This July Tommy Zyw selects from the subject of Vintage and Contemporary Prints.

Printmaking in Britain underwent a revival at the turn of the 20th century – the founding of the Society of Painters and Etchers in 1880 and the release of several publications by London art dealers was a driving force behind the growing popularity in print making. In recent times, printmaking in Scotland has flourished with the emergence of several independent studios which have included Harley Brothers, Glasgow and Edinburgh Print Studios, Peacocks and Graal Press.

This exhibition features prominent figures in Scottish and British printmaking with specific examples from contemporary artists including; Wilhelmina Barns Graham, Elizabeth Blackadder, Victoria Crowe, Kate Downie, Edward Gage, Charles Hodge Mackie, G.L. Hunter, Angie Lewin, Robert MacBryde, Calum McClure, David Michie and Frances Walker

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham

Born: 1912

Place of Birth: St Andrews

Died: 2004

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

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

Please click here to view paintings by the artist.

Elizabeth Blackadder

Born: 1931

Place of Birth: Falkirk

Died: 2021

Elizabeth Blackadder was born in Falkirk in 1931. She studied at Edinburgh College of Art from 1949 until 1954 under Robert Henderson Blyth and William Gillies inter alia and enjoyed travelling scholarships to southern Europe and Italy. In 1956 she married artist and fellow Scottish Gallery exhibitor John Houston and began teaching in Edinburgh. One of Scotland’s greatest artists, she also enjoys recognition and success in London. Elizabeth is perhaps best known for her detailed yet lyrical watercolours of flowers, ‘table-top’ compositions using Oriental objects and her beloved cats. Trips to Japan and Venice and a greater emphasis on oil can be seen in landscape and townscape pieces as well as important still life series using decorated tins and boxes arranged with exotic fish, fruit and vegetables. In 2001, she was appointed Her Majesty’s Painter and Limner in Scotland. Elizabeth was also an inspired and skilful maker of original prints. We have oils, watercolours and original etchings in stock.

To view paintings by Elizabeth Blackadder please click here

Victoria Crowe

Born: 1945

Victoria Crowe studied at Kingston School of Art from 1961-65 and at the Royal College of Art, London, from 1965-68. At her postgraduate show, she was invited by Sir Robin Philipson to teach at Edinburgh College of Art. For thirty years she worked as a part-time lecturer in the School of Drawing and Painting while developing her own artistic practice. She lives and works in West Linton, Edinburgh, and Venice. Her first one-person exhibition, after leaving the Royal College of Art, was in London and she has subsequently gone on to have over fifty solo shows.

Victoria Crowe’s first solo exhibition at The Scottish Gallery was in 1970. In August 2018, we held a major exhibition of paintings at The Scottish Gallery. This coincided with The Scottish National Portrait Gallery’s retrospective of Victoria Crowe’s portraits. In 2019 The City Art Centre held a retrospective entitled 50 Years of Painting. This exhibition embraced every aspect of Crowe’s practice and featured over 150 pieces. The Gallery hosted a complementary exhibition in September 2019 50 Years: Drawing & Thinking, which focussed on her studio life.

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

In 2000, her exhibition A Shepherd’s Life, consisting of work selected from the 1970s and 80s, was one of the National Galleries of Scotland’s Millennium exhibitions. It received great critical acclaim. The exhibition toured Scotland and was re-gathered in 2009 for a three-month exhibition at the Fleming Collection, London. Victoria was awarded an OBE for Services to Art in 2004 and from 2004-2007, she was appointed Senior Visiting Scholar at St. Catherine’s College, Cambridge. The resulting work, Plant Memory, was exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy in 2007 and subsequently toured Scotland. In 2009 she received an Honorary Degree from The University of Aberdeen and in 2010 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

In 2013, Dovecot Studios wove a large-scale tapestry of Victoria’s painting Large Tree Group. This collaborative tapestry was acquired for the National Museums Scotland. In 2015, Victoria was an invited artist at Dumfries House and in 2016 a group of work by the artist was acquired by the National Galleries of Scotland. Victoria was commissioned by the Worshipful Company of Leathersellers’ in 2014, to design a forty-metre tapestry for their new hall in the city of London, which took over three years to weave and was installed in January 2017. Dovecot worked 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.

In 2022 Victoria Crowe made two trips to Orkney as part of her Royal Scottish Academy/Pier Arts Centre Residency award. This exhibition will showcase some of the work Crowe made during her residency, as well as works created in response to her time spent in Orkney.

The Scottish Gallery exhibitions: 1970, 1973, 1977, 1982, 1995, 1998, 2001 (Festival), 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010 (Festival), 2012, 2014 (Festival), 2016, 2018 (Festival), 2019, 2021, 2023, 2025 (Fesitval, 80th)

To view Victoria Crowe’s paintings please click here

Kate Downie

Photography by Alicia Bruce

Born: 1958

Born in North Carolina, Kate Downie studied at Grays School of Art in Aberdeen before travel and residencies took her to the United States, England, Amsterdam and Paris. Over the past two decades Downie has established herself as one of Scotland’s most prominent artists. Her skill not restricted to painting alone, she works across a diverse range of artistic medium. One recent project for Pittenweem Arts Festival saw Kate juxtapose large colour-field prints with architectural charcoal drawings with extraordinary results. The majority of her work is defined by geography, and the artist’s response to the landscape or subject in front of her. Kate’s constant search for new challenges and inspirations has seen her set up studios in such diverse places as a brewery, an oil rig, and for her most recent show an abandoned Hydroponicum. Her work is held in many public collections including Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art; Kelvingrove, Art Gallery: Reitveld Kunst Academie, Amsterdam; the BBC and Edinburgh Council. Downie has enjoyed ten solo exhibitions at The Scottish Gallery. She is currently exhibiting at the Glasgow Women’s Library with Conversations with Joan. An exhibition based around Downie’s creative journey to complete a version of Joan Eardley’s painting Two Children left unfinished on her Townhead Studio easel at the time of her death in 1963.

‘One of my creative concerns is to define these spaces between buildings rather than the buildings themselves. The object lesson for me is the witnessing and the drawing of these nonplaces which are also, by definition, public arenas of cumulative activity. My job as an artist is to accommodate these actions in our contemporary lives, and to find the poetry within.’
– Kate Downie

Click here to see paintings by the artist

Edward Gage

Born: 1925

Place of Birth: Gullane, East Lothian

Died: 2000

Born Gullane, East Lothian,Teddy Gage was a polymath artist, writer and teacher, for many years the art master at Fettes College and subsequently the influential, erudite critic for The Scotsman newspaper. Gage studied at Edinburgh Collage of Art from 1941-42 and again after the war 1947-52. He paints French watercolour landscapes, often of the South of France or Mediterranean countries with simplified designs and a wet technique.

Charles Hodge Mackie

Born: 1862

Place of Birth: Aldershot

Died: 1920

Mackie was an artist who is notoriously hard to categorise in relation to British art of the time due to his catholic range of influences. He travelled to France for his honeymoon in 1892, where he famously befriended Sereusier and Gauguin. His contact with Gauguin and the Pont Aven school was to have drastic effect on the rest of Mackie’s career, most notably in his use of colour and technique. After discussions with Gauguin, Mackie began to use Japanese oak blocks for his printing; he had previously used cut linoleum.

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.

Angie Lewin

Born: 1963

Place of Birth: Cheshire

Angie Lewin was born in Cheshire and studied Fine Art Printmaking at Central St. Martins College of Art and Design before completing a postgraduate degree in printmaking at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts. After working in London as an illustrator she studied Horticulture and then subsequently moved to Norfolk, which prompted a return to printmaking. Angie now mainly lives and works in Scotland.

Inspired by both the clifftops and saltmarshes of the North Norfolk coast and the Scottish Highlands, she depicts these contrasting environments and their native flora in wood engraving, linocut, silkscreen, lithograph and collage. Her still lifes often incorporate seedpods, grasses, flints and dried seaweed collected on walking and sketching trips. A Wedgwood cup designed by Ravilious may contain feathers and seedheads. An anthology of garden writing published by Merrell, Garden Wisdom, is illustrated throughout by her prints, and author Leslie Geddes-Brown explains:

“The whole book was, in its turn, inspired by the art of Angie Lewin, who brings her own vision of the natural world to her work. She sees the beauty in all seasons and all manifestations of plants: the ordered pattern of the blooms, the thrusting energy of the emerging buds, the prolific seedheads and the varieties of shapes, colours and habits to be found in meadow and border.”

In 2010 Merrell published a monograph, Angie Lewin – Plants and Places. As well as designing fabrics and stationery for St Jude’s, which Angie runs with her husband Simon, she has completed commissions for Penguin, Faber, Conran Octopus, Merrell and Picador and has also designed fabrics for Liberty. In 2006 Angie was elected to The Royal Society of Painter Printmakers and in 2008 to The Society of Wood Engravers. In 2010 she was elected to The Art Workers Guild and in 2016 she was elected to The Royal Watercolour Society.

Public Collections include:
V&A London; The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; The London Institute; The University of Aberystwyth; Art for Hospitals and Hospices Collection

To view original works by Angie Lewin please click here

Robert MacBryde

Born: 1913

Place of Birth: Maybole, Ayrshire

Died: 1966

Robert MacBryde was a still life and figurative painter and a theatre set designer. Born in Maybole, he came from a poor working class family and worked in a shoe factory before gaining a place at Glasgow School of Art (1932-37). At art school he met fellow painter Robert Colquhoun, with whom he established a life long relationship and jointly they became known as ‘The Two Roberts’. They moved to London in 1939 and MacBryde had his first solo exhibition at the Reid & Lefevre Gallery in 1943.

Robert Colquhoun died of heart failure in 1962. Soon after MacBryde moved to Ireland, and for a time shared a house with Patrick Kavanagh, Robert MacBryde died in 1966 in Dublin as a result of a street accident.

Click here to view paintings by this artist

Calum McClure

Born: 1987

Calum McClure was born in 1987 and graduated in Drawing and Painting from Edinburgh College of Art in 2010. He was the winner of the 2011 Jolomo Painting Award, has had five successful exhibitions with The Scottish Gallery and was an invited artist at the Annual Exhibition of the Royal Academy in London in 2012. Recently he has been included in an exhibition of prints at the Royal Academy, London; had work in the major Scottish art societies’ annual exhibitions; had work exhibited at the RA Summer Exhibition; won a prize at the inaugural W Gordon Smith Award for painting; and most recently exhibited two pieces with Flowers Gallery, London.

McClure is a painter who immerses himself in the landscape and in the artistic process of representing it. He understands how paint can convey the poetry of suggestion and is absorbed in the infinite possibilities of the medium. His work evokes atmospheres, especially through the representation of light, shadow and reflections. Some of his images are almost abstract, others quite clearly representational, produced from intense scrutiny of details in the landscape and vistas, views from particular vantage points all with their possibility for further imaginative exploration. He is an artist who dreams as he sees and concentrates deeply as he paints, enabling others who view his work to be transported in a similar way. The images are positive, beautiful and lyrical, those of a precious environment to be nurtured and celebrated.

David Michie

Born: 1928

Place of Birth: Saint-Raphaël, France

Died: 2015

Born in San Raphael, France the son of painter Anne Redpath, David Michie graduated from ECA 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 ECA from where he retired in 1990 as Head of School of Drawing and Painting.

Frances Walker

Born: 1930

Place of Birth: Kirkcaldy

Born in Kirkcaldy in 1930, Frances Walker studied at Edinburgh College of Art and then took up a post as visiting teacher of art for the Hebrides. This experience engendered in her a life-long love of wild and desolate places and since then she has chosen to depict the most remote landscapes, her compositions usually based on coastal reaches, craggy rocks and deserted beaches.

Moving to Aberdeen, Walker took up a post at Gray’s School of Art, where she taught for many years. Since retirement, she has divided her time between Aberdeen and the Western Isles, especially Tiree, where she owns a thatched cottage, but more recently has also travelled further afield – her latest inspiration being the even wilder and more desolate landscape of the Antarctic and South Georgia. A suite of Antarctic paintings were recently bequeathed and exhibited as part of a major exhibition, Among the Polar Ice at The McManus in Dundee (September 2019 – March 2020).

Click here to see paintings by the artist

Vintage and Contemporary Prints

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