Gallery 8, 8 Duke Street, St James’s, London, SW1Y 6BN, open 10am – 6pm

This summer we return to London alongside Ewan Mundy Fine Art with an exhibition of Twentieth Century Scottish Painting. This year the exhibition will feature early works by Elizabeth Blackadder and Joan Eardley, as well as groups of paintings by F.C.B. Cadell, John Houston, Robin Philipson, Anne Redpath and William McTaggart amongst others. Also included in the exhibition will be a focus on contemporary landscape painting with works by Duncan Shanks, James Morrison and Geoff Uglow. To find out more about the exhibition please contact Tommy Zyw.

F.C.B. Cadell

Born: 1883

Died: 1937

The almost complete lack of ‘angst’ in his work seems to derive from an intense love of life, a sensuous enjoyment of good living and an admiration for men who were masculine and women who were elegant. His subject-matter reflected his hedonism. Guy Peploe

Cadell was born in Edinburgh in 1883 and from an early age, showed a precocious talent for art and was producing very capable watercolours and drawings in his early teens. Half French, he was taken to France and Munich by his mother for artistic education and some very fine, freely painted farmyard paintings date from this early period. Despite his sophistication, Cadell’s most natural habitat was the west Highlands, Iona in particular, and he made only a few painting trips to France after the War. He produced some of his most brilliant Colourist works while staying with the Peploes in Cassis in 1924. Very fashion conscious, his work before 1914 had an Edwardian opulence and breadth unique in Scottish painting. By the twenties his work had a hard edge with clear colour, chiming with the jazz-age, and the compositions have a deco stylishness full of sophistication of concept and originality of palette. He is as original and distinctive a voice as any in Scottish painting.

F.C.B. Cadell & The Scottish Gallery

F.C.B. Cadell first exhibited with The Gallery in 1909, and his second in 1910 showcased his Venetian paintings. The visit to Venice had been productive and represented (as with Peploe and Fergusson in Royan in the same year) his full engagement with a personal impressionism in which colour was used for direct expressionist purpose. His was a precocious early career, brilliant in watercolour, encouraged by Arthur Melville. In oil, his earlier work is characterised by rich medium, broad-brush marks and is high in tone, unlike the more sonorous works of Peploe and Fergusson’s early Edinburgh years. His next exhibition with The Scottish Gallery was not until 1932, at a time when picture sales were in decline due to the Great Depression. Cadell had always been comfortable to be his own agent, using the artist-run Society of Eight for many of his exhibitions of new work, and on Iona, where he spent every summer after The Great War. There he set up a daily exhibition of the fruits of his labour, his manservant Charles Oliver acting as sales agent, selling to the many wealthy summer visitors, like David Russell of Markinch and George Service of Cove.

Elizabeth Blackadder

Born: 1931

Place of Birth: Falkirk

Died: 2021

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

To view prints by Elizabeth Blackadder please click here

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)

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.

Sir Robin Philipson

Born: 1916

Place of Birth: Broughton-in-Furness

Died: 1992

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

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

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

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

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

Elizabeth Cumming, 2018

Anne Redpath

Born: 1895

Died: 1965

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

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

William McTaggart

Born: 1835

Died: 1910

One of Scotland’s most famous landscape painters, William McTaggart’s paintings are typified by loose, energetic brushwork and a deep concern for the effects of light. The Scottish Gallery was McTaggart’s main dealer in his lifetime, selling many of his greatest works to the likes of Robert Wemyss Honeyman and Andrew Carnegie.

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.

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.

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)

The Scottish Gallery at Duke Street, St James, London

Join our mailing list