The Scottish Colourists and the Royal Scottish Academy

I am looking forward to giving the paper ‘Complete Impotent Senility: The Scottish Colourists and the Royal Scottish Academy’ at the Scottish Society for Art History and Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) conference ‘Scottish Art and the Academy‘. It is being held to celebrate the RSA’s bicentenary and will take place in-person in Edinburgh on the 5 and 6 February 2006.

‘Complete impotent senility’

In John Duncan Fergusson’s book Modern Scottish Painting, published in 1943, he decried the ‘complete impotent senility of the RSA’. His stance as a champion of the independent artist ‘liberated from the strangle-hold of Academic Art’ is in complete contrast to that of his fellow Colourist, Samuel John Peploe, who was an award-winning student at the RSA Life School, was elected an ARSA in 1918, became a full member in 1927 and received a Memorial Exhibition as part of the 1936 Annual Exhibition; moreover, he served three terms as a Visitor to the RSA School of Painting. He presented Boy Reading, seen above, to the Academy’s Diploma Collection on attainment of full academician status.

‘Olive branches gripped between their teeth’

Situated between these two extremes are the remaining members of the Colourist quartet, F. C. B. Cadell and George Leslie Hunter. As a result, this particularly well-known group of modern Scottish artists embody a wide range of attitudes towards the RSA. Cadell overlapped briefly with Peploe as a student at the RSA Life School, was represented in the Annual Exhibitions regularly for over thirty years, was elected
ARSA in 1931 and became a full Member in 1936. His proposals were not without controversy however and after failures on several occasions up to 1920 he declared ‘I shall consent to have my name on the Nomination List again when the President leads the whole Council crawling on their hands and knees round … to my door, with olive branches gripped between their teeth.’ His death the year following the achievement of full RSA status was made all the more tragic by the discovery of an uncashed cheque for £50 from the Academy’s Alexander Nasmyth Fund amongst his effects, to which he had had to apply due to ‘failure of purchases’ and ‘death of Patrons.’ HIs painting The Poet was presented to the Academy’s Diploma Collection in 1937.

The Royal Glasgow Institute

Glasgow-based Hunter had the least connection with the RSA, with sporadic appearances in the annual exhibitions between 1915 and 1930, probably arranged by his dealers in the city, Alexander Reid, A. J. McNeill Reid and Tom Honeyman. Reflecting this geographical difference compared to Peploe and Cadell who lived in Edinburgh, Hunter was much more closely involved with the RSA’s ‘rival’ in the west, the Royal Glasgow Institute, with whom he exhibited virtually every year between 1916 and 1936. His opinion of the RSA does not seem to be very high: when he praised Peploe’s solo exhibition at The Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh in 1923 Hunter said that it ‘looked very fine after the insipid stuff at the academy’.

A Landmark Exhibition

Finally, the RSA’s mounting of a major exhibition of the work of Cadell, Hunter and Peploe – who all died during the 1930s – in 1949 was the first time the artists were presented together in a public as opposed to a private gallery. It included Hunter’s A Summer Day, Largo, Cadell’s Interior: The Orange Blind and Peploe’s The Brown Crock, all seen here. It was also the first time the trio were shown together in the country of their birth. The lenders of the 122 paintings reads like a role call of the artists’ most loyal patrons, friends and relatives, as well as their most supportive dealers and the public collections who had the foresight to acquire their work when it was relatively new. The exhibition was widely covered in the press and is recognised as a milestone in the establishment of the posthumous reputation of the three artists in Scottish art history as well as their inter-relationship, issues which are being strengthened and challenged to this day.

Established in 1826

Come and hear about the Scottish Colourists and the Royal Scottish Academy at the conference. Over two days it will celebrate, explore and interrogate the RSA’s history since it was established in 1826 and will showcase new research on artists connected to it. The conference also aims to cast an enquiring eye over the idea of the Academy and its ‘official’ status, looking at those who may have been excluded from it or reacted against it at different times. For more information click on this link and to book tickets, go to this page.

For more about the Scottish Colourists, you might be interested in this news, you might enjoy listening to this talk recording and you might like to read this post.