In the last century or so, the modern period, Scotland has accelerated its contribution to British art through hundreds of individual artists, many of them quite resistant to the orthodoxy of art historical taxonomy. Two such are James Cowie and William Crosbie. Cowie had a cussed determination to look back to the early Renaissance and he discouraged his students from indulging in experimentation with the freedoms of modernism. But in his own work, a playfulness and intellectualism allies him, however unwittingly, with surrealism. Crosbie, a generation younger, studied in Paris with Leger and allowed the vocabulary of modernism and Picasso in particular to influence his stylistic development but like Cowie he remained a determined individual, playing with ideas of decorative and distorted imagery to his own ends. Both were highly gifted draughtsmen and seeing their work together on page and wall is no hardship and makes a link (a generalisation?) which can enrich our understanding of the Scottish School.

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.

Works on Paper

James Cowie

William Crosbie

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