The Glasgow School of Art is world renowned for producing international artists. In recent times Glasgow has produced six Turner Prize winners and alumni account for 30% of nominees since 2005. However, this tradition of nurturing world-class artists has been prevalent for many decades. The city has long been known as a hub of creativity and to coincide with our major new exhibition of Duncan Shanks we present a modest exhibition celebrating the work of the Glasgow School which include painters as diverse as James Cowie, William Crosbie, Robert Colquhoun, David Donaldson, Joan Eardley, Alexander Goudie, James Morrison, Duncan Shanks, Jimmy Robertson, John Byrne, Archie Forrest and Alison Watt. The latter group all adherents of the Donaldson approach of direct, gestural painting and colour construction. More recently artist Geoff Uglow (class of 2000) and Hannah Mooney (class of 2017) have both found individual voices to express their vision of the landscape.

James Cowie

Born: 1886

Place of Birth: Aberdeenshire

Died: 1956

Born in Aberdeenshire, Cowie studied at Glasgow School of Art. He later taught at Bellshill Academy, near Glasgow, followed by the position of Warden at Hospitalfield House. It was here Cowie taught Joan Eardley, with whom he famously clashed over their different approaches to painting. Cowie’s style of painting was precise and linear. A great admirer of artists like Poussin and the pre-Raphaelite painters, he felt he shared their classical values of self-restraint and objectivity. He had a meticulous way of working and believed that art was a product of thought and reason.

James Cowie was one of the finest draughtsmen of his generation: drawing was the very essence of what he did, but his drawing was never showy, no mere display of virtuosity like the work of Augustus John, for instance, which he loathed. Rather for him drawing was a way of raising something observed into a visual idea that has its own energy and integrity on the page and subsequently, too, on the canvas, for he always worked through drawing to painting. Nor is it fanciful to put it that way, it merely paraphrases his own words; to copy nature, he said, is to me not enough for a picture, which must be an idea, a concept built of much that in its total combination it would never be possible to see and to copy. Such a stern ambition took a great deal of thought and so he worked out his ideas on paper. He made studies for compositions to be painted and of figures and other details that occur in them, but also too of things that simply caught his eye. He did make drawings that are compositions in themselves, especially latterly when he was inspired by the enigmatic work of the surrealists, but even when an idea eventually became a finished watercolour, he made numerous preparatory drawings. Duncan MacMillan, 2015

The Scottish Gallery exhibitions: 1956 (Memorial), 1986 (Retrospective), 2015

William Crosbie

Born: 1915

Place of Birth: Hankow, China

Died: 1999

William Crosbie studied at the Glasgow School of Art from 1932-5. A travelling scholarship took him to Paris, where he worked under Fernand Léger, and took classes in History of Art at The Sorbonne and in drawing with Maillol. Crosbie was part of a group of artists and writers who were very active immediately before the Second World War painting portraits. Later in his career it was by working with architects, decorating firms and painting murals that he was able to make a living, and continue to create the paintings that he wanted to paint.

Through his career he excelled in an extraordinary variety of subjects: straightforward landscapes of Scotland, England and France; still life, the female nude, a sort of modern fête champêtre; surrealism; religious painting; portraiture, both intimate and official and the self-portrait.

“As a painter I have always worked in the belief that once you have mastered a technique or perfected a style, that’s the time to stop. Each piece of work should be a fresh beginning as far as possible.” William Crosbie, 1974.

Robert Colquhoun

Born: 1914

Place of Birth: Kilmarnock

Died: 1962

Robert Colquhoun was born in 1914 to working class parents from Kilmarnock, Ayrshire. His art teacher, James Lyle, helped him win a scholarship to Glasgow School of Art (1933-1937), and he then won a travelling scholarship to France and Italy along with his lifelong friend, lover and companion, Robert MacBryde with whom he is largely associated. Solo exhibitions under the guidance of Duncan MacDonald at the Lefevre Gallery on Bond Street were sell out sensations and the phrase ‘The Golden Boys of Bond Street’ was coined. During this high period, Colquhoun and MacBryde showed in The Scottish Gallery, 1944, British & French Artists. He later became a master of the monotype technique as he slowly moved away from the canvas. Success post 1951 saw The Roberts, as they were known to their friends, fall into a sharp decline into a life of poverty. Robert Colquhoun died in 1962.

The Scottish Gallery exhibitions: 1944 Colquhoun & MacBryde participate in Paintings by British and French Artists, Lefevre Gallery, London and which also tours to Aitken Dott & Son (The Scottish Gallery), Edinburgh. The Roberts, 2010 Golden Years, 2014 The Roberts, Revisited, 2017

Please click here to view Robert Colquhoun’s prints

David Donaldson

Born: 1916

Place of Birth: Lanarkshire

Died: 1996

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

Joan Eardley

Born: 1921

Place of Birth: Sussex

Died: 1963

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

Alexander Goudie

Born: 1933

Place of Birth: Paisley

Died: 2004

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

James Morrison

Born: 1932

Place of Birth: Glasgow

Died: 2020

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

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

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

Duncan Shanks

Born: 1937

Place of Birth: Airdrie

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

John Byrne

Born: 1940

Died: 2023

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

View John Byrne prints here.

Archie Forrest

Born: 1950

Place of Birth: Glasgow

Archie Forrest studied at GSA 1969-73 and taught there 1978-85 but now paints full time. He works in the Glasgow School/Scottish Colourist tradition with still life, figure and landscape subjects (often France or Italy) of brilliant colour and bravura handling underpinned by fine drawing and sense of form; he is also a sculptor of considerable merit. He has shown with great success both in London and with The Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh.

Alison Watt

Born: 1965

Place of Birth: Greenock

Alison Watt graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1988 in a frenzy of critical and commercial attention never seen before at The School of Art. She had an exhibition in 2000 at the SNGMA called Shift, which marked her as the youngest female artist to be so honoured with a solo show. In 2008 she was awarded an OBE. Her work is widely exhibited and is held in many prestigious public and private collections.

Geoff Uglow

Born: 1978

Geoff Uglow is a British painter, born in 1978 in Cornwall. He studied at Falmouth and graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2000. He became a Rome Scholar in 2002 living and working in the illustrious British School at Rome for two years. He remained in Italy for a further two years before returning to his permanent studio on the dramatic coast of the south west peninsula of Cornwall. He won the prestigious Alastair Salvesen Art Scholarship for painting and travel in 2009 and used his time to journey around the coastline of Scotland in the footsteps of famous eighteenth-century painter William Daniell. This body of work was exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. He has exhibited both in the UK and internationally, has won numerous awards and his paintings are held in both public and private collections worldwide. The artist currently works between his home and studio in Cornwall and in Italy.

Uglow looks to nature for inspiration. Out of the turbulent depths of a life lived, he gives harbour to fleeting moments of perceived beauty, in contemplation of painting. And then, into the eddy and flow of wet on wet colour by way of brush or hand, he emulsifies a fathomless feeling with impressions of light and air and motion. These paintings exude a visceral current, forcing the viewer to experience all six degrees of freedom. There is a warmth and generosity in his approach and his practice holds a message of promise.

The artist often diarises the passing year with painted colour notes expressing the passage of the seasons by pinning the essence of a particular day. Other major projects have included his Quercus series, using the oak tree as a vehicle to chart the changing rhythms, cycles and seasons of the British landscape. Uglow also finds his subject in his rose garden, which he had cultivated from seed. He describes each painting as ‘a handwritten letter, a moment, which can suspend disbelief, a fragment of vanished beauty.’

The Scottish Gallery exhibitions: 2011, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2022, 2024 (Festival)

Hannah Mooney

Born: 1995

Place of Birth: Ramelton, Co. Donegal, Ireland

Hannah Mooney was born in Ramelton, Co. Donegal, Ireland and graduated in 2017 from Glasgow School of Art. She has won several awards as a student and since graduating, in recognition of her compelling talent as a painter most recently at the New Contemporaries Exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy where she won the major Fleming Wyfold Bursary. She currently works in two distinct subjects; still life and the landscape and in both she is an instinctive, natural painter deeply concerned with the matière and traditional composition. Her work has already been acquired for the James Nichol McBroom Archive and the Hottinger Group.

Selected Awards: RSA John-Kinross Scholarship 2017, RSA Landscape Drawing Prize 2017, James Nicol McBroom Memorial Prize 2017, Armour Prize 2017, Selected for Royal Scottish Watercolours Society Exhibition 2018, RSA Galleries, Edinburgh Selected for New Contemporaries Exhibition 2018, RSA Galleries, Edinburgh Hottinger Prize for Excellence 2018, House for an Art Lover Award 2018, Art in Healthcare Prize 2018, Fleming-Wyfold Art Bursary 2018

The Glasgow School

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