policeman before joining the Pioneer Corps seeing action in France, the Low Countries and Germany. He left the Army in 1946 as an Acting Major and returned briefly to Glasgow before taking up the position of Warden at Hospitalfield, Arbroath, succeeding the artist, James Cowie. The fishing towns of Angus and Kincardineshire were to be his inspiration for many paintings of this period in which he celebrated the colour, forms and architecture of the working harbour communities. In 1954, he relocated to Aberdeen as Principal of Gray’s School of Art but continued to pursue his painting practice alongside his academic commitments. He was elected a full Academician of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1956, and by the time of his death was the longest-established member. After retiring in 1971, he became one of the founding members of Peacock Printmakers in Aberdeen, alongside Frances Walker.

The Scottish Gallery exhibitions: 1947, 1987

Helen Glassford

Born: 1976

Place of Birth: Lancaster

Helen Glassford was born in Lancaster in 1976. She studied at Carlisle Art College for a year before going on to the Fine Art Drawing and Painting degree course at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee graduating in 2002. Glassford’s oil paintings draw on her memory, experience and observation of the remote areas of Scotland. She seeks out the atmosphere, the intangible and unseen through her expressive land and mindscapes. In her work she constructs full environments, which she describes as a visual echo of experience, connecting the wild with the past and present, and connecting the intimate with the vast. Her work is in many private collections world-wide and in the public collection of the McManus Art Gallery and Museum Scotland. She exhibits throughout the UK and lives and works in Newport-on-Tay.

Alexander Goudie

Born: 1933

Place of Birth: Paisley

Died: 2004

Alexander Goudie is widely regarded as one of Scotland’s finest figurative painters. He enrolled in the Glasgow School of Art at just 17, and though he was reportedly boisterous and opinionated, he was focussed on developing traditional skills in painting. He was inspired by Manet, Velazquez and Van Dyke, and along with his peers and contemporaries, David Donaldson, Jimmy Robertson, John Cunningham, Duncan Shanks and John Byrne was trained to understand the alchemy of paint. His son, painter and broadcaster Lachlan Goudie explains:
‘They studied the properties of pigments and mediums, the tension between line and colour, the methods of modelling form and transferring your lived experience onto canvas.’

Lachlan Goudie

Born: 1976

Place of Birth: Glasgow

Lachlan Goudie studied English at Christ’s College, Cambridge before completing a Fine Art Degree at Camberwell College of Art. He regularly exhibits in his hometown of Glasgow, as well as Edinburgh, London and New York. He has won numerous awards, and in 2013 he was elected a member of the Royal Institute of Oil painters in London. As well as a painter, Lachlan works as a successful broadcaster and author. His popular 4-part BBC series, A Story of Scottish Art, led to the publication of an engaging and insightful book of the same name, to positive reviews.

The scope of Lachlan’s work is broad, incorporating portraiture, still life and landscape painting. He was schooled in painting by his father from an early age, and is a keen advocate for the value of technique, craft and tradition in contemporary art. Frequent painting trips abroad, during which he sketches in the open air whilst on the road, allow him to observe, document and celebrate the world around us.

‘I am a Glasgow boy. I was born in that city and my father, the artist Alexander Goudie, studied and taught at the Glasgow School of Art. The legacy of those late 19th Century artists who came to be known as the ‘Boys’, made a deep impression on my dad. When I was a young apprentice painter, he taught me their techniques and alerted me to the qualities which distinguished their work; assiduous control of tone, the use of square-edged brushes, an affinity with those French painters whose approach combined realism and naturalism.’
– Lachlan Goudie

Derrick Guild

Photography by Jed Gordon

Born: 1963

Place of Birth: Perth

Born in 1963 in Perth, Scotland, Derrick Guild has been the recipient of many awards for his unique work. Guild’s paintings and objects reference European still life of the 15th to 19th centuries. The drama, allegory and naturalism inherent in this period of painting speak to Guild of ever-present dilemmas of the human condition. His works are classical, formal and at the same time contemporary in their sense of dislocation and ambiguity.

‘In my work I am trying to create fluidity between the past and present. I make still life paintings using oil on canvas and objects that use a wide range of materials including cast resin, oil paint and miscellaneous materials. In the paintings, I am trying to harness the look and feel of the great European still life tradition. I want to hijack the high drama and emotional integrity that resonates in the work of that era. I aim to marry that look and feel to contemporary ideas and thoughts that include religion, colonialism, genetic modification, sexuality, commodification of nature, fecundity, humour, appropriation, addiction, beauty, absurdity, surrealism and realism. This list is always growing and is never closed. I feel the still life format easily allows narrative and metaphor, complexity and simplicity to be conveyed. Whilst every painting can be read alone, I feel that they are each a single sentence in a much longer and ongoing dialogue. The objects are in a sense three-dimensional versions of my still life paintings. They have developed from the realisation that an object resonates differently when it interacts in a space as a real object. I am trying for a more heightened sense of realism so that the experience of the object is not filtered through the two-dimensional canvas.’ – Derrick Guild

John Houston

Born: 1930

Died: 2008

John Houston was brought up in Buckhaven in Fife, where the ever-changing light over the Forth estuary and fields falling away to the shoreline were the backdrop to an idyllic childhood of horse fairs, golf and football. The landscape eventually inspired him to become a painter. Houston was drawn into the fold of Edinburgh College of Art and became as prodigious and natural a painter as his mentor William Gillies. He travelled widely, making exhibitions after trips to Europe, Japan and America, always with his fellow artist, wife and soul-mate Elizabeth Blackadder. He was an expressionist who could evoke the subtle, particular character of place, but his vision and ambition always looked outward. John Houston was represented by The Scottish Gallery from the late 1950s. He was ten times a solo exhibitor at The Edinburgh International Festival, between 1961 and his last show in 2008. Houston was honoured with a major retrospective at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 2005. His work is held in numerous public collections. We are actively looking for artwork by John Houston. If you have any works you are interested in selling please contact The Gallery.

The Scottish Gallery exhibitions: 1960, 1962 (Festival), 1965, 1967 (Festival), 1971 (Festival), 1975, 1980, 1990, 1993, 1997, 2003 (Festival), 2007 (Festival), 2009 (Memorial), 2012, 2013

Click here to view prints by this artist.

George Leslie Hunter

Born: 1877

Place of Birth: Rothesay

Died: 1931

Born in Rothesay in 1877, George Leslie Hunter emigrated to California in 1892 where his father bought a farm. He spent all his time drawing and when his family came back in 1900 he stayed to become part of the Bohemian lifestyle of San Francisco. He earned money by acquiring illustration work for newspapers and magazines. He went to New York with friends and then on to Paris in 1904, working in each city for a few months. Back in San Francisco he lost everything in the 1906 earthquake and shortly thereafter returned permanently to Scotland. He had his first solo exhibition with Alexander Reid in Glasgow in 1915, an association which continued until his death in 1931.

From 1923 he exhibited with Peploe and Cadell as the Three Scottish Colourists, and spent much of the twenties in France, often subsidised by Reid and a coterie of dedicated collectors, including T.J. Honeyman who wrote his biography after his untimely death at the age of fifty-four. He also showed regularly with The Scottish Gallery and we have continued to deal actively in his work in recent years.

Please contact the Gallery if you would like to arrange an appointment to view the works we currently have available for sale.

Adrian McCurdy

Born: 1953

Place of Birth: Kendal

I have managed to blend uncomplicated jointing with sculptural minimalism expressed through the wood craft of cleft oak. Referring back to early styles of cottage furniture has become a frequent source of inspiration and rudimentary character. I like things to last well and be relevant over time to fresh interpretation.

Adrian McCurdy has worked with wood since an early age. With a background in Fine Art, Adrian’s career moved first from painting to a development of unique wood-skills in furniture and more recently carved panels. From his workshop in the Scottish Borders, Adrian produces furniture using quality local timber and craft techniques both long established and contemporary, often working with storm damaged wood felled by local saw-mills.

‘My roots in traditional crafts go back to childhood experiences in a home where hand making furniture was my father’s career and regular conversation subject. We even had a lesson in cutting bread. I took a somewhat contrary direction by choosing art college and painting, but perhaps unsurprisingly found earning an income easier using what felt like natural wood-skills. I found a part-time opportunity that brought me to the Scottish Borders 45 years ago to assist Tim Stead with furniture. Although Tim’s preference to folk art was greater than mine, the simple approach he practised made sense to me.’ – Adrian McCurdy, 2023

Public collections include: Perth Art Gallery and Museum; National Museums Scotland, Edinburgh; Globe Theatre, London; Ann Getty Collection, Hawaii.

David McClure

Born: 1926

Place of Birth: Lochwinnoch

Died: 1998

McClure was one of a group of highly regarded young painters that included James Cumming, William Baillie, John Houston, Elizabeth Blackadder and David Michie all of whom graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in the early 1950s. Their formative years benefited from the examples of a remarkable concentration of talent in the capital, both on the Art College staff and in the annual exhibitions of the RSA, RSW, SSA or SSWA. In addition, The Scottish Gallery was regularly showing established artists such as Anne Redpath, William Gillies, William MacTaggart, as well as younger artists like Joan Eardley and Robin Philipson. McClure and many of his Edinburgh College peers soon joined them. McClure had his first one-man show with The Scottish Gallery in 1957 and the following decade saw regular exhibitions of his work.

He was included in the important surveys of contemporary Scottish art which began to define the Edinburgh School throughout the 1960s and culminated in his Edinburgh Festival show at The Gallery in 1969. But he was, even by 1957 (after a year’s painting in Florence and Sicily) at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, alongside his great friend Alberto Morrocco, applying the rigour and inspiration that made the college such a bastion of painting.

The Scottish Gallery exhibitions: 1957, 1962, 1966, 1969 (Festival), 1989, 1992, 1994, 1996 (70th Birthday Exhibition), 2000 (Memorial), 2003, 2010, 2014, 2015, 2019, 2022

James Morrison

Born: 1932

Place of Birth: Glasgow

Died: 2020

James Morrison sadly passed away in 2020. He was a great painter and a huge part of The Scottish Gallery for more than sixty years, the last thirty under an exclusive arrangement. His kindness, generosity and loyalty made him a hugely rewarding friend, and it has been a privilege to represent one of Scotland’s most distinctive and brilliant painters.

Born in Glasgow in 1932, Morrison studied at Glasgow School of Art from 1950-4. After a brief spell in Catterline in the early 1960s, Morrison settled in Montrose in 1965, joining the staff of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee the same year. He resigned from Duncan of Jordanstone in 1987 to paint full-time and since then his work has been exclusively available through The Scottish Gallery. Whole-heartedly a landscape painter, his main working areas are the lush, highly-managed farmland around his home in Angus and the rugged wildness of west coast Assynt. As well as Scotland, Morrison has had extended painting trips to Africa, France, and Canada, including three trips to the Arctic in the 1990s. A suite of his Arctic paintings were acquired and exhibited as part of a major exhibition, Among the Polar Ice at The McManus in Dundee (September 2019 – March 2020).

James Morrison first exhibited with The Gallery in the fifties, and over the course of his career, he enjoyed over twenty-five solo exhibitions with The Gallery, which also organised several one man shows elsewhere in the UK and internationally. In June 2022, The Scottish Gallery celebrated the life and work of one of Scotland’s most-loved artists in a major retrospective show James Morrison A Celebration 1932 – 2020. The exhibition, held two years after his death, presented work from the entirety of his artistic career which spanned seven decades.

Alberto Morrocco

Born: 1917

Place of Birth: Aberdeen

Died: 1998

Alberto Morrocco was born in Aberdeen to Italian parents in 1917. He attended Gray’s School of Art from the prodigious age of fourteen, tutored by James Cowie and Robert Sivell, and won the Carnegie and Brough travelling scholarships, affording him opportunity to paint and study in France, Italy and Switzerland in the late 1930s. After serving in the army between 1940-46 he devoted his time to painting. His subject matter varied from the domestic interior, landscape, imaginings of Italian life, still life and many commissioned portraits. Combining his talent with abundant energy he became one of the most dominant figures in the Scottish artworld in the second half of the 20^th century. David McClure succinctly explained: ‘Alberto painted as an Italian operatic tenor sings, that is with a passionate theatricality and always con brio. Alberto Morrocco was the subject of a centenary exhibition at The Gallery in August 2017.

Leon Morrocco

Photography by Dan Weill

Born: 1942

Place of Birth: Edinburgh

Leon Morrocco, the eldest son of painter Alberto Morrocco, was born in Edinburgh and studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and The Slade before Edinburgh College of Art. He was a lecturer in drawing and painting at Edinburgh College of Art from 1965-1968, and then took up a similar post at Glasgow School of Art from 1969- 1979 before moving to Australia to take up the post of Head of Fine Art at the Chisholm Institute in Melbourne. He has been painting full time since 1984.

Lilian Neilson

Born: 1938

Place of Birth: Kirkcaldy

Died: 1998

Born in Kirkcaldy, Lilian Neilson studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee from 1955 to 1960, followed by a brief period at Hospitalfield House in Arbroath, where she became friends with Joan Eardley. She completed a post-diploma year tutored by Hugh Crawford and Alberto Morrocco in 1960-61 and was awarded a travelling scholarship to France and Italy in 1961-62. Following this time in Europe, she joined Joan Eardley in Catterline where Neilson responded to the dramatic northeast coastline and began painting powerful landscapes and seascapes. The artist also worked backstage with Reet Guenigault in theatres including the Traverse in Edinburgh, but she returned to Catterline to help nurse Joan Eardley when her illness was diagnosed in 1962. Neilson bought one of the tiny fishing cottages, No 2 South Side, Catterline, with her home on one side and studio on the other. Like Eardley, she lived a frugal life. She moved permanently to Catterline in 1986 where Neilson undertook monthly surveys of the coastline and local beaches and began studying printmaking in Dundee. Her final exhibition, Certain Days and Other Seasons, was held at the Seagate in Dundee and Aberdeen Museum & Art Gallery.

Denis Peploe

Born: 1914

Died: 1993

Denis Peploe was born in 1914, the second son of the celebrated Scottish Colourist S J Peploe. Denis Peploe enrolled at Edinburgh College of Art at the age of seventeen where he was a contemporary of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and Margaret Mellis. He won post-diploma scholarships to Paris and Florence and took advantage of opportunity to travel extensively in Spain, Italy and Yugoslavia. He first exhibited at The Scottish Gallery in 1947, to critical acclaim. The Glasgow Herald critic responded to the exhibition, saying he was “an artist born fully armed”; and The Bulletin critic wrote: “the general impression of the exhibition is that we have in Denis Peploe a vital and adventurous painter”. Reviewers never avoided mention of his father, and though one couldn’t confuse their work there were similarities in their approaches: each picture was a response to a particular subject, either intellectual or emotional. His son, Gallery Director, Guy Peploe explains:

‘While he was intimately exposed to the mainstream of European art he remained better defined as an artist who responded directly to his subject, en plein air or in the studio. Here the challenge was a live model, or the intellectual exercise of reinvigorating the still life subject. His work remained free of political or art-world references but was at the same time formed by the century of modernism, the times of unprecedented turmoil and change to which he belonged. His response was to cleave to the idea that art was important, even redemptive and that it could somehow describe a better, or more vital place.’

The Scottish Gallery exhibitions: 1947, 1948 1951, 1954 1984, 1988, 1990 1995 (Memorial), 2006, 2010, 2014 (Centenary)

We would be delighted to hear from you if you are considering selling any works by Denis Peploe.

S.J. Peploe

Born: 1871

Place of Birth: Edinburgh

Died: 1935

Born in 1871, he is the senior of the four artists now known as The Scottish Colourists. S.J. Peploe had his first exhibition at The Scottish Gallery in 1903 and a life long association with us until his untimely death in 1935. He lived in Paris from 1910 until 1912, where his work changed radically from paintings reminiscent of Manet and Sargent to brilliant Fauvist works which placed him in the vanguard of British Modernism. By the time of his early death aged sixty-four in 1935, he was recognised as a great painter but only by a small coterie of collectors and curators, like Ion Harrison and Stanley Cursiter and it has taken a further fifty years for his national and international significance to be fully appreciated.

The Scottish Gallery exhibitions: 1903, 1909, 1922, 1923, 1924, 1927, 1934, 1936 (Memorial), 1947, 1985, 1990 (Edinburgh & London), 2012, 2021 (Bicentenary)

We have more available works by S.J. Peploe. Please contact the Gallery if you would like to arrange an appointment to view the works we currently have available for sale. Furthermore, should you have any work you would be interested in selling please do contact The Gallery on 0131 558 1200. Guy Peploe is the world’s leading authority on the work of S.J. Peploe.

Sir Robin Philipson

Born: 1916

Place of Birth: Broughton-in-Furness

Died: 1992

Sir Robin Philipson had a significant, influential presence on the Scottish Art Scene throughout his lifetime. He served as Head of School of Drawing and Painting at Edinburgh College of Art where he diligently maintained the ideals of the post-war Edinburgh School. And, for a whole decade he was President of the Royal Scottish Academy – a period seen as a Golden Age in Scottish Painting. First and foremost, however, he was a practicing painter.

In 1961 Tom Elder Dickinson described Robin Philipson as ‘…original without being pretentious, forceful without being crass, advanced without being outré. . . At his best he is a supreme painter possessed by a mood of peculiar sensitiveness. I can think of no artist today whose understanding and feeling for the qualities of paint are so perfectly matched to his lyrical purpose; he takes the paint into his very imagination and makes it speak with (an) eloquence and fervour.’

Philipson was enormously important to The Scottish Gallery where we held nine exhibitions in his lifetime. He was doubtless the most high-profile Scottish artist of his generation earning countless honours including a knighthood in 1976.

The Scottish Gallery exhibitions: 1954, 1958, 1961 (Festival), 1965 (Festival), 1968, 1970 (Festival), 1973, 1976 (Festival), 1983 (Festival) 1995 (Memorial), 2003, 2006, 2012, 2016 (Centenary)

His art, its free handling, its meaningful decorative values and its sometimes dark subjects, it remains a serious investigation of life. For him the production of art was essential but brave.

Elizabeth Cumming, 2018

Anne Redpath

Born: 1895

Died: 1965

Anne Redpath was a pivotal figure in the group of painters now referred to as The Edinburgh School. She had attended the College of Art, receiving her diploma in 1917. After a lengthy spell in the south of France, Redpath returned to Hawick in the mid-1930s. Her brilliant manipulation of paint, left in delicious peaks or eked across a rough surface with a palette knife, is characteristic of the varied responses to different subjects at different times. In the last years of her output she often favoured a limited palette; perhaps a few brilliant, jewel-like notes enlivening a dark or white composition.

Redpath was an inspirational person and formed many enduring friendships. Her flat in London Street became an artistic salon, celebrated by Sir Robin Philipson’s famous, affectionate group portrait in The Scottish National Portrait Gallery. She had considerable commercial success in her lifetime, enjoying a fruitful, consistent relationship with The Scottish Gallery and then with Reid & Lefevre in London. Since her passing, her reputation has been further enhanced with retrospective and centenary exhibitions resulting in her being established as one of the great figures in 20th Century Scottish Painting.

James Downie Robertson

Born: 1931

Place of Birth: Cowdenbeath

Died: 2010

James Downie Robertson was born in Cowdenbeath in 1931. He studied at the Glasgow School of Art under David Donaldson and Joan Eardley, graduating in 1953. In 1959 he joined the staff of the Glasgow School of Art, ultimately becoming a Senior Lecturer and temporary Head of Drawing and Painting, and had a major impact on the students he taught, before his retirement in 1996.

Robertson was predominantly a landscape painter, focusing his attention on on capturing the moods and feel of the places he painted. His work is held in many private and public collection worldwide, including that of HRH Prince Phillip and HRH The Queen Mother.

Duncan Shanks

Born: 1937

Place of Birth: Airdrie

Duncan Shanks was born in Airdrie in 1937 and studied at Glasgow School of Art from 1955 to 1960. During his Post Diploma year he was awarded a travelling scholarship which enabled a visit to Italy. On his return to Glasgow he joined the Art School staff where he lectured until 1979, before leaving to concentrate on painting full-time. Duncan’s first solo exhibition was hosted by Stirling University in 1974. Since then he has exhibited worldwide with notable public exhibitions including Falling Water at Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh in 1988, Patterns of Flight at Wrexham Art Centre in 1991 and Poetry of Place at the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery in Glasgow, which coincided with the bequest of the entirety of his sketchbooks to their collection in 2013. Shanks is a member of the Royal Scottish Academy, the Royal Glasgow Institute and Royal Society of Painters in Watercolour. He has been the subject of twelve solo exhibitions at The Scottish Gallery; his most recent, The Riverbank, was the Edinburgh Art Festival exhibition for 2022.

Matthew Draper

Born: 1973

Place of Birth: Staffordshire

Matthew Draper identifies himself principally as a draughtsman; drawing being the most unencumbered and immediate form of image-making. His work is made with an intense and energetic immediacy, working instinctively rather than methodically, keeping him physically and emotionally involved in the process. He crushes soft pastels in his hands, rubbing the dust into the paper in wide sweeps of colour, gradually manipulating the material to build up a thick layered surface using the ball of his thumb or the heel of his hand.

He is interested in and influenced by the dramatic imagery of eighteenth and nineteenth century painting. He admires the idea of the contemplation of landscape in the Romantic spirit, found in the work of the German Romantics like Caspar David Friedrich and the notion of the grandeur of the landscape as expressed in the work of the American subliminal painters like Sanford Robinson Gifford and Frederic Edwin Church. These artists adopted the term ‘Luminism’, defined as light in the landscape and the effect that light has on the landscape and objects within it.

As a contemporary artist choosing to adopt this approach to light in the landscape, his interest is not to make straight forward topographical images that are illustrations of place. Instead he is attempting to make imagery that is descriptive of the circumstances under which the subject is viewed; images which convey a sense of place. The drawings are emotional reactions to events and experiences evolving in front of him; events happening or about to happen. The images become like fading memories or captured moments in time. The making of the work is in itself a set of actions and events which creates a harmony between his process and his interpretation of the subject.

Ten Years of Modern Masters London

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