The Edinburgh School refers to a group of artists associated with Edinburgh College of Art after the First World War. The same group was all represented, at various stages, by The Scottish Gallery. Major figures of the school regularly held shows with us, both those of the older generation and from the later 1950’s those younger artists who they had helped to inspire. We are delighted to present this showcase exhibition featuring artists Gordon Bryce, Sir William Gillies, John Houston, David McClure, David Michie, Denis Peploe, Adam Bruce Thomson and William Wilson.

Gordon Bryce

Born: 1943

Place of Birth: Edinburgh

Gordon Bryce studied at ECA 1960 to 1965 and began lecturing at Aberdeen from 1968. He now paints full-time and his work is treasured in numerous public and private collections. Bryce shows regularly in both Scotland and London, his pieces focussing on still life and landscape subjects, the latter typically of Aberdeenshire and the West Coast of Scotland. All his work is painted with a characteristic native richness and strength of colour and texture.

Gordon Bryce has quietly emerged over the last thirty years or so as the Scottish painter who carries the torch for contemporary belle peinture, a torch borne in previous generations by Anne Redpath and SJ Peploe. He is an easel painter with an endless fascination for his chosen medium, for composition and the subtle expressions of familiar landscape. His paintings do not shout for attention, they are the antithesis of the current vogue for artworks arising out of identity politics, instead giving us pause to recognise the value of simple pleasure and truth; his technical gifts are great, but they have never been set to serve the ego. His paintings remind the viewer of the enduring value of well-made paintings which are of their time but timeless.

Sir William Gillies

Born: 1898

Place of Birth: Haddington

Died: 1973

Sir William Gillies was the dominant figure of the Edinburgh School over which both his personality and his work had a quiet authority. He led by example at the College of Art, encouraging his students to experiment but from a firm grounding in looking, and of course practice, drawing in particular. He also selected his staff to reflect this ethos: men and women who had a similar independence but respected hard work, what William MacTaggart called the good habit. The duties of teaching for Gillies and many of his colleagues in the School of Drawing and Painting were combined with their own practice without conflict; being a professional painter: working and exhibiting, was understood as integral to the reputation and health of the School. Robin Philipson, Elizabeth Blackadder, John Houston, David Michie and James Cumming were the beneficiaries of this attitude, along with their students, quietly instilled by Gillies over his fifty years of influence.

I have been trying to pin down my thoughts on the great man. I do not find it easy. In a way he remains an enigma. I was a student for five years while Gillies was Head of Paintings and yet I had only three or four lessons from him in all that time. The first was when MacTaggart called for Bill Gillies to come and see a painting I had done. He admired it generously and commended it for its tonal values. I had on the easel a much more freely painted thing with apples and a jug. He looked at it and said Apples are not tennis balls. They have planes. He then proceeded to push the wet paint around with his horny thumb, making the apples truly three dimensional, and expressed in planes. On another occasion I was propounding a theory I had come across about Organic Colour Values… I asked him if he did not agree with this. His esponse was typically anti-intellectual. No. Nature always gets the colour wrong, so you have to try to improve it.

David McClure, quoted in W.G. Gillies by W. Gordon Smith, Atelier Books, 1991

The Scottish Gallery exhibitions: 1945, 1949, 1952, 1958 (Festival), 1963 (Festival), 1968, 1971, 1986, 1989, 1991 (Festival), 2011, 2012, 2013, 2016, 2017, 2020, 2023 (Anniversary)

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.

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

David Michie

Born: 1928

Place of Birth: Saint-Raphaël, France

Died: 2015

Born in Saint-Raphaël, France, the son of painter Anne Redpath, David Michie (1928-2015) graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 1953 following a travelling scholarship to Italy with fellow student John Houston. He lectured at Gray’s in Aberdeen and from 1961–1982 at Edinburgh from where he retired in 1990 as Head of School of Drawing and Painting. He died in Edinburgh in 2015 and The Scottish Gallery held his Memorial Exhibition in March 2017, celebrating the life and work of one of Scotland’s most enduring image-makers. We continue to work with the Michie estate hosting David Michie Studio Insights in February 2021, and The Early Years in March 2023.

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.

Adam Bruce Thomson

Born: 1885

Died: 1976

Bruce Thomson – or ‘Adam B’, as he was often called – was a painter of great integrity whose long, productive life tells the story of Scottish painting for the first three quarters the twentieth century. Thomson was born in 1885, attending first the Trustees Academy and then the newly established Edinburgh College of Art where he received diplomas in both Drawing and Painting, and Architecture before scholarships took him abroad to Spain and then Paris. He was an accomplished etcher and lithographer and he also sought expertise in the difficult media of pastel and watercolour. By the 1920s, his technique was closest to S.J. Peploe, Cadell and other contemporaries favouring the technique of painting on a gesso ground with an oil-reduced vehicle so the subjects tended to be treated in flat areas of colour.

Thomson served in the Great War before returning to the College where he taught etching, composition and still life to the painting school and colour theory to the architecture students. His association with Edinburgh College of Art continued until his death as, although he retired from teaching in 1950, he continued as an examiner and a Trustee. His links with both the RSA, where he was Treasurer for seven years and the RSW, where he served as President for a further seven years from 1957 were very important to him. He was awarded an OBE in 1963. In 2024 the City Art Centre in Edinburgh is holding a major retrospective of his work, The Quiet Path, his first major exhibition in a public institution, to coincide The Gallery will honour Thomson with an exhibition in September 2024.

William Wilson

Born: 1905

Place of Birth: Edinburgh

Died: 1972

Click here to see prints by the artist.

Like many of the significant Scottish artists of the twentieth century, William Wilson was not satisfied with the restrictions of one medium, but focused his energies on three.

Throughout his life he fixed intently on each in turn; etching, watercolour painting and finally stained glass design, which obtained him an international reputation. However, it is his work in etching, made between 1925 and 1940 which is arguably his most powerful and successful work, and a unique contribution to Scottish art history. While the previous generation of Scottish etchers, DY Cameron and James McBey, had been primarily concerned with the documentation of landscape and atmospheric effect, Wilson’s interest lay in the structural qualities of an image, often realised through architectural subjects, relishing the angular juxtapositions of roof, wall and landscape. Wilson’s draughtsmanship is superb, his line as suggestive as Eric Gill and his tonality in a tradition that goes back to Samuel Palmer and Rembrandt. His etchings are visually rich, suffused with atmosphere and represent a body of work to match McBey and Cameron.

The Edinburgh School

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