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Description: Globalizing Impressionism: Reception, Translation, and Transnationalism
British impressionism, like many of the impressionisms discussed in this volume, comprised a diversity of styles, reflecting the overlapping networks of influence that contributed to the development of avant-garde art in the late nineteenth century. In his pioneering publication British...
PublisherYale University Press
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00198.015
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11. British Impressionism and the Glasgow Boys
Frances Fowle
British impressionism, like many of the impressionisms discussed in this volume, comprised a diversity of styles, reflecting the overlapping networks of influence that contributed to the development of avant-garde art in the late nineteenth century. In his pioneering publication British Impressionism and follow-up exhibition, Impressionism in Britain, Kenneth McConkey acknowledged this diversity, including in his canon the London impressionists, John Singer Sargent, the Newlyn School, Irish artists such as Roderic O’Conor, and the Scottish artists known as “the Glasgow Boys.”1 See Kenneth McConkey, British Impressionism (Oxford: Phaidon, 1989); and Kenneth McConkey, Impressionism in Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). On the Glasgow Boys, see Roger Billcliffe, The Glasgow Boys (London: Francis Lincoln, 2008); and Roger Billcliffe, ed., Pioneering Painters: The Glasgow Boys (Glasgow: Glasgow Museums, 2010). I am also indebted to Professor McConkey for his feedback on this essay.
In her 1994 essay for Norma Broude’s edited volume World Impressionism, Anna Gruetzner Robins insisted that it was Walter Sickert’s London impressionists who represented the core group of “British” impressionists—in particular Philip Wilson Steer, Sidney Starr, Theodore Roussel, and Paul Maitland.2 Anna Gruetzner Robins, “British Impressionism: The Magic and Poetry of Life around Them,” in World Impressionism: The International Movement, 1860–1920, ed. Norma Broude (New York: Abrams, 1994). It is worth noting that in her 2007 publication, A Fragile Modernism, Robins rejected the blanket term “British Impressionism,” since it “assumes that no distinctions were made between one kind of new painting and another,” and adopted Moore’s more neutral expression “modern painting.” See Anna Gruetzner Robins, A Fragile Modernism: Whistler and His Impressionist Followers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 177–79. Her canon also included English landscape artists such as George Clausen, James Charles, and H. H. La Thangue, whom she dubbed the “English luminists,” due to the bright palette and broken brushwork of their later work—even though some of them continued to paint images of rural labor rather than urban modernity.3 Robins, “British Impressionism,” 91. By contrast, Irish and Scottish artists were noticeably underrepresented, with the Glasgow Boys receiving only a cursory mention. Robins concluded that “Scottish artists had little interest in French Impressionism,” due to their early engagement with rural naturalism, and their later development of “a flat decorative style of painting in bright colors,” which, in Robins’s view, had nothing to do with impressionism.4 Robins, “British Impressionism,” 81, 83. This essay argues that, on the contrary, it is precisely this “decorative impressionism” that distinguishes the work of the Scottish artists. Their “decorative” approach derived from a multiplicity of sources: not only from French impressionism, but also from artists as diverse as Jules Bastien-Lepage, James McNeill Whistler, and Adolphe Monticelli.5 On Scottish impressionism, see Frances Fowle, Impressionism and Scotland (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2008). It was concerned not only with the aesthetic arrangement of colors and shapes on a two-dimensional surface, but with compositional harmony—what the critic R.A.M. Stevenson, in 1895, termed a “unity of impression”—achieved either through evoking the effect of dappled light scattered over an entire scene, or through creating a patterned surface with regular brush marks, or perhaps through elements of both approaches.6 R. A. M. Stevenson, “The Lesson of Impressionism,” in Velasquez (London: G. Bell, 1912), 124.
A century before Robins, the Scottish critic James Caw (later director of the National Galleries of Scotland) associated the Glasgow Boys with the notion of a British impressionism, but was at pains to distance their work from what he then viewed as the pernicious influence of Claude Monet and his contemporaries. Writing in 1894, he insisted: “The London Impressionists are so in the French sense, but the Glasgow men, to whom the term is also applied, are not.”7 James Caw, “A Phase of Scottish Art,” Art Journal 20 (1894): 75. His distinction between English and Scottish impressionism stemmed from a nationalistic impulse, albeit one that was consistent with the position of many British critics of the period, who noted that London-based artists such as Sickert and Sargent, had absorbed impressionism as a result of their close friendships with, respectively, Edgar Degas and Monet. By contrast, the Glasgow artists—among them John Lavery, James Guthrie, Edward Arthur Walton, Joseph Crawhall, George Henry, and Edward Atkinson Hornel—had developed a distinct form of impressionism that “they need not have left their own country to acquire.”8 Caw, “Phase of Scottish Art,” 75. Caw goes so far as to claim that McTaggart had developed his own brand of impressionism “before the Frenchmen.” Caw was later director of the National Galleries of Scotland and the author of Scottish Painting Past and Present, 1620–1908 (Edinburgh: T. C. and E. C. Jack, 1908). Caw was vague about the sources of the Glasgow Boys’ impressionism, but he was hinting at the rich holdings of French nineteenth-century paintings to be found in Scottish collections, which had been brought to Glasgow by a group of enlightened art dealers, among them Thomas Lawrie, Craibe Angus, and Alexander Reid. French paintings were loaned to local exhibitions by Scottish mercantile collectors from the late 1870s onward, and in 1888 Degas’s Foyer de la danse de la rue Peletier of 1872 was shown at the Glasgow International Exhibition.9 On the market for French nineteenth-century painting in Scotland, see Frances Fowle, Van Gogh’s Twin: The Glasgow Art Dealer Alexander Reid (1854–1928) (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2010).
In their day the Glasgow Boys were recognized internationally as impressionists. The German critic Richard Muther, in the third volume of his influential book Geschichte der Malerei (1896), described “die Boys of Glasgow” in terms of “Impressionism united with . . . Japanese painting, and Monticelli’s splendour of colour.”10 Richard Muther, The History of Modern Painting (London: J. M. Dent, 1907), 4:41. He also drew parallels with American impressionism, reproducing their paintings alongside those of Whistler and Sargent.11 Richard Muther, Geschichte der Malerei (Berlin: Neufeld und Henius, 1912), 3:378. Muther was the first not only to identify the principal sources of the Glasgow Boys’ paintings, but also to characterize their work in terms of decorative impressionism. He described their “decorative harmony, and the rhythm of forms and masses of colour” in Whistlerian terms, adding: “They cared most to seek nature in the hours when distinct forms vanish out of sight and the landscape becomes a vision of colour.”12 Richard Muther, The History of Modern Painting (London: Henry, 1896), 3:688.
As a counterpoint to Muther, Caw identified what he termed “emotional significance” as the key feature of Scottish impressionism.13 James Caw, William McTaggart: A Biography (Glasgow: James Maclehose, 1917), 100. In his view, the English impressionists (and, indeed, Monet) were inferior to their northern equivalents because they neglected any emotional engagement with their subject.“The Frenchmen (and later most of their English following, of whom Mr. Wilson Steer is the most notable),” he commented, “confined their efforts to recording the merely visual aspects of actualité, and founded their treatment upon a scientific theory.”14 Caw, William McTaggart, 100. Caw was almost certainly influenced in his views by the Irish critic George Moore’s Modern Painting (1893). Moore was skeptical of Monet and what he termed “scientific” impressionism. “Great art dreams, imagines, sees, expresses—reasons never,” he wrote. “The separation of the method of expression from the idea to be expressed is the sure sign of decadence. France is now all decadence.”15 George Moore, Modern Painting (London: Walter Scott, 1893), 96. Good art, by implication, was honest and health-giving, a true representation of nature, created in a direct, spontaneous manner, but also viewed through the artist’s temperament. In Moore’s view, this more desirable branch of modern painting was epitomized by the work of Édouard Manet and Whistler. To Caw, it was embodied in the work of the Glasgow Boys, precisely because they were closer to Whistler than to Monet.
It was the Scottish impressionists’ adoption of a style distinct from Monet’s that was noted by contemporary critics. The possibility of their inclusion in the impressionist canon, on the other hand, was never in question. As Alexis Clark discusses in chapter 5 of this anthology, for the French critic Camille Mauclair, British impressionism centered around the Glasgow School. In his 1904 history of impressionism, he associated these Scottish artists with American painters such as as John Lewis-Brown, William Turner Dannat, and Alexander Harrison, whose common thread was their admiration for Whistler. He included the Glasgow School in his brief section on impressionism in Britain, identifying them as followers of Whistler.16 Camille Mauclair, L’impressionnisme, son histoire, son ésthetique et ses maîtres (Paris: Librairie de l’art ancien et moderne, 1904), 210. According to Mauclair, “En Amérique, l’influence [de l’impressionnisme] a été moins sensible, ainsi qu’en Angleterre: le regretté John Lewis-Brown a été imbu de Degas et de Monet, tandis que des personnalités comme celles de M. Dannat, M. Alexander, de MM. Lavery et Guthrie, sont inspirées de Whistler, qui fut le compagnon de la première heure des impressionnistes sans partager leurs idées.” He made a distinction between these artists, among whom he named Lavery and Guthrie, and those who were “directly inspired by impressionism,” including “a number of young painters from . . . London.”17 Mauclair, L’impressionnisme, 210. Here and elsewhere, unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine. Mauclair also included Lionel Walden (1861–1933), Frederick Carl Frieseke (1874–1939), and James Wilson Morrice (1865–1924) in his list of those directly influenced by impressionism.
That only Lavery and Guthrie were named by Mauclair may be due to their international reputation. Both had won medals at the 1889 Paris Exposition universelle and at the Munich International, where, in 1890, a number of Scottish artists had caused a sensation with paintings such as Walton’s A Daydream and Henry and Hornel’s The Druids: Bringing in the Mistletoe. In 1891 Lavery’s masterpiece, The Tennis Party (1885; fig. 1), was acquired by the Munich Pinakothek, and in the early 1900s two of his portraits were bought by the French state for the Musée du Luxembourg.18 Léonce Bénédite oversaw the purchase of Lavery’s self-portrait Father and Child in 1900 and also acquired Lavery’s Spring in 1904. Thanks to the support of the dealer Alexander Reid, many of the Glasgow Boys went on to exhibit at Secessionist exhibitions in Munich, Berlin, Barcelona, and Vienna, as well as the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the Pittsburgh Carnegie International, and other venues in the United States.19 Frances Fowle, Van Gogh’s Twin, 70–73. In 1895 Reid, in collaboration with the art dealer Charles Kurtz, organized the transport of the Glasgow Boys’ paintings to the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis—and on to Chicago, Cincinnati, Pennsylvania, and New York—and to the Pittsburgh Carnegie International the following year.
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Description: The Tennis Party by Lavery, John
Fig. 1. John Lavery, The Tennis Party, 1885. Oil on canvas, 76.2 × 183 cm. Aberdeen Art Gallery. Presented by Sir John Murray 1926.
By contrast with these Scottish artists, the English impressionists, at least initially, were well known in their own country and in France, but less so in the rest of Europe or North America. They benefited from the attention of local critics such as Moore and D. S. MacColl, who reported on the annual exhibitions of the New English Art Club, where Sickert and his circle exhibited in the second half of the 1880s.20 The Glasgow Boys were also regular exhibitors at the New English Art Club. On this, see Kenneth McConkey, The New English: A History of the New English Art Club (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2006). Supported by the art dealer David Croal Thomson, in 1889 they formed a breakaway group that included Sickert, Steer, Starr, Roussel, and others who exhibited for the first time under the banner “London Impressionists” at the Goupil Gallery.21 On the London impressionists, see Robins, Fragile Modernism. Two years later the Glasgow Boys—notably Guthrie, Lavery, Walton, Henry, and Hornel—were given their own “impressionist” room at the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) in Edinburgh. However, whereas the London-based “new art critics,” such as Moore and MacColl, were more or less receptive to French and English impressionism,the Scottish impressionists received no such support.22 Anna Gruetzner Robins, “The Greatest Artist the World Has Ever Seen,” in Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec, London and Paris 1870–1910, ed. Anna Gruetzner Robins and Richard Thomson (London: Tate, 2005), 84. In 1893 the president of the RSA, Sir George Reid, delivered a scathing attack:
The so-called impressionists have, unfortunately, some followers in Scotland. There is quite a school of them in Glasgow. It is the influence of the modern French school of painting. But what is this impressionism except, among the younger artists, the offerings of admiring incapacity in the shape of more or less dexterous imitation of some of the better known leaders of the movement in France? I greatly dislike young artists going in for this kind of thing. It is simply an impertinence.23 Sir George Reid, Westminster Gazette, February 4, 1893. See also W. B. Richmond, “French Impressionism and Its Influence on British Art,” in Transactions of the National Association for the Advancement of Art and Its Application to Industry, Edinburgh Meeting, 1889 (London: 22 Albemarle Street, 1890), 98–109.
Above all, critics such as Moore and MacColl objected to the decorative aspects of Scottish impressionism. MacColl, while an enthusiastic supporter of Steer, criticized the Scottish artist Arthur Melville for “lean[ing] to pictorial formula rather than to naturalism.” In MacColl’s view, Melville was more interested in applying his decorative, “blottesque” style than in creating a readable painting.24 D. S. MacColl, Saturday Review, October 1, 1904, cited in Vivien Hamilton, Joseph Crawhall: One of the Glasgow Boys (London: John Murray, 1990), 57. Of Hornel’s expressive and highly decorative painting Summer (1891), Moore wrote: “To ignore what are known as values seems to be the first principle of the Glasgow school. Hence a crude and discordant coloration without depth or richness. Hence an absence of light and the mystery of aerial perspective.”25 Moore, Modern Painting, 207. Moore mistakenly titles this work Midsummer. Hornel’s technique evolved in part from his observation of the rich color and thick impasto of the French artist Monticelli, whose work was widely collected in Scotland.26 See Frances Fowle, “La délicieuse couleur décorative: Van Gogh, Alexander Reid et L’influence de Monticelli en Ecosse,” in Van Gogh–Monticelli (Marseilles: Centre de la Vieille Charité, 2008), 103–27; and Frances Fowle, “Souvenirs and Fêtes Champêtres: William Allan Coats’s Collection of Nineteenth-Century French Paintings,” Journal of the Scottish Society for Art History 14 (2009): 63–70. Monticelli was also greatly admired by Vincent van Gogh for his brilliant, gemlike color and decorative symbolism.27 Fowle, Van Gogh’s Twin, 63–64. Like many of the Glasgow Boys, Hornel was also fascinated by Japanese prints, which explains the flattened perspective in Summer.
The Glasgow Boys were particularly lambasted by the British art establishment for their decorative approach to portraiture. Writing in the Studio in 1912, the author Archibald Stodart Walker commented that “the early portraits of such men as Lavery, Henry, Walton and [Alexander] Roche . . . made no pretence of digging into character. The sitter was merely part of a scheme of decoration. . . . The mental and moral capacities of the model were discarded or sacrificed for the merely tonal and decorative aims of the painter.”28 A. Stodart Walker, “The Portraits of Sir George Reid RSA,” International Studio 46 (March–June 1912): 174. Significantly, Sir James Guthrie, to whom Walker sat for his own portrait, was excepted from this group. Walker was referencing portraits of the early 1890s, such as George Henry’s Whistleresque The Feather Boa (1892), for example, which privileges tonal harmony over individual character. Around the same date, Walton produced a pastel portrait of Elizabeth Reid (sister of the art dealer Alexander Reid) entitled Auburn. Executed in harmonizing tones of russet and brown, the title reflects the sitter’s striking hair coloring.
In summary, at the turn of the twentieth century, the Scottish impressionists were appreciated internationally, but less so in their own country, and to a certain extent this remains the case today. One need only consider the lukewarm response by London-based critics such as Alastair Sooke to the Glasgow Boys exhibition at the Royal Academy in 2010, as opposed to the warm reception the Scottish impressionism exhibition received at the Drents Museum in the Netherlands in 2015.29 See Alastair Sooke’s review in the Telegraph, in which he describes the Glasgow Boys’ work as “pretty, but tame.” Alastair Sooke, “Pioneering Painters: The Glasgow Boys 1880–1900, Royal Academy, Review,” Telegraph, November 1, 2010, https://bit.ly/2BmQp38. By contrast Stefan Kuiper, in de Volkskrant, commented, “There is little to criticize in this exhibition. It is excellent. High quality selection of works” (“Op die expositie valt weinig ann te merken; die is prima. Hoogwardige selectie”). Stefan Kuiper, “Hoogwaardige selectie Glasgow Boys in Drents Museum,” de Volkskrant (October 2, 2015), https://bit.ly/3hnv7So.
FOLLOWERS OF FRENCH IMPRESSIONISM
In 1893 Sir George Reid had accused the Scottish impressionists of imitating their French contemporaries and, despite Robins’s assertion that the Glasgow Boys had no interest in French impressionism, they were undeniably aware of and, in certain cases, responded to their work. This was again largely thanks to the influence of Alexander Reid, who supported many of the Boys in the 1890s. Reid was not only a friend and direct contemporary of Guthrie and the other Glasgow Boys, he also had a close connection with Whistler, whose work he handled and who was godfather to his son, A. J. “McNeill” Reid. Referred to by some of the Boys as “Degas Reid,” he was also the first British dealer to consistently stock and exhibit the work of the French impressionists.30 Fowle, Van Gogh’s Twin, 59. He lived in Paris from 1886 to 1889, working briefly for the art dealers Boussod, Valadon et cie. During this period he shared an apartment with Vincent and Theo van Gogh, who encouraged him to sell French impressionist works in Britain. He subsequently dedicated his Glasgow gallery, La Société des Beaux-Arts, to the promotion of modern French art and, during the 1890s, regularly displayed works by Degas, Manet, Monet, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, and others. He also stocked and sold the work of Monticelli. As a supporter, therefore, as well as a direct contemporary of the Glasgow Boys, Reid acted as a catalyst, giving them the opportunity to view not only Whistler’s and Monticelli’s paintings, but also French impressionist art.
As Reid did not set up his Glasgow gallery until 1889, the group’s exposure to impressionism before that date was admittedly limited. Several of the Glasgow Boys, among them Lavery, James Paterson, and William Kennedy, had trained in Paris in the late 1870s and 1880s and, while there, were able to trawl the local art dealers for inspiration. However at that date they were more inspired by the Salon naturalism of Bastien-Lepage than by Monet or Degas. Lavery was among the first wave of artists to work at the international artists’ colony of Grez-sur-Loing, arriving in the early 1880s, shortly after Melville, Kennedy, and Roche. At Grez they painted out-of-doors alongside the American Lovell Birge Harrison and the Irish painter Frank O’Meara, both students of Carolus-Duran, as well as William Stott of Oldham. Roche recalled that “the favourite topics were Bastien-Lepage and plein air,” rather than French impressionism.31 Walter Shaw Sparrow, John Lavery and His Work (London: Keagan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1911), 41. Kennedy was taught by Bastien-Lepage and passed on his lessons to the rest of the group. In particular, many adopted the French artist’s propensity for vertical formats, high horizons, and “square-brush” technique, all of which laid the foundations for their hallmark mosaic-style brushwork and decorative approach to landscape.
As the art historian William Hardie has observed, this decorative tendency is most evident in the work of Melville, Crawhall, Henry, and Hornel, but it also appears in the work of Guthrie and Walton in the second half of the 1880s.32 William Hardie, Scottish Painting, 1837 to the Present (London: Studio Vista, 1990), 83. It manifested itself as early as 1885 in the work of Henry, working at the artists’ colony of Cockburnspath in Berwickshire, in the Scottish borders. Henry’s Noon (1885) perfectly illustrates the new direction their art was taking. The subject of a young girl resting in the shade while tending a herd of cows was inspired by Bastien-Lepage’s Pauvre fauvette (1881), which was widely reproduced in publications such as the Art Journal and the Magazine of Art, but Henry’s canvas is more overtly decorative in intention.33 Pauvre fauvette was published in the Art Journal and the Magazine of Art in 1882. The composition is divided horizontally into broad bands of sunlight and shadow and vertically by the smooth and erect trunk of the tree, whose foliage obscures the horizon and closes off the composition, flattening the perspective.
Lavery later confessed that, while in Paris in the early 1880s, he had “deplorably little to say about Monet, Pissarro, and Cézanne.”34 Sir John Lavery, The Life of a Painter (Boston: Little, Brown, 1940), 44. The “foreign” artists whom he encountered while training at the Académie Julian were predominantly Americans, including Whistler, Sargent, William Merritt Chase, Charles Sprague Pearce, and Birge Harrison.35 Lavery, Life of a Painter, 241. At Julian’s he overlapped not only with the English painter George Clausen, but also with the American impressionist Robert Vonnoh, whose tenure, in turn, coincided with that of Steer. In his memoirs, Lavery mentions Mary Cassatt, who “came on the scene as I was leaving Paris,” and whose work was “on a par with the best French Impressionists.”36 Lavery, Life of a Painter, 241. However, since none of the Glasgow artists spoke fluent French, none established any close relationships with members of the French avant-garde. As Lavery later admitted, “Though I owe much to my French masters . . . I dare say I should have learned more and been more influenced by the influential and impressed by the Impressionists.”37 Lavery, Life of a Painter, 45.
Nevertheless, most of the Glasgow Boys admired Manet and, however erroneously, regarded him as the leader of the French impressionist movement. In 1883 Lavery was delighted that his submission to the Paris Salon, Two Fishermen, was hung on the line close to Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882). As McConkey has pointed out, Lavery referenced Manet’s painting in his use of a mirror and its reflection in the background of his major canvas of 1883, After the Dance. A young girl is slumped in a chair, while in the mirror behind her, an elderly gentleman in tails, possibly her father, is reflected alongside other partygoers.38 Kenneth McConkey, John Lavery: A Painter and His World (Edinburgh: Atelier, 2010), 20. As part of his series of paintings commissioned for the Glasgow International Exhibition of 1888, Lavery once again paid homage to Manet’s painting in The Cigar Seller at the International (1888).
Despite these examples, the English critic Walter Shaw Sparrow categorically denied Manet’s influence on Lavery, asserting, “I cannot believe that what may be called the plebian naturalness of Manet was ever fascinating to a young man who loved a thoroughbred grace. The Impressionists had no other effect on Lavery than that of making him keen to study out of doors.”39 Sparrow, John Lavery and His Work, 48. Sparrow’s assertion reveals more about his own aversion to Manet’s troublesome realism than about Lavery’s debt or otherwise to the artist. Certainly, both Lavery and Guthrie were fascinated enough by Manet to visit a retrospective of forty works at Paul Durand-Ruel’s gallery in Paris in the spring of 1894, when Guthrie himself had four paintings on show at the Société national des beaux-arts.40 This visit is recorded in Anne Mackie’s journal, housed at the National Library of Scotland; see Belinda Thomson, “Patrick Geddes’s ‘Clan d’Artistes’: Some Elusive French Connections,” in Patrick Geddes: The French Connection, ed. Frances Fowle and Belinda Thomson (Oxford: White Cockade, 2004), 56. Mauclair reviewed the Manet show for the Art Journal: Camille Mauclair, “Edouard Manet,” Art Journal (September 1895): 274–79.
It was also in the early 1890s that Crawhall began to take an interest in Degas, whose work he was able to see at an exhibition at Alexander Reid’s Glasgow gallery in 1892. A specialist in paintings of animals, he shared Degas’s fascination with unexpected viewpoints and with capturing figures, especially horses, in motion. As Melville’s biographer once noted, “Both in drawing and painting [Crawhall] had a Degas-like faculty of suggesting movement and light,”41 Agnes E. Mackay, Arthur Melville, Scottish Impressionist, 1855–1904 (Leigh-on-Sea: F. Lewis, 1951), 66. a skill developed through close observation of Degas’s work.42 Fowle, Impressionism and Scotland, 47. Like Degas, Crawhall experimented with different media, preferring latterly to work in gouache on Holland linen. His subjects included the circus and the racetrack, as well as more upper-class leisure pursuits such as hunting and shooting. He saw the humor in modern inventions such as the motorcar and the bicycle, portraying the sister of one of his most important patrons, William Burrell, as a “New Woman” in Girl on a Bicycle (c. 1896)—a subject also addressed by Lavery.
Even if the Glasgow Boys’ links with French impressionism were not as intimate as those of artists such as Sickert and Sargent, it is certain that Lavery, Crawhall, and others were at least familiar with the work of Manet and Degas and, in certain cases, observed their work closely. Nevertheless, it was undoubtedly Whistler who exercised a more enduring influence. And it was Whistler’s emphasis on tonal harmony, as well as his interest in Japanese art, that would lead ultimately to the development of the Scottish artists’ hallmark style of decorative impressionism.
WHISTLERIAN MODERNITY
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Whistler was regularly referred to by British art writers as an impressionist. Indeed, as the critic Frank Rutter observed, “In England . . . impressionism meant Whistler. . . . The more we liked Whistler, the more we were tempted to dub ‘impressionist’ all the paintings we liked.”43 Frank Rutter, “Impressionism as a Word in the Vocabulary of Art Criticism,” in Art in My Time (London: Rich and Cowan, 1933), 57–58. Sickert was Whistler’s disciple, and in 1889 he defined impressionism in terms reminiscent of the famous “10 O’Clock” lecture:
Essentially and firstly it is not realism. It has no wish to record anything merely because it exists. It is not occupied in a struggle to make intensely real and solid the sordid or superficial details of the subjects it selects. It accepts, as the aim of the picture, what Edgar Allan Poe asserts to be the sole legitimate province of the poem, beauty. . . . It is . . . strong in the belief that for those that live in the most wonderful and complex city in the world, the most fruitful course of study lies in a persistent effort to render the magic and poetry which they daily see around them.44 Walter Sickert, “Introduction to the Catalogue of the London Impressionists Exhibition, Goupil Galleries, December 1889,” in Philip Wilson Steer, ed. D. S. MacColl (London: Faber and Faber, 1945), 176.
Whistler’s “Ten O’Clock,” first delivered at Prince’s Hall, London, on February 20, 1885, was the Glasgow Boys’ bible. The lecture contained undisguised criticism of Victorian narrative painting and emphasized the importance of artistic “suggestion,” as opposed to mundane description. Lavery, for one, owned a copy of the lecture, and, along with Alexander Reid, it was he who provided the strongest link between Whistler and the rest of the Boys; and, like Reid, he often acted as an intermediary between the artist and his Scottish clients and dealers.45 McConkey, John Lavery: A Painter, 35–36. However, it was Walton who led the campaign to persuade Glasgow Corporation, in 1891, to acquire Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 2: Portrait of Thomas Carlyle (1872–73).
By the late 1880s, therefore, Whistler’s work was well known in Scotland and was collected by a number of Scottish industrialists. Under Whistler’s influence, several of the Glasgow Boys abandoned naturalism in favor of a more imaginative response to landscape and figurative painting. Henry’s River Landscape by Moonlight (1887), a view of the River Clyde by moonlight, is a response to Whistler’s assertion that the artist should record the city at twilight, “when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairyland is before us.”46 James McNeill Whistler, “Mr Whistler’s ‘Ten O’Clock,’” in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890; repr., London: Heinemann, 1936), 159. Whistler confirmed the Glasgow artists’ belief that it was more important to paint tonally and to “suggest” rather than describe reality. Henry’s nocturne River Landscape illustrates this point well, but whereas Whistler transformed and disguised the industrial Thames under a veil of evening mist, Henry, the painter of modern life, drew attention to the Clyde as a working river.
In his masterpiece, Stirling Station (1888), William Kennedy revealed a similar commitment to impressionist modernity, as viewed through a Whistlerian lens (fig. 2). He referenced Whistler in the harmonies of gray dotted with pinpricks of light, while the asymmetrical composition is more typical of Degas. The subject of a bustling station, too, shows an engagement with impressionist modernity and paintings such as Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare series. However, Kennedy’s technique owed less to Monet than to Whistler, and to the English impressionist Sydney Starr (another Whistler acolyte), whose Paddington Station (1886) had been exhibited two years prior at the Society of British Artists exhibition in London.
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Description: Stirling Station by Kennedy, William
Fig. 2. William Kennedy, Stirling Station, 1888. Oil on canvas, 54 × 81.6 cm. Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Glasgow Museums. Purchased with the assistance of the Heritage Lottery Fund, The Art Fund, the Trustees of the Hamilton Bequest and the Friends of Glasgow Museums, 2008.
Lavery, for one, explored the contrast between Whistler’s tonal aestheticism and the bolder techniques of impressionism in one of his early studio pictures, A Visit to the Studio (1885). In this picture-within-a-picture a large, elaborately framed painting (an unfinished version of Lavery’s Return from Market, 1884) stands on an easel. Executed with broad brushstrokes in a light palette, it shows two people punting on a river, and yet appears too large to have been painted outdoors. By contrast, the interior of the studio and the female visitor are depicted in much darker, harmonious tones. In general such tonal harmony was the “impressionism” that Lavery embraced, with its emphasis on the decorative, rather than on the analysis of light and the idea of instantaneity.
The Glasgow Boys themselves sometimes engaged in debate around the use of terms such as “realism” and “impressionism.” In 1884, for example, Walton painted a portrait of fellow Glasgow Boy Joseph Crawhall leaning on the back of a canvas and inscribed it with the legend: “Joe Crawhall the impressionist by E. A. Walton the realist” (fig. 3). The location is Crawhall’s studio: the painting is propped up against another canvas depicting a bullfight, presumably painted during a recent trip to Spain. Tucked behind the stretcher are peeling posters on which the words “toro” (bull) and “chica” (girl) are highlighted. Together with some Japanese-style characters in cartouches “stamped” on the back of the canvas, they give an indication of the sitter’s current artistic (and more private) preoccupations. Seen in this context, the epithet “impressionist” becomes a private joke, perhaps more a reflection of how critics lampooned the artist at the time than of how he perceived his own approach to painting. Yet it is significant that the distinction between these two terms, “realist” and “impressionist,” was already a source of debate in 1884, the latter equivalent to “working in a sketch-like, even slipshod, manner,” as far as the critics were concerned, rather than anything more specific. By the late nineteenth century the two terms would become more distinct, as critics such as Moore and MacColl consistently categorized Manet, Whistler, and Degas as “realists,” distancing their naturalistic approach from that of Monet and his fellow “impressionists,” who were more concerned with the analysis of light and color.47 In Nineteenth-Century Art (Glasgow: J. Maclehose, 1902), for example, D. S. MacColl grouped Manet, Whistler, and Degas under the heading “realism,” whereas Monet was discussed in a chapter on “impressionism.”
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Description: Portrait of Joseph Crawhall by Walton, E. A.
Fig. 3. Edward Arthur Walton, Portrait of Joseph Crawhall, 1884. Oil on canvas, 74.3 × 36.8 cm. National Galleries of Scotland. Edinburgh. Presented by Mrs. A. E. Walton, 1924.
The cartouches in Walton’s painting were allusions to Whistler’s passion for Japanese art, which both Walton and Crawhall shared. Japanese objects were relatively easy to view in Glasgow, their popularity symptomatic of a more general British craze for “Oriental” art.48 On Japonisme in Britain, see Ayako Ono, Japonisme in Britain (London: Routledge, 2006). In November 1889 Walton’s chosen costume for the Glasgow Art Club Ball was that of the Japanese printmaker Hokusai. Coinciding with this event, Alexander Reid held an exhibition of Japanese prints by “Hokusai and his pupils” that he had brought back to Glasgow from Siegfried Bing’s gallery in Paris.
The Glasgow Boys’ shift in the late 1880s and 1890s toward decorative harmony was therefore underpinned by Whistler’s aestheticism, as well as the brilliant colors and flattened forms of Japanese prints. The two were often fused in works such as Kennedy’s The Fur Boa (1890–93), which includes in the background a Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock print, reproduced in brilliant primary colors. Crawhall’s calligraphic style, too, derived from a fascination with the techniques of Japanese art, albeit viewed through the lens of Degas. He delighted in flattened forms and “cropping” his images in unexpected ways, most evident in works such as Horse and Cart with a Lady (c. 1894–1900) or American Jockeys (c. 1900).
The Glasgow Boys undeniably owed a considerable debt to Whistler, and he too felt a close connection with the west of Scotland, not only through his friendship with the artists, but through his Scottish grandmother, who was a McNeill of Barra. Toward the end of his life, the University of Glasgow awarded him an honorary degree, and, in time, in recognition of the affection he held for the city, his vast estate of prints, drawings, and paintings, as well as his extensive archive of correspondence, was presented to the university.49 Presented to the Hunterian Art Gallery and the university in 1935 and 1954 by his ward, Rosalind Birnie Philip.
PAINTERS OF MODERN LIFE
As the examples discussed above demonstrate, in conjunction with the Glasgow Boys’ move toward a more decorative style of painting, they began to take an interest in impressionist modernity; indeed, their assimilation of modern-life subjects was far more wholehearted than Robins’s 1994 essay suggests. Scotland was an expanding industrial nation, and Glasgow—then the second city of the British Empire—was home to a new class of rich mercantile collectors eager to champion the avant-garde. Supported by the nouveau riche, the Glasgow Boys produced a whole series of pictures of suburban leisure. More than any other group of works, they demonstrate the close attention that these Scottish artists were paying not only to French impressionism, but also to French “society” painters on the fringes of the movement, such as Giuseppe De Nittis and James Tissot, both of whom were well known in Britain.50 I have argued this elsewhere in Fowle, Impressionism and Scotland. See also Hugh Stevenson, “Modern Life,” in Billcliffe, Pioneering Painters, 76–89.
It was Walton who was the first of the Glasgow Boys to turn wholeheartedly to the painting of modern life. In 1885, based in the commuter town of Helensburgh in Dunbartonshire, he produced a series of high-keyed watercolors, which have as their subject young, upper-class women strolling out-of-doors. An example is En plein air, now in a private collection.51 Walton exhibited other titles such as A Morning Outing and A Suburban Villa at the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolour in 1885 and 1886. See Billcliffe, Glasgow Boys, 127. The telegraph posts and approaching carriage in this watercolor underline the contemporaneity, as well as the immediacy, of the image. Meanwhile, the low viewpoint and asymmetry, emphasizing the emptiness of the wide avenue, were compositional devices favored by Degas—in works such as Place de la Concorde of 1875—as well as by De Nittis, who participated in the first exhibition of the future impressionists at Nadar’s studio in 1874.
Painted in the same year as Walton’s En plein air, Lavery’s masterpiece, The Tennis Party, shows figures in movement, engaged in a game of tennis (see fig. 1). Lawn tennis was a modern and popular sport for Britain’s upper-middle classes during the 1870s and 1880s, and Lavery’s tennis players are playing on a grass court at Cathcart, then a genteel area south of the city of Glasgow. In 1885 he produced a whole series of such images inspired by the social rituals associated with tennis, the most noteworthy being Played! (1885) and A Rally (1885). These paintings have no real equivalent in French impressionism, but The Tennis Party was praised by some as a “lively work of the Impressionist School” (and dismissed by others as “mere vulgarity”) when it was first exhibited in 1886.52 Lavery, Life of a Painter, 49; The Builder, May 15, 1886, cited in Kenneth McConkey, Sir John Lavery (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1993), 46. McConkey, too, has associated the “fragmentary and snapshot perception” in Lavery’s masterpiece with Degas’s “urban impressionism.”53 McConkey, John Lavery: A Painter, 34. In reality this apparent “snapshot” of reality was painted in the studio, and the sketch on which it was based is much closer in technique to French impressionism.
Lavery credited Bastien-Lepage with teaching him how to capture a figure in motion, but in terms of subject matter, The Tennis Party could not be further from the rural naturalism of the French artist. The theme of the upper classes engaged in sport was almost certainly inspired by the fashionable society paintings of Tissot, who specialized in often vaguely suggestive images of leisure and courtship. Lavery, however, mindful of his predominantly Presbyterian Scottish audience, and intent on capturing a fleeting moment, adopted a far more objective approach.
A related work, Lavery’s less well-known image of modern suburban leisure, The Croquet Party (fig. 4), could potentially have been inspired by Manet, who, in 1873, had painted two young couples playing croquet in the garden of the Belgian painter Alfred Stevens. More ambitious than Manet’s work and set against the backdrop of the Firth of Clyde, Lavery’s oil shows a group of young men and women playing croquet in a large private garden. There is no hint of any courtship ritual, and the real subject is the balmy atmosphere of a hot summer’s afternoon. Trees cast long shadows across the lawn and dappled light plays on the surface of two young women’s flowing white dresses, recalling the earlier impressionist works of Monet, twenty of whose more recent paintings had been on show at the Goupil Gallery in London the previous year.54 McConkey, John Lavery: A Painter, 52. McConkey also points to the influence of Sargent, whose A Morning Walk and St. Martin’s Summer were on view at the New English Art Club and compared to Monet by the critic for the Times. See unsigned review, Times, April 18, 1889, 8, cited in Impressionists in England: the Critical Reception, ed. Kate Flint (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 310.
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Description: The Croquet Party by Lavery, John
Fig. 4. John Lavery, The Croquet Party, 1890. Oil on canvas, 91.5 × 183 cm. Private collection.
The subject of tennis was also addressed by Arthur Melville, who painted other modern subjects such as golfers at Dunbar and skaters on Duddingston Loch in Edinburgh (a subject also treated by De Nittis), as well as can-can dancers and urban flaneurs.55 See K. McConkey and C. Topsfield, Arthur Melville: Adventures in Colour (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2015), 65–82. Melville trained at the Académie Julian in the late 1870s and made frequent trips to Paris. Among his most audacious works were four watercolors of dancers at the Moulin Rouge, painted in bold primary colors, and far more abstract and experimental than any of Degas’s café-concert pictures or Sickert’s music-hall paintings. Arguably Meville’s most “impressionist” modern-life image, however, was The Chalk Cutting, painted in 1898 when Melville was staying at Sandhills House in Surrey (fig. 5). Clouds of chalk dust explode into the air, concealing part of the rail track, wagons for transporting stone, and a distant crane, perhaps evoking the way in which the steam of the locomotives fills the atmosphere in Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare series.
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Description: The Chalk Cutting by Melville, Arthur
Fig. 5. Arthur Melville, The Chalk Cutting, 1898. Oil on canvas, 85.1 × 92.8 cm. National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh. Purchased with the assistance of the Art Fund and the Patrons of the National Galleries of Scotland, 1913.
The majority of the Glasgow Boys embraced modern-life themes, but, apart from Lavery, relatively few chose to paint these subjects in oil, or on a large scale. Melville’s The Chalk Cutting, William Kennedy’s Stirling Station (1888; see fig. 2), and Guthrie’s Midsummer (1890, discussed below) are among the exceptions to this rule, perhaps for the simple reason that watercolors of modern life sold more easily. Caw, for one, always had reservations about such contemporary themes. He judged Lavery’s The Tennis Party, for example, to be “charming . . . in perfect modernity of treatment and subject,” but basically inferior to his earlier history paintings.56 Caw, “Phase of Scottish Art,” 77. Perhaps tellingly, Melville failed to sell his Chalk Cutting, and Lavery, although successful in Germany, had to wait until 1923 until he found a Scottish buyer for his modern-life masterpiece.57 The painting was deaccessioned by the Munich Pinakothek. Significantly, however, the buyer in question, Sir James Murray, also owned works by Degas, Monet, Sisley, and Pissarro.
TOWARD A DECORATIVE IMPRESSIONISM
As this essay argues, it was not so much the engagement with modern-life subjects as it was the decorative aspect of the Glasgow Boys’ impressionism that set them apart from their English contemporaries. In 1892 Guthrie produced a large-scale oil entitled Midsummer (fig. 6), which was the culmination of a series of works in pastel, begun in the 1890s, that recorded the daily round of tea parties and tennis matches that occupied the young ladies of Helensburgh. Guthrie exhibited the painting at the annual exhibition of the New English Art Club in London, where it caught Moore’s attention. The Irish critic waxed lyrical, describing the canvas as “a delicate and yet a full sensation of the beauty of modern life,” and admiring in particular the three women “with their tiny Japanese tea-table . . . [dressed in] white, like a lily, drenched with green shadows.”58 Moore, Modern Painting, 206. Moore had objected to the decorative aspects of Hornel’s Summer, with its “crude” color and flattened forms, but he was somehow able to appreciate Guthrie’s painting of young women taking tea out-of-doors in a Helensburgh garden. Even though it was executed with the characteristic square-brush technique of the Glasgow Boys, creating a positive kaleidoscope of color, it was less concerned with surface pattern than with the evocation of dappled light on a summer’s day. Indeed, Midsummer could be said to epitomize Scottish impressionism, for it combines an interest in light and modernity with a mosaic-like application of paint, which was noted by contemporary critics.
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Description: Midsummer by Guthrie, James
Fig. 6. James Guthrie, Midsummer, 1892. Oil on canvas, 101.8 × 126.2 cm. Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh. Diploma work deposit, 1893.
Hardie has observed that this decorative tendency in the Glasgow Boys’ work had largely evaporated by the late 1890s, when many of the artists turned to more commercial outlets for their art, such as portraiture.59 Hardie, Scottish Painting, 83. However, it was still at its height in 1894, when George Henry produced works such as The Milliner’s Window (c. 1894; fig. 7). This snapshot of a female flaneur combines the subject matter and unexpected viewpoint of Degas with the tonal harmonies of Whistler and the brilliant decorative color of Monticelli. Richard Muther had made this point in the 1890s, and the artist, curator, and writer Stanley Cursiter would later confirm it. The Glasgow painters, observed Cursiter, “were not content with the appeal of romance or sentiment or even the impressionism which was a loyal record of nature, unless these qualities were combined with decorative values.”60 Stanley Cursiter, James Paterson 1854–1932, memorial exhibition, Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, n.d., cited in Hamilton, Joseph Crawhall, 28. That is not to say that this decorative impulse should exclude them from the British impressionist canon; it simply distinguishes them from the London impressionists. As this historical account has detailed, this decorative impulse was already evident in some of the Bastien-Lepage–inspired and Whistleresque work produced by the Boys in the mid- to late 1880s. By the 1890s decorative impressionism had become the hallmark of their style.
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Description: The Milliner's Window by Henry, George
Fig. 7. George Henry, The Milliner’s Window, c. 1894. Oil on canvas, 89 × 54 cm. Private collection.
In conclusion, therefore, this essay makes a case for the Glasgow Boys’ inclusion in the canon of British impressionism since, not only did they engage with modern-life subjects, they also observed and absorbed some of the methods of French impressionists such as Degas and Monet, as well as those closely associated with the group, among them Manet and De Nittis. For almost a decade, from the mid-1880s onward, leading members of the Glasgow School practiced their own particular brand of decorative impressionism, characterized by a brilliant palette and mosaic-like brushwork. In their day they were internationally celebrated, and they deserve such recognition once again. Yet, while critics and art historians continue to downplay the contribution of the Glasgow Boys to the global history of impressionism, they will continue to remain little known beyond the borders of Scotland.
 
1      See Kenneth McConkey, British Impressionism (Oxford: Phaidon, 1989); and Kenneth McConkey, Impressionism in Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). On the Glasgow Boys, see Roger Billcliffe, The Glasgow Boys (London: Francis Lincoln, 2008); and Roger Billcliffe, ed., Pioneering Painters: The Glasgow Boys (Glasgow: Glasgow Museums, 2010). I am also indebted to Professor McConkey for his feedback on this essay. »
2      Anna Gruetzner Robins, “British Impressionism: The Magic and Poetry of Life around Them,” in World Impressionism: The International Movement, 1860–1920, ed. Norma Broude (New York: Abrams, 1994). It is worth noting that in her 2007 publication, A Fragile Modernism, Robins rejected the blanket term “British Impressionism,” since it “assumes that no distinctions were made between one kind of new painting and another,” and adopted Moore’s more neutral expression “modern painting.” See Anna Gruetzner Robins, A Fragile Modernism: Whistler and His Impressionist Followers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 177–79. »
3      Robins, “British Impressionism,” 91. »
4      Robins, “British Impressionism,” 81, 83. »
5      On Scottish impressionism, see Frances Fowle, Impressionism and Scotland (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2008). »
6      R. A. M. Stevenson, “The Lesson of Impressionism,” in Velasquez (London: G. Bell, 1912), 124. »
7      James Caw, “A Phase of Scottish Art,” Art Journal 20 (1894): 75. »
8      Caw, “Phase of Scottish Art,” 75. Caw goes so far as to claim that McTaggart had developed his own brand of impressionism “before the Frenchmen.” Caw was later director of the National Galleries of Scotland and the author of Scottish Painting Past and Present, 1620–1908 (Edinburgh: T. C. and E. C. Jack, 1908). »
9      On the market for French nineteenth-century painting in Scotland, see Frances Fowle, Van Gogh’s Twin: The Glasgow Art Dealer Alexander Reid (1854–1928) (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2010). »
10      Richard Muther, The History of Modern Painting (London: J. M. Dent, 1907), 4:41. »
11      Richard Muther, Geschichte der Malerei (Berlin: Neufeld und Henius, 1912), 3:378. »
12      Richard Muther, The History of Modern Painting (London: Henry, 1896), 3:688. »
13      James Caw, William McTaggart: A Biography (Glasgow: James Maclehose, 1917), 100. »
14      Caw, William McTaggart, 100. »
15      George Moore, Modern Painting (London: Walter Scott, 1893), 96. »
16      Camille Mauclair, L’impressionnisme, son histoire, son ésthetique et ses maîtres (Paris: Librairie de l’art ancien et moderne, 1904), 210. According to Mauclair, “En Amérique, l’influence [de l’impressionnisme] a été moins sensible, ainsi qu’en Angleterre: le regretté John Lewis-Brown a été imbu de Degas et de Monet, tandis que des personnalités comme celles de M. Dannat, M. Alexander, de MM. Lavery et Guthrie, sont inspirées de Whistler, qui fut le compagnon de la première heure des impressionnistes sans partager leurs idées.” »
17      Mauclair, L’impressionnisme, 210. Here and elsewhere, unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine. Mauclair also included Lionel Walden (1861–1933), Frederick Carl Frieseke (1874–1939), and James Wilson Morrice (1865–1924) in his list of those directly influenced by impressionism. »
18      Léonce Bénédite oversaw the purchase of Lavery’s self-portrait Father and Child in 1900 and also acquired Lavery’s Spring in 1904. »
19      Frances Fowle, Van Gogh’s Twin, 70–73. In 1895 Reid, in collaboration with the art dealer Charles Kurtz, organized the transport of the Glasgow Boys’ paintings to the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis—and on to Chicago, Cincinnati, Pennsylvania, and New York—and to the Pittsburgh Carnegie International the following year. »
20      The Glasgow Boys were also regular exhibitors at the New English Art Club. On this, see Kenneth McConkey, The New English: A History of the New English Art Club (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2006). »
21      On the London impressionists, see Robins, Fragile Modernism»
22      Anna Gruetzner Robins, “The Greatest Artist the World Has Ever Seen,” in Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec, London and Paris 1870–1910, ed. Anna Gruetzner Robins and Richard Thomson (London: Tate, 2005), 84. »
23      Sir George Reid, Westminster Gazette, February 4, 1893. See also W. B. Richmond, “French Impressionism and Its Influence on British Art,” in Transactions of the National Association for the Advancement of Art and Its Application to Industry, Edinburgh Meeting, 1889 (London: 22 Albemarle Street, 1890), 98–109. »
24      D. S. MacColl, Saturday Review, October 1, 1904, cited in Vivien Hamilton, Joseph Crawhall: One of the Glasgow Boys (London: John Murray, 1990), 57. »
25      Moore, Modern Painting, 207. Moore mistakenly titles this work Midsummer»
26      See Frances Fowle, “La délicieuse couleur décorative: Van Gogh, Alexander Reid et L’influence de Monticelli en Ecosse,” in Van Gogh–Monticelli (Marseilles: Centre de la Vieille Charité, 2008), 103–27; and Frances Fowle, “Souvenirs and Fêtes Champêtres: William Allan Coats’s Collection of Nineteenth-Century French Paintings,” Journal of the Scottish Society for Art History 14 (2009): 63–70. »
27      Fowle, Van Gogh’s Twin, 63–64. »
28      A. Stodart Walker, “The Portraits of Sir George Reid RSA,” International Studio 46 (March–June 1912): 174. Significantly, Sir James Guthrie, to whom Walker sat for his own portrait, was excepted from this group. »
29      See Alastair Sooke’s review in the Telegraph, in which he describes the Glasgow Boys’ work as “pretty, but tame.” Alastair Sooke, “Pioneering Painters: The Glasgow Boys 1880–1900, Royal Academy, Review,” Telegraph, November 1, 2010, https://bit.ly/2BmQp38. By contrast Stefan Kuiper, in de Volkskrant, commented, “There is little to criticize in this exhibition. It is excellent. High quality selection of works” (“Op die expositie valt weinig ann te merken; die is prima. Hoogwardige selectie”). Stefan Kuiper, “Hoogwaardige selectie Glasgow Boys in Drents Museum,” de Volkskrant (October 2, 2015), https://bit.ly/3hnv7So»
30      Fowle, Van Gogh’s Twin, 59. »
31      Walter Shaw Sparrow, John Lavery and His Work (London: Keagan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1911), 41. »
32      William Hardie, Scottish Painting, 1837 to the Present (London: Studio Vista, 1990), 83. »
33      Pauvre fauvette was published in the Art Journal and the Magazine of Art in 1882. »
34      Sir John Lavery, The Life of a Painter (Boston: Little, Brown, 1940), 44. »
35      Lavery, Life of a Painter, 241. »
36      Lavery, Life of a Painter, 241. »
37      Lavery, Life of a Painter, 45. »
38      Kenneth McConkey, John Lavery: A Painter and His World (Edinburgh: Atelier, 2010), 20. »
39      Sparrow, John Lavery and His Work, 48. »
40      This visit is recorded in Anne Mackie’s journal, housed at the National Library of Scotland; see Belinda Thomson, “Patrick Geddes’s ‘Clan d’Artistes’: Some Elusive French Connections,” in Patrick Geddes: The French Connection, ed. Frances Fowle and Belinda Thomson (Oxford: White Cockade, 2004), 56. Mauclair reviewed the Manet show for the Art Journal: Camille Mauclair, “Edouard Manet,” Art Journal (September 1895): 274–79. »
41      Agnes E. Mackay, Arthur Melville, Scottish Impressionist, 1855–1904 (Leigh-on-Sea: F. Lewis, 1951), 66. »
42      Fowle, Impressionism and Scotland, 47. »
43      Frank Rutter, “Impressionism as a Word in the Vocabulary of Art Criticism,” in Art in My Time (London: Rich and Cowan, 1933), 57–58. »
44      Walter Sickert, “Introduction to the Catalogue of the London Impressionists Exhibition, Goupil Galleries, December 1889,” in Philip Wilson Steer, ed. D. S. MacColl (London: Faber and Faber, 1945), 176. »
45      McConkey, John Lavery: A Painter, 35–36. »
46      James McNeill Whistler, “Mr Whistler’s ‘Ten O’Clock,’” in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890; repr., London: Heinemann, 1936), 159. »
47      In Nineteenth-Century Art (Glasgow: J. Maclehose, 1902), for example, D. S. MacColl grouped Manet, Whistler, and Degas under the heading “realism,” whereas Monet was discussed in a chapter on “impressionism.” »
48      On Japonisme in Britain, see Ayako Ono, Japonisme in Britain (London: Routledge, 2006). »
49      Presented to the Hunterian Art Gallery and the university in 1935 and 1954 by his ward, Rosalind Birnie Philip. »
50      I have argued this elsewhere in Fowle, Impressionism and Scotland. See also Hugh Stevenson, “Modern Life,” in Billcliffe, Pioneering Painters, 76–89. »
51      Walton exhibited other titles such as A Morning Outing and A Suburban Villa at the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolour in 1885 and 1886. See Billcliffe, Glasgow Boys, 127. »
52      Lavery, Life of a Painter, 49; The Builder, May 15, 1886, cited in Kenneth McConkey, Sir John Lavery (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1993), 46. »
53      McConkey, John Lavery: A Painter, 34. »
54      McConkey, John Lavery: A Painter, 52. McConkey also points to the influence of Sargent, whose A Morning Walk and St. Martin’s Summer were on view at the New English Art Club and compared to Monet by the critic for the Times. See unsigned review, Times, April 18, 1889, 8, cited in Impressionists in England: the Critical Reception, ed. Kate Flint (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 310. »
55      See K. McConkey and C. Topsfield, Arthur Melville: Adventures in Colour (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2015), 65–82. »
56      Caw, “Phase of Scottish Art,” 77. »
57      The painting was deaccessioned by the Munich Pinakothek. »
58      Moore, Modern Painting, 206. »
59      Hardie, Scottish Painting, 83. »
60      Stanley Cursiter, James Paterson 1854–1932, memorial exhibition, Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, n.d., cited in Hamilton, Joseph Crawhall, 28. »
11. British Impressionism and the Glasgow Boys
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