Various Artists

Ten Years of Modern Masters London

6 June 2023 - 9 June 2023

As we continue to celebrate our Modern Masters series, we are presenting an exclusive collection of post-war and contemporary paintings in London, alongside Scottish furniture by Adrian McCurdy.

Opening Times | London
Tuesday 6 June 12noon – 5pm
Wednesday 7 June 11am – 6pm
Thursday 8 June 11am – 6pm
Friday 9 June 11am – 3pm

Gallery 8, 8 Duke Street, St James’, London, SW1Y 6BN

About Barbara Balmer

RSA, RSW, RGI

Born: 1929

Place of Birth: Birmingham, England

Died: 2017

Barbara Balmer (1929–2017) was born in Prestwick, Ayrshire, Balmer first studied at Coventry College of Art before enrolling at Edinburgh College of Art, where she trained during a dynamic post-war period alongside many of the leading figures of modern Scottish painting. A travelling scholarship following graduation allowed her to spend extended time in France and Spain, experiences that had a lasting influence on her sensitivity to light, architecture and colour. She first exhibited professionally in 1953 and went on to establish a highly respected career spanning more than six decades.

Balmer worked fluidly across oil, watercolour and lithography, developing a practice distinguished by clarity of composition, subtle tonal relationships and a deeply intuitive response to place. While rooted in observation, her paintings often move beyond direct description, balancing structure with spontaneity and atmosphere with formal control. Mediterranean towns, Scottish coastlines, interiors and still life arrangements all became recurring subjects, unified by her remarkable ability to evoke light and spatial harmony.

Her still life paintings possess a particular quiet intensity. Carefully arranged objects, flowers and domestic interiors are transformed through nuanced colour and sensitive handling into compositions of great elegance and intimacy. Equally, her landscapes capture a solidity and particular shifting atmosphere of the Scottish environment.

Alongside her studio practice, Balmer was an accomplished draughtswoman and printmaker. Lithography formed an important aspect of her work, allowing her to explore line, tonal depth and compositional rhythm through a more graphic language. She also undertook significant public commissions, including a major mural for Cumbernauld Town Hall, demonstrating the breadth and ambition of her practice.

Balmer exhibited widely throughout her career and was the subject of more than twenty solo exhibitions. She was a regular exhibitor at the Royal Scottish Academy, the Society of Scottish Artists and the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour, and her work is represented in numerous public and private collections across the UK. She also maintained a long-standing relationship with The Scottish Gallery, where she exhibited regularly throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, including solo exhibitions in 1975, 1980, 1985 and 1988.

Today, Barbara Balmer is recognised as an important voice within post-war Scottish painting, admired for work that combines painterly confidence with sensitivity and restraint.

About Wilhelmina Barns-Graham

CBE, HRSA, HRSW

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. 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.

About Elizabeth Blackadder

DBE, RA, RSA, RSW, RGI

Born: 1931

Place of Birth: Falkirk

Died: 2021

Dame Elizabeth Blackadder (1931–2021) stands as one of the most important figures in modern Scottish art. Born in Falkirk, she studied at Edinburgh College of Art from 1949–1954 under influential teachers including William Gillies and Robert Henderson Blyth, graduating into what would become one of the most remarkable artistic careers of the twentieth century. Early travelling scholarships to southern Europe and Italy introduced Blackadder to the light, architecture and visual cultures that would profoundly shape her work for decades to come.

Working across painting, watercolour, drawing, printmaking and tapestry, Blackadder developed a singular visual language distinguished by exquisite draughtsmanship, subtle colour relationships and an extraordinary sensitivity to observation. Flowers, cats, Japanese objects, interiors, gardens and landscapes became recurring motifs within compositions that balanced intimacy with formal sophistication. Whether depicting an iris from her Edinburgh garden, a Venetian lagoon or a still life assembled from treasured objects gathered on her travels, Blackadder transformed everyday subjects into meditations on beauty, balance and quiet contemplation.

Although often associated with the Edinburgh School through her connection to William Gillies, Blackadder consistently expanded beyond its traditions. Her work absorbed influences from European modernism, Japanese aesthetics and botanical illustration while remaining unmistakably personal. The influence of Japan became especially significant from the 1980s onwards, inspiring her use of flattened space, decorative pattern, gold leaf and carefully orchestrated compositions. Her paintings possess an unmistakable elegance and restraint, yet beneath their delicacy lies immense technical control and formal intelligence.

Alongside her own studio practice, Blackadder played a vital role within Scottish art through teaching at Edinburgh College of Art from 1962 until her retirement in 1986. Generations of students benefitted from her quiet encouragement and example, recognising in her a painter wholly committed to “the good practice” of making art every day.

Blackadder achieved numerous historic distinctions during her lifetime. In 1972 she was elected to the Royal Scottish Academy and in 1976 became the first woman elected to both the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Academy in London. In 2001 she was appointed Her Majesty the Queen’s Painter and Limner in Scotland, the first woman to hold the role. A major retrospective at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 2011 confirmed her position as one of Britain’s most admired post-war artists. Her work is held in major collections worldwide including Tate, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Yale Centre for British Art and the National Galleries of Scotland.

The Scottish Gallery shared an exceptionally close and enduring relationship with Elizabeth Blackadder spanning more than six decades. As Christina Jansen reflected, the relationship was “both professional and personal: based on mutual respect, hard work, nurture and trust.” Blackadder exhibited regularly with The Gallery throughout her career, and her exhibitions became defining moments within the Edinburgh Festival calendar. Over this long partnership, The Scottish Gallery presented sixteen solo exhibitions alongside numerous mixed and thematic exhibitions, helping place her work in important public and private collections internationally.

Selected solo exhibitions with The Scottish Gallery include: 1961, 1966, 1972, 1974 Festival Exhibition, 1985 Edinburgh Festival Exhibition. 1994 Festival Exhibition, 1998, 2003, 2004, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2020, Elizabeth Blackadder: A Celebration, Festival Exhibition, 2023

Few artist-gallery relationships in Scottish art history have been as longstanding, collaborative or significant. Elizabeth Blackadder’s legacy remains one of extraordinary generosity, refinement and dedication to the act of looking closely at the world.

To view prints by Elizabeth Blackadder please click here

About Donald Morison Buyers

RSW

Born: 1930

Place of Birth: Aberdeen

Died: 2003

Donald Buyers (1930–2009) was born in Aberdeen, where he attended Aberdeen Grammar School before studying at Gray’s School of Art. Following graduation, he assisted his tutor Robert Sivell with the murals for Aberdeen University Union at Schoolhill, an early experience that helped shape his understanding of composition and design.

His was a quiet life, well lived, throughout which family and painting remained his twin loves. A honeymoon in Paris became an extended stay, and the influence of the School of Paris remained a constant presence throughout his career. The work of French painters, particularly their approach to colour, structure and atmosphere, informed his own distinctive visual language and left a lasting impression on his practice.

Returning to Aberdeen, Buyers embarked on a career in teaching, working at Robert Gordon’s College before later becoming a visiting lecturer at Gray’s School of Art. Alongside his teaching commitments, he maintained a dedicated studio practice, exhibiting regularly and developing a body of work distinguished by its sensitivity to colour, light and place.

Working primarily in oil, Buyers drew inspiration from the landscapes and coastal scenery of north-east Scotland, although his paintings were never simply descriptive. Through subtle harmonies of colour and carefully balanced compositions, he sought to convey mood and atmosphere as much as topography. His work reflects a lifelong engagement with the expressive possibilities of paint, balancing observation with an increasingly personal and poetic response to the landscape.

Respected by fellow artists and collectors alike, Buyers remained committed to painting throughout his life. His work stands as a thoughtful contribution to post-war Scottish painting, combining the influence of European modernism with a deep affection for the landscapes and communities of Scotland.

About John Byrne

RSA

Born: 1940

Died: 2023

John Byrne (1940–2023) was one of Scotland’s most celebrated artists, renowned for his exceptional draughtsmanship, inventive imagination and deeply personal approach to painting. Born and raised in Ferguslie Park, Paisley, he studied at Glasgow School of Art from 1958 to 1963 and went on to establish a career that encompassed painting, drawing, printmaking, theatre design and writing.

A painter of remarkable versatility, Byrne moved effortlessly between realism and invention, creating works that are rich in narrative, character and atmosphere. Much of his imagery draws upon memory and autobiography, frequently referencing the Teddy Boy and rock-and-roll culture of his youth. His paintings are populated by recurring characters, self-portraits, family members and imagined figures, all rendered with the wit, tenderness and psychological insight that became hallmarks of his work.

Byrne’s artistic career was launched in memorable fashion in 1967 when, frustrated by a lack of interest from London galleries, he submitted paintings under the pseudonym “Patrick”, claiming them to be the work of his elderly father. The paintings were enthusiastically received, establishing Byrne’s reputation and revealing the mischievous intelligence that would characterise much of his creative life.

Alongside his success as a visual artist, Byrne achieved international acclaim as the playwright behind The Slab Boys trilogy and the television series Tutti Frutti. His keen eye for observation and gift for storytelling informed both disciplines, lending his paintings a distinctly theatrical quality and a powerful sense of narrative.

Byrne also designed celebrated record sleeves for musicians including Donovan, Gerry Rafferty and Billy Connolly. His work is held in major public and private collections throughout the United Kingdom and internationally, including the National Galleries of Scotland, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. Represented by The Scottish Gallery for over two decades from the 1980s, Byrne remains one of the most influential and beloved figures in modern Scottish art.

View John Byrne prints here.

About Doug Cocker

RSA

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

Doug Cocker will be the subject of a major new exhibition Threads this May at Dovecot Studios. The exhibition, which is in collaboration with The Scottish Gallery and Dovecot Studios, will run from 24 May – 19 July 2025. Please contact The Gallery for more information.

About Victoria Crowe

OBE, DHC, FRSE, MA(RCA), RSA, RSW

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 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, 80^th)

To view Victoria Crowe’s prints please click here

About Alan Davie

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.

CBE, HRSA

Born: 1920

Place of Birth: Grangemouth

Died: 2014

About David Donaldson

RSA, RP

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.

About Joan Eardley

RSA

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 1955 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)

About J.D. Fergusson

RBA

Born: 1874

Place of Birth: Leith, Edinburgh

Died: 1961

Born in Leith in Edinburgh, J.D. Fergusson’s studies took him to Paris in the 1890s where he attended the Académie Colarossi and made broad connections in avant-garde life. He exhibited in London in 1905 and finally settled in Paris in 1907 where he experimented with Fauvist and Cubist styles, became a Sociétaire of the Salon d’Automne and acquaintance of many of the leading figures in the movement, including Picasso and Braque.

He had four works exhibited in Post-Impressionist and Futurist Exhibition in London, 1913. He lived between France and Britain, eventually settling in Glasgow with his life partner and the pioneering dancer Margaret Morris.

[Fergusson] is a poet with an acute sense for the discipline of form. He has an instinct for the rhythm which makes sense out of a picture just as it informs the shape and meaning of a dance. His pictures and his sculptures seem to move with a musical rhythm. – Robins Millar, Glasgow Evening Citizen, May 5th 1948
Everyone in Scotland should refuse to have anything to do with black or dirty and dingy colour, and insist on clean colours in everything. I remember when I was young any colour was considered a sign of vulgarity. Greys and blacks were the only colours for people of taste and refinement. Good pictures had to be black, grey, brown or drab. Well! Let’s forget it, and insist on things in Scotland being of colour that makes for and associates itself with light, hopefulness, health and happiness. – J.D. Fergusson, Modern Scottish Painting, 1943

J.D. Fergusson & The Scottish Gallery

J.D. Fergusson exhibited with The Scottish Gallery in 1923. The exhibition included both small-scale sculpture he had produced over the preceding few years and his Highland series of oil paintings, which represented the artist’s engagement with his native landscape and culture. Twenty years before, he had been one of the purchasers of work from his friend S.J. Peploe’s first exhibition with The Gallery, but in the intervening years he had looked to London and then Paris for his commercial and spiritual existence. It would only be after his second flight from the continent, in the face of WWII, that Scotland would take the central place in his work and thoughts. Fergusson was a paragon of the bohemian life and one of the major contributors to British modernism – uncompromising, Modernist and brilliant. A Memorial exhibition was held for Fergusson at The Scottish Gallery in 1961, and numerous exhibitions have been held since.

About Ian Fleming

RSA, RSW

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

About Helen Glassford

RSW

Born: 1976

Place of Birth: Lancaster

Helen Glassford (b.1976, Lancaster) is a Scottish painter whose atmospheric oil paintings explore the emotional and sensory experience of landscape. Living and working in Newport-on-Tay, Fife, Glassford draws deeply from her encounters with the remote and weather-beaten regions of Scotland, particularly the Highlands and northern coastlines. Her paintings are less descriptions of specific places than immersive responses to memory, atmosphere, light and the physical experience of being within the landscape.

Glassford studied at Carlisle Art College before completing a degree in Fine Art Drawing and Painting at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee, graduating in 2002. A professional member of both the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour and Visual Arts Scotland, she has established a distinctive voice within contemporary Scottish landscape painting.

Working predominantly in oil on board, Glassford creates layered and expressive paintings that hover between abstraction and representation. Through washes, glazes, poured paint and gestural mark-making, she evokes the shifting weather systems, fleeting light and elemental forces of the natural world. Horizons dissolve into mist, mountains emerge through rain and water reflects the changing sky in compositions that feel both vast and deeply intimate. Her surfaces carry traces of movement and erosion, echoing the effects of wind, tide and passing time. Glassford describes her paintings as “visual echoes of experience,” connecting the wild with the personal and the present with memory. Solitude, remoteness and the emotional pull of northern landscapes are recurring themes throughout her work. Influenced by poetry, environmental concerns, natural systems and the aesthetics of northern European painting, Glassford seeks what she calls “the intangible and unseen,” creating contemplative spaces that invite stillness, reflection and emotional resonance.

Her recent exhibition The Phenomenal World at The Scottish Gallery brought together works developed over several years of travel through some of Scotland’s most remote landscapes. Reflecting on changing light, weather and the experience of walking within these environments, the exhibition explored what writer Peter Davidson described as “the capture of the changing moment”, paintings shaped by the fugitive atmosphere and mutable beauty of the North.

In Festival 2027, The Scottish Gallery will present a major solo exhibition of new work by Helen Glassford, further establishing her as one of the most compelling contemporary painters of the Scottish landscape.

About Alexander Goudie

RP, RGI

Born: 1933

Place of Birth: Paisley

Died: 2004

Alexander Goudie (1933–2004) is widely regarded as one of Scotland’s greatest figurative painters, an artist whose exuberant personality, technical brilliance and devotion to the traditions of European painting shaped a remarkable and highly individual career. Born in Paisley in 1933, he enrolled at Glasgow School of Art at just sixteen, where he studied under influential tutors including David Donaldson. A gifted but outspoken student, Goudie immersed himself in the study of the great masters, particularly Manet, Velázquez and Van Dyck, developing an understanding of paint as both material and language. His training emphasised draughtsmanship, tonal control and the “alchemy of paint”, the tension between line and colour, and the ability to transform lived experience into art.

Awarded the prestigious Newbery Medal for Distinction on graduating in 1955, Goudie quickly established himself as one of Scotland’s leading portrait painters, producing commissions for major public and private figures including Billy Connolly, Lord Mackay of Clashfern and, in 1993, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Yet portraiture formed only one aspect of a hugely ambitious creative life. Goudie worked across painting, drawing, mural design, ceramics and theatre, bringing the same theatrical flair and painterly confidence to every project he undertook.

In 1962 he married Marie-Renée Dorval and was introduced to Brittany, a landscape and culture that would become central to his imagination for the rest of his life. Dividing his time between Glasgow and the Breton coast, Goudie spent decades documenting the harbours, fishermen, interiors and rhythms of life around Loctudy and the Villa Ker Jan, the family’s summer home overlooking the Atlantic. Brittany transformed his palette and loosened his handling of paint, encouraging a vibrant colourism inspired by Gauguin, Sérusier and the Nabis. These paintings celebrate what Lachlan Goudie describes as la belle vie, a world of sensuality, theatre, elegance and joy.

Alongside these luminous Breton works, Goudie created richly atmospheric paintings of Glasgow, the city he passionately loved and mythologised. From the grandeur of Arnewood House, his extraordinary West End home and studio, to the Kibble Palace, Glasgow Cathedral and the Western Baths, Goudie painted the city as a place of artistic sophistication, civic pride and architectural drama. His interiors and still life painting became equally celebrated, filled with Persian rugs, Venetian masks, flowers, musical instruments and glittering objects arranged with a colourist’s instinct and a stage designer’s sense of spectacle.

A deeply cultured artist with a lifelong fascination for literature, music and theatre, Goudie undertook several ambitious large-scale projects throughout his career. Between 1987 and 1989 he created over 300 works for the Brittany Ferries flagship Le Bretagne, transforming the vessel into what became the world’s largest floating gallery dedicated to a single artist. His monumental painted cycle inspired by Robert Burns’ Tam o’Shanter remains one of the most important visual interpretations of the poem ever produced.

The Scottish Gallery has played a significant role in celebrating and preserving Alexander Goudie’s legacy over many decades. The relationship began with his first major exhibition of Breton paintings at The Scottish Gallery in 1966, followed by further exhibitions in 1974 and the Festival Exhibition of 1977. Following the artist’s death in 2004, The Gallery continued to champion his work through Alexander Goudie Memorial Exhibition in 2006, Tam o’Shanter – Works on Paper in 2009, Still Lifes and Interiors in 2011, Alexander Goudie: An Artist’s Life, Act I in 2021 and Alexander Goudie: La Belle Vie, Act II in 2025.

Whether painting portraits, interiors, Glasgow rooftops or the luminous coastlines of Brittany, Alexander Goudie’s work remains unmistakable for its bravura handling, theatrical imagination and unapologetic celebration of beauty, culture and the transformative power of paint.

About Lachlan Goudie

Born: 1976

Place of Birth: Glasgow

Lachlan Goudie (b.1976, Glasgow) is a Scottish artist based in London, who is also a published author and broadcaster whose work bridges painting, storytelling and cultural history. Equally at home in the studio, on location or in front of the camera, Goudie has become one of the most engaging public voices in British art, while maintaining a distinguished practice as a painter of landscape, portraiture, industry and still life.

Born and raised in Glasgow, Goudie was schooled in painting from an early age by his father, the celebrated artist Alexander Goudie. The legacy of the Glasgow Boys, with their emphasis on tonal control, realism and direct observation, profoundly shaped his approach to painting. He studied English at Christ’s College, Cambridge before undertaking Fine Art training at Camberwell College of Art in London. A passionate advocate for the enduring value of craft and technique in contemporary art, Goudie combines rigorous draughtsmanship with a bold and expressive use of colour.

The scope of his artistic practice is remarkably broad. Working across portraiture, still life, landscape and large-scale industrial subjects, Goudie’s paintings are driven by curiosity, observation and an instinct for narrative. Frequent painting trips throughout Britain and abroad have seen him sketch and paint in shipyards, forests, quarries, steelworks, oil rigs and satellite laboratories, documenting the relationship between people, place and industry with both energy and empathy. His recent exhibition From the Forest to the Forge brought together over fifteen years of work exploring Britain’s industrial and natural landscapes, from the Clyde shipyards and Port Talbot steelworks to ancient woodlands and coastal environments.

Goudie is particularly fascinated by the intersection between human endeavour and landscape. Whether depicting the immense scale of naval engineering or the intricate structure of ancient trees, his paintings search for what he describes as the “industrial sublime”, moments where awe, beauty and labour converge. Through expressive mark-making and vibrant colour, he transforms shipyards, scaffolding, machinery and working environments into dynamic compositions that celebrate both craftsmanship and resilience.

Alongside his studio practice, Goudie is widely recognised as an acclaimed arts broadcaster and author. His landmark BBC series The Story of Scottish Art introduced audiences to Scotland’s artistic heritage with warmth, insight and accessibility, later leading to the publication of his acclaimed book of the same title. He has since written and presented numerous documentaries for the BBC including The Art of Witchcraft, Stanley Spencer: The Colours of the Clyde, Awesome Beauty: The Art of Industrial Britain and Mackintosh: Glasgow’s Neglected Genius. He has also appeared as a judge on The Big Painting Challenge and as presenter of BBC4’s Life Drawing Live!.

Goudie regularly exhibits in Edinburgh and London, and in 2013 he was elected a member of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters in London. Across painting, writing and broadcasting, his work is united by a deep belief in the transformative power of art, and its ability to connect people to history, landscape, imagination and one another.

About Derrick Guild

RSA

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

Photograph by Jed Gordon

About John Houston

OBE, RSA, RSW, RGI

Born: 1930

Died: 2008

John Houston (1930–2008) was one of the great painterly forces in modern Scottish art, celebrated for a bold, expressive approach to landscape that combined instinctive draughtsmanship with a profound emotional response to place. Born and brought up in Buckhaven, Fife, Houston’s early life was shaped by the coastal landscape of the East Neuk, where changing weather, estuary light and the rhythms of rural and fishing life formed the foundations of his visual imagination. Horse fairs, football crowds, harbours, fields and shoreline villages would continue to surface throughout his career, transformed through paint into works of immense vitality and atmosphere.

Houston studied at Edinburgh College of Art in the late 1940s under Sir William Gillies, whose influence remained significant throughout his life. Like Gillies, Houston possessed an extraordinary natural fluency with paint and a deep commitment to working directly from observation. Yet while rooted in the traditions of the Edinburgh School, Houston pushed beyond its restraint towards a more vigorous and expressionistic handling of colour and surface. Paint became the means through which weather, movement and sensation could be experienced rather than merely described.

Travel played an important role in Houston’s practice. Alongside his wife and fellow artist Elizabeth Blackadder, he travelled widely throughout Europe, Japan and the United States, producing ambitious exhibitions inspired by each journey. Whether painting the harbours of France, Venetian canals, Japanese gardens or the coastline of East Lothian, Houston approached every subject with the same urgency, confidence and painterly freedom. His landscapes are alive with shifting light and movement, built through richly worked surfaces and dynamic brushwork that reveal the physical act of painting itself.

Still life and figure painting also formed an important part of his oeuvre, but it was landscape that remained at the emotional centre of his work. The Bass Rock, East Lothian coastline, the Lammermuir Hills and the beaches of Fife became recurring motifs, revisited repeatedly across decades with endless variation and invention. His paintings celebrate not simply the appearance of place but the experience of standing within it: the force of wind, the movement of clouds, the density of air and the fleeting drama of Scottish weather.

The Scottish Gallery played a central and enduring role throughout Houston’s career. Represented by The Gallery from the late 1950s, he developed a particularly close relationship with Guy Peploe, rooted not only in mutual respect but also in Houston’s long friendship with Guy’s father, the artist Denis Peploe. This loyalty and shared understanding between artist and gallery endured for over five decades and resulted in one of the most significant exhibiting relationships in modern Scottish art.

Houston became one of The Scottish Gallery’s defining Festival artists, presenting ten major solo exhibitions during the Edinburgh International Festival between 1961 and 2008. These exhibitions cemented his reputation as one of Scotland’s foremost painters and established The Scottish Gallery as the principal home for his work. Following his death in 2008, The Gallery continued to champion his legacy through memorial and retrospective exhibitions, reaffirming his importance within twentieth-century British painting.

Selected exhibitions with The Scottish Gallery include 1960, 1962 Festival Exhibition, 1965, 1967 Festival Exhibition, 1971 Festival Exhibition, 1975, 1980, 1990, 1993, 1997, 2003 Festival Exhibition, 2007 Festival Exhibition, John Houston Memorial Exhibition in 2009, and further exhibitions celebrating his work in 2012 and 2013.

In 2005 Houston was honoured with a major retrospective at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, recognising a lifetime devoted to painting and his position as one of Scotland’s most important modern artists. His work is held in numerous public collections including the National Galleries of Scotland, Tate and the Royal Scottish Academy.

The Scottish Gallery continues to actively seek important works by John Houston.

Click here to view prints by this artist.

About 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 to Scotland in 1900 he remained in California and became 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 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.

Leslie Hunter, as I review the good old days, seems to be all-pervasive. I knew him first in San Francisco, and we lived the carefree Bohemian life and were unaware of it. I moved to New York; and he came down Broadway as accustomed as a piece of scenery. Paris – and there was Hunter sketching on a street corner. London – and Hunter hailed me from the next table of a Chelsea restaurant. Glasgow – and Hunter, finding my name at a hotel in an obscure newspaper paragraph, called me up on the telephone. I have no doubt that if I ever visit Damascus I shall find him there ahead of me. And always the same Hunter; Scotch from his accent to his walk, quietly friendly, quaintly witty. I had laughed with him many times over these recurrent meetings of ours before I realised how much the boy I knew and starved with in San Francisco was coming to mean in modern art. When in the first decade of this century painting shook off the Victorian shackles, he found himself. Reid, the famous Glasgow dealer, a leader in the Modernist movement, ‘brought him out’. Reid it was who introduced Degas, Manet and Renoir to Great Britain. Tradition says that he was one of the few men whom the crusty Degas would admit to his Studio. He sold most of Whistler’s paintings. And Reid’s verdict that Hunter is ‘a more powerful Colourist than Matisse and equally refined’ carries authenticity. Hunter belongs to that school which Paris calls les écossais modernes. This group of late has given exhibitions at the Leicester Galleries in London and the select Barbazanges Gallery in Paris: in both instances the force and purity of their colour attracted sensational attention. Fergusson and Peploe of this modern group have already exhibited in New York; but although Hunter grew up in California this is his first appearance in an American gallery. He lives and paints, now, on the Côte d’Azur; and that richly coloured country is the inspiration for most of these landscapes. – Will Irwin, 1929 (reviewing Hunter’s exhibition at the Ferargil Gallery, New York)

G.L. Hunter & The Scottish Gallery

In April 1924, Alexander Reid and The Scottish Gallery signed a joint contract with G.L. Hunter and his first solo exhibition at The Scottish Gallery was held in the autumn. This was a momentous year for The Colourists which saw the exhibition Les Peintres de l’Écosse Moderne at the Galerie Barbazanges in Paris, featuring Peploe, Fergusson, Hunter and Cadell. It was also a productive time for Hunter, who worked in Fife, on Loch Lomond and in a Glasgow studio for most of the next three years. From 1928, Hunter was living mostly in the South of France, based in Saint[1]Paul-de-Vence, but he continued to send work back to The Gallery.

About Adrian McCurdy

Born: 1953

Place of Birth: Kendal

Adrian McCurdy (b.1953, Kendal) is one of Scotland’s most respected furniture makers, celebrated for work that combines traditional craftsmanship with a refined contemporary sensibility. Working from his workshop in the Scottish Borders, he creates furniture and sculptural objects from locally sourced timber, often using storm-felled trees and sustainably harvested hardwoods from the surrounding landscape.

Although trained in Fine Art, McCurdy’s relationship with wood began in childhood. Raised in a household where furniture making was both profession and daily conversation, he developed an early appreciation for the value of skilled handwork and the enduring qualities of well-made objects. After initially pursuing painting, he gradually returned to woodworking, discovering that the language of timber offered a more natural and direct means of expression.

A pivotal moment came when he moved to the Scottish Borders more than four decades ago to work alongside the celebrated furniture maker and artist Tim Stead. While developing his own distinct voice, McCurdy absorbed the values that would shape his career: respect for materials, honesty in construction and a belief that furniture should possess both utility and presence.

His work is characterised by an elegant economy of form. Drawing inspiration from vernacular furniture traditions, early cottage furniture and the structural logic of historic woodworking, he pares forms back to their essentials. Through uncomplicated joinery, carefully considered proportions and an exceptional understanding of timber, McCurdy creates pieces that are both sculptural and functional. Cleft oak, hand-worked surfaces and subtle evidence of the maker’s hand remain central to a practice that values authenticity over ornament.

As the artist explains:

“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.”

Alongside furniture, McCurdy has increasingly explored carved panels and wall-based works, extending his investigation of form, texture and material into a more explicitly sculptural territory. Throughout his practice there remains a commitment to creating objects that feel rooted in place, crafted with care and capable of lasting for generations.

His work is held in public and private collections including Perth Art Gallery, National Museums Scotland, the Globe Theatre, London, and the Ann Getty Collection, Hawaii.

Adrian McCurdy is exclusively represented by The Scottish Gallery in Scotland.

About David McClure

RSA, RSW

Born: 1926

Place of Birth: Lochwinnoch

Died: 1998

David McClure was one of the outstanding Scottish painters of the post-war generation. He emerged from Edinburgh College of Art in the early 1950s alongside a remarkable group of artists including James Cumming, William Baillie, John Houston, Elizabeth Blackadder and David Michie. Together, they helped shape what became known as the Edinburgh School: a generation defined by strong draughtsmanship, expressive colour and a renewed confidence in painting.

McClure’s early career developed within an exceptionally rich artistic climate. Edinburgh was home to influential teachers and exhibiting societies, while The Scottish Gallery was presenting the work of established figures such as Anne Redpath, William Gillies and William MacTaggart, alongside younger artists including Joan Eardley and Robin Philipson. McClure soon joined this company, holding his first solo exhibition with The Scottish Gallery in 1957.

Travel played a vital role in the formation of his mature style. Following a year spent painting in Florence and Sicily, McClure absorbed the colour, light and structure of Mediterranean painting, qualities that remained central to his work. By the late 1950s he was teaching at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee alongside his close friend Alberto Morrocco, contributing to the college’s reputation as one of Scotland’s great centres of painting.

Throughout the 1960s McClure was included in important surveys of contemporary Scottish art, helping to define the character and ambition of the Edinburgh School. His 1969 Edinburgh Festival exhibition at The Scottish Gallery marked a high point in his relationship with the Gallery and confirmed his position as one of the leading painters of his generation.

McClure’s work is distinguished by its luminous colour, patterned surfaces and intimate subject matter. Still lifes, interiors, landscapes and family scenes are transformed through a rich painterly language that balances observation with imagination. His paintings remain deeply admired for their warmth, intelligence and unmistakable sense of joy in the act of painting.

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

About James Morrison

RSA, RSW

Born: 1932

Place of Birth: Glasgow

Died: 2020

Born in Glasgow in 1932, James Morrison was one of the most significant Scottish landscape painters of the post-war period. He studied at Glasgow School of Art from 1950–54, developing the rigorous observational practice and draughtsmanship that would underpin a career spanning more than six decades. While his early paintings focused on the streets and tenements of Glasgow, his move to Catterline in 1958 marked a decisive shift towards landscape and established many of the themes that would define his mature work.

From the northeast coast and the farmland of the Mearns to the tidal landscapes of Montrose Basin and the remote expanses of Assynt, Morrison developed a highly distinctive vision of the Scottish landscape. Working predominantly en plein air, he painted directly before his subject, responding to shifting weather, changing light and the structure of the land itself. His paintings are characterised by expansive skies, measured horizons and an acute sensitivity to atmosphere, balancing direct observation with a profound understanding of space and composition.

In 1965 Morrison settled in Montrose and joined the staff of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, where he later became Senior Lecturer. Alongside teaching, he continued to develop a remarkable body of work rooted in Angus and the northeast coast. The landscapes around Montrose, Farnell, Kinnell and Montreathmont became enduring subjects, allowing him to refine the visual language for which he became internationally recognised.

From the 1970s onwards, Morrison expanded his practice through regular painting trips to the west coast of Scotland, particularly Assynt and Achiltibuie, where the clarity of the atmosphere and dramatic geological forms provided new stimulus. He also travelled extensively abroad, painting in France, Greece, Botswana, Switzerland and the Canadian Arctic. Between 1990 and 1996 he undertook four expeditions to the High Arctic, producing some of the most ambitious and contemplative works of his career. These paintings, with their vast spaces, restrained palettes and elemental stillness, represent a major achievement within contemporary Scottish painting.

Morrison’s relationship with The Scottish Gallery spanned more than sixty years and formed one of the most significant artist-gallery partnerships in Scottish art. He first exhibited with The Gallery in 1959, when Aitken Dott & Son presented his debut solo exhibition in Edinburgh, introducing his paintings of Glasgow and the northeast coast to a wider audience. Over the following decades, The Scottish Gallery presented more than twenty-five solo exhibitions of his work, charting the evolution of his practice from the structural landscapes of Catterline and Angus to the monumental panoramas of Assynt and the Arctic.

From the late 1980s onwards, Morrison worked exclusively with The Scottish Gallery. This long association enabled the Gallery to present major Festival exhibitions, touring exhibitions and retrospectives that introduced successive generations of collectors and audiences to his work. The relationship was founded on a shared commitment to Scottish painting and to the sustained development of an artist’s career over a lifetime of practice.

In June 2022, The Scottish Gallery presented James Morrison: A Celebration 1932–2020, a major retrospective exhibition spanning seven decades of painting and drawing. More recently, James Morrison: Under a Northern Sky, published by The Scottish Gallery Press, further explored the breadth of his achievement, tracing his artistic journey from Glasgow and Catterline to the landscapes of Angus, Assynt and the High Arctic. The publication is available to purchase through The Scottish Gallery.

James Morrison died in 2020. His work is held in major public collections including the National Galleries of Scotland, The McManus, Glasgow Museums, the Royal Scottish Academy, Aberdeen Art Gallery and numerous university and civic collections across the UK. Widely regarded as one of the defining painters of the Scottish landscape tradition, Morrison’s work remains celebrated for its clarity, restraint and enduring sense of place.

About Alberto Morrocco

RSA, RSW

Born: 1917

Place of Birth: Aberdeen

Died: 1998

Alberto Morrocco OBE, was one of the most charismatic and influential figures in Scottish art during the second half of the twentieth century. Born in Aberdeen to Italian parents, he studied at Gray’s School of Art from the age of fourteen under James Cowie and Robert Sivell, winning both the Carnegie and Brough Travelling Scholarships which enabled him to study and travel in France, Switzerland and later Italy.

Morrocco’s Scottish upbringing and Italian heritage combined to create a unique artistic vision. While his rigorous training instilled a lifelong commitment to drawing, structure and composition, his imagination was fuelled by the colour, warmth and theatricality of Mediterranean life. Throughout his career he returned repeatedly to subjects that became synonymous with his work: bustling Italian beaches, melon sellers, still lifes, domestic interiors, musicians, harlequins and portraits, all rendered with extraordinary vitality and sensual colour.

Following military service during the Second World War, Morrocco completed his travelling scholarship and in 1950 was appointed Head of Painting at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, a position he held for over thirty years. There he influenced generations of artists while establishing himself as one of Scotland’s most admired painters.

Although renowned as a master draughtsman and colourist throughout his life, the final fifteen years of his career saw an extraordinary creative flowering. Freed from academic responsibilities, he painted with increasing spontaneity and brilliance, producing works of remarkable confidence, exuberance and joie de vivre. As his friend David McClure observed, “Alberto painted as an Italian operatic tenor sings, that is with a passionate theatricality and always con brio.”

A longstanding artist of The Scottish Gallery, Morrocco first exhibited with the Gallery in 1957 and remained one of its most celebrated painters throughout his career. His work is held in major public collections across the United Kingdom, including the National Galleries of Scotland, Dundee Art Galleries and Museums, Aberdeen Art Gallery and the Royal Scottish Academy.

The Scottish Gallery celebrated the centenary of Morrocco’s birth with a major exhibition in 2017.

About Leon Morrocco

RSA, RGI

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.

Photograph by Dan Weill

About Lilian Neilson

Born: 1938

Place of Birth: Kirkcaldy

Died: 1998

Born in Kirkcaldy in 1938, Lilian Neilson was a painter and printmaker whose work was shaped profoundly by the elemental coastline and weather of northeast Scotland. She studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee from 1955–1960, where she developed a rigorous approach to drawing and painting before undertaking a post-diploma year under Hugh Crawford and Alberto Morrocco in 1960–61. Awarded a travelling scholarship to France and Italy in 1961–62, Neilson absorbed the influence of European modernism while refining a deeply personal visual language rooted in direct observation and emotional response to place.

Following her return from Europe, Neilson spent increasing periods in the fishing village of Catterline, where she formed a close friendship with Joan Eardley. The dramatic cliffs, turbulent seas and shifting weather systems of the northeast coast became central to her practice. Like Eardley before her, Neilson responded to Catterline not simply as landscape, but as a place of physical and emotional intensity. Her paintings capture the force and movement of the natural world through richly worked surfaces, energetic mark-making and a powerful sense of atmosphere. Wind, tide, rain and erosion became recurring themes within a body of work that feels both deeply rooted in observation and highly expressive.

Alongside painting, Neilson worked backstage in theatre with Reet Guenigault, contributing to productions at venues including the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh. Yet it was Catterline that remained the emotional centre of her life and work. Following Joan Eardley’s illness in 1962, Neilson returned to help care for her friend during the final stages of her life. Soon afterwards she purchased No. 2 South Side, one of the tiny fishermen’s cottages in the village, creating a home and studio that allowed her to work directly within the landscape that inspired her most profoundly.

Neilson lived quietly and with remarkable dedication to her practice, embracing the rhythms and hardships of life on the coast. In 1986 she moved permanently to Catterline, where she began an extraordinary sustained engagement with the surrounding environment. Undertaking regular monthly surveys of the coastline and beaches, she documented seasonal change, erosion, weather and light with remarkable sensitivity and persistence. During this period she also returned to Dundee to study printmaking, extending her exploration of landscape through etching and graphic processes that echoed the structural intensity of her paintings.

Her later works possess a meditative quality, balancing the raw energy of the coast with moments of stillness and reflection. Whether depicting storm-darkened cliffs, winter shorelines or the muted colours of tidal pools and seaweed-covered rocks, Neilson painted with a profound understanding of the physical and emotional character of place. Her work stands within the lineage of great Scottish landscape painting while retaining a singular voice marked by honesty, restraint and emotional depth.

Neilson’s final exhibition, Certain Days and Other Seasons, was presented at the Seagate in Dundee and Aberdeen Art Gallery shortly before her death in 1998. Today her work is increasingly recognised as an important contribution to post-war Scottish painting, closely connected to the legacy of Catterline while remaining wholly individual in vision and achievement.

About Denis Peploe

RSA

Born: 1914

Died: 1993

Denis Peploe RSA (1914–1993) was born in Edinburgh, the second son of the Scottish Colourist S. J. Peploe. Growing up within one of Scotland’s most distinguished artistic families, he accompanied his father on painting trips to Iona and the south of France, yet from an early stage developed an independent artistic identity and remained wary of direct comparison with his celebrated parent.

At seventeen he enrolled at Edinburgh College of Art, where contemporaries included Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and Margaret Mellis. His talent was quickly recognised through scholarships to Paris and Florence, followed by extensive travels in Spain, Italy and Yugoslavia. Exposure to European modernism informed his early work, but his career was interrupted by six years of military service during the Second World War, during which he rose from enlisted soldier to Captain in the Special Operations Executive.

Returning to painting in 1946, Peploe sought inspiration in the dramatic landscapes of the West Highlands. The mountains and sea lochs around Plockton, Applecross and Torridon became enduring subjects, painted with an expressive intensity that distinguished his work from the more decorative traditions associated with the Scottish Colourists. His first exhibition at The Scottish Gallery in 1947 was met with remarkable critical acclaim, prompting one reviewer to describe him as “an artist born fully armed” and another as “a vital and adventurous painter.”

Throughout his career Peploe remained committed to direct observation, whether painting Highland landscapes, Mediterranean harbours, still life or the human figure. Travel to Cyprus, Spain and France enriched his palette and broadened his vision, while his teaching at Fettes College and later Edinburgh College of Art provided a stable framework for a deeply personal studio practice.

His son, 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.”

A longstanding artist of The Scottish Gallery, Denis Peploe first exhibited with the Gallery in 1947 and remained an important presence throughout his career. Today his work is recognised for its painterly vigour, emotional honesty and singular contribution to twentieth-century Scottish art.

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

About S.J. Peploe

RSA

Born: 1871

Place of Birth: Edinburgh

Died: 1935

Born in 1871 in Edinburgh, S.J. Peploe is the senior of the four artists known as The Scottish Colourists. 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.

My memories of S. J. Peploe are the memories of our friendship which was wonderful and interesting all the time. Nothing about it was spectacular. It was merely a happy unbroken friendship between two painters who both believed that painting was not just a craft or profession but a sustained attempt at finding a means of expressing reactions to life in the form demanded by each new experience. This is quite different from arriving at a way of doing a thing and continuing to do it in a tradesmanlike manner. By life we meant everything that happened to us; and, as we were curious about life, we painted all sorts of things – men, women, children, landscape, seapieces, flowers, still-life – anything. – Memories of Peploe, J. D. Fergusson, 1945

S.J. Peploe & The Scottish Gallery

In November 1898, the partners of Aitken Dott & Son bought the painting A Gypsy Queen by S.J. Peploe. Two years before, senior partner Peter McOmish Dott had formed The Scottish Gallery to identify the picture dealing part of the firm as distinct from the other businesses – architectural supplies, artist’s materials, framing, gilding and other services – and determined to represent the best of contemporary Scottish painting. The purchase of Peploe’s painting initiated a close relationship between the firm and the artist, then aged twenty-seven. McOmish Dott was a wholehearted admirer of Peploe’s early paintings, and a show was arranged for January 1903, which was a commercial and critical success. Peploe held a second exhibition in 1909, but from then his practice moved towards modernism and Dott struggled to accept the radical expressionist work the artist brought back from Paris after his move in 1910. However, the younger partner of the firm George Proudfoot, and subsequent directors, continued their support for the artist. From the early 1920s The Gallery held a joint contract with Alexander Reid in Glasgow to buy work directly from the artist, an arrangement that allowed Peploe to remove himself from the commercial world and concentrate on his painting, particularly his new subject of Iona and the magnificent rose and tulip paintings of his maturity. Solo exhibitions were held in 1922, 1923, 1924, 1927, 1934, 1936 (Memorial) and The Scottish Gallery has held numerous notable solo exhibitions subsequently including the artist’s 150th anniversary in 2021.

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

About Sir Robin Philipson

PPRSA, RA

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

About Anne Redpath

OBE, RSA, ARA, RWA

Born: 1895

Died: 1965

Born in Galashiels in 1895, Anne Redpath was one of the defining figures of twentieth-century Scottish painting and a central force within what became known as the Edinburgh School. A painter of remarkable individuality, confidence and technical brilliance, Redpath transformed still life, landscape and interior painting through her bold handling of colour, richly textured surfaces and instinctive understanding of composition. Her work combined the decorative refinement of European modernism with a profoundly personal response to the domestic world, establishing a visual language that remains among the most distinctive in British painting.

Redpath studied at Edinburgh College of Art from 1913, where her exceptional talent quickly became apparent. In 1919 she was awarded a prestigious travelling scholarship, allowing her to study in Bruges, Paris, Florence and Siena. The experience proved transformative. Renaissance painting, church interiors and the colour and structure of European art remained lifelong influences, although Redpath absorbed these sources into an unmistakably independent vision. As Patrick Bourne observed, even her early copies after Botticelli reveal a painter already interpreting rather than imitating.

Following her marriage to architect James Michie in 1920, she lived in France for over a decade, first in St Omer and later on the Côte d’Azur at Cap d’Ail and St Raphaël. The Mediterranean light, architecture and atmosphere broadened her palette and introduced a new freedom into her work. During this period she held an exhibition at the Casino in St Raphaël in 1928, while continuing to send paintings back to Scotland for exhibition.

Returning permanently to Scotland in 1934, Redpath devoted herself fully to painting while raising her three sons. The following decades saw an extraordinary flowering of her career. Initially inspired by the Borders landscape and domestic interiors, she soon developed the richly orchestrated still life and interiors that would become central to her reputation. Paintings such as The Indian Rug demonstrated her extraordinary command of colour, structure and surface, while revealing the influence of Matisse filtered through a distinctly Scottish sensibility. Her vigorous use of brush, knife and rag gave her paintings a tactile vitality that became one of the defining characteristics of her mature work.

Travel remained fundamental to Redpath’s imagination. From the 1940s onwards she painted in Skye, Spain, Brittany, Corsica, Portugal, the Canary Islands and Venice, constantly renewing her visual vocabulary through direct engagement with new landscapes and cultures. Church interiors, hillside villages, harbours and flowers all became subjects through which she explored colour, rhythm and structure. Even in her later works, where the palette often became darker and more restrained, flashes of jewel-like colour animate the compositions with extraordinary intensity.

Anne Redpath enjoyed a long and highly significant relationship with The Scottish Gallery, which became central to her exhibiting career in Scotland. Her first solo exhibition with The Scottish Gallery was held in 1950, beginning a fruitful partnership with Mrs Proudfoot and later Bill Macaulay. Further solo exhibitions followed in 1953, 1957, 1960 and 1963, with a Memorial Exhibition held in 1965 shortly after her death. The Gallery has continued to champion her work through major posthumous exhibitions including Anne Redpath Centenary Exhibition in 1995, Anne Redpath: Oils and Works on Paper in 2003, The Michie Family in 2012 and Anne Redpath: Fifty in 2015, marking fifty years since the artist’s death.

Alongside her exhibiting success in Edinburgh, Redpath established an important reputation in London through Reid & Lefevre Gallery and regular exhibitions at the Royal Academy. She became the first female painter elected as a full Academician of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1952 and in 1960 became the first woman painter since the war to be elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in London. She was awarded an OBE in 1955 in recognition of her contribution to art. Her London Street flat in Edinburgh became an important artistic meeting place, frequented by painters, writers and musicians, and immortalised in Sir Robin Philipson’s celebrated group portrait now in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

Today Anne Redpath is recognised as one of the great innovators of modern Scottish painting. Her work is held in major public collections including the National Galleries of Scotland, Tate, Aberdeen Art Gallery and numerous civic and university collections across the UK. Her paintings remain remarkable for their vitality, elegance and emotional resonance, balancing formal sophistication with an intense delight in paint itself. Few artists have contributed more profoundly to the development of Scottish painting in the twentieth century.

About James Downie Robertson

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.

RSW ARSA RSA

Born: 1931

Place of Birth: Cowdenbeath

Died: 2010

About Duncan Shanks

RSA, RSW, RGI

Born: 1937

Place of Birth: Airdrie

Duncan Shanks was born in Airdrie in 1937 and studied at Glasgow School of Art from 1955–1960, later receiving a travelling scholarship which allowed him to visit Italy during his Post Diploma year. Returning to Glasgow, he joined the staff at the School of Art, where he lectured until 1979 before dedicating himself fully to painting.

For more than six decades, Shanks has developed a deeply personal and immersive visual language rooted in the landscape surrounding his home in Crossford, in the Clyde Valley. Working from direct observation, his practice begins outdoors with walking, drawing and recording fleeting moments in nature before these impressions are transformed in the studio into richly layered and expressive paintings. Rivers, wooded glens, storms, hedgerows, moonlight and shifting weather become catalysts for works that balance abstraction and representation with extraordinary energy and sensitivity. Shanks has often described painting as “a journey through a landscape of self”, where memory, movement, poetry and music merge with the experience of the natural world.

The Falls of Clyde, Tinto Hill and the surrounding valley have remained enduring subjects throughout his career. His paintings capture the force and rhythm of nature through sweeping gesture, intricate mark-making and luminous colour, creating works that feel both elemental and intensely lyrical. Whether describing cascading water, storm clouds gathering over hills, or the tangled vitality of winter hedgerows, Shanks conveys landscape as something alive, constantly changing and emotionally charged.

Shanks has exhibited internationally and has been the subject of major public exhibitions including Falling Water at Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh (1988), Patterns of Flight at Wrexham Art Centre (1991), and Poetry of Place at the Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow (2013), which coincided with the bequest of his complete sketchbook archive to the Hunterian collection. His work is held in numerous public and private collections across the UK. In December 2026, Duncan Shanks’ work will again be celebrated in a major presentation at the Hunterian Art Gallery, alongside a significant new solo exhibition at The Scottish Gallery.

About Matthew Draper

SSA VAS PS

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.

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