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Published: 28 October 2010
by JOHN EVANS

Visitors to the Glasgow Boys will see a great celebration of culture dating from the final two decades of the 19th century but will search in vain for gritty scenes of a hard industrial life which provided their city with its pulse.

A modern industrialist and entrepreneur headed the group who organised the exhibition at Glasgow Museums, where it  broke attendance records at the Kelvingrove gallery, and brought it to London in association with the Royal Academy.

Lord Macfarlane, himself a collector and enthusiast for the work of “the Boys”, gave an insight into what drove the second city of Empire and its wealth. “The Boys,” he said “were pioneering and proud of the great business­men… and both had substantial creative abilities and instincts.” 

So the backing was there for an adventurous modern art, the avant-garde.

These young pioneering painters, comprising a core of a dozen or so but up to twice that number in all, pushed the boundaries against the Edinburgh-based Scottish art establishment of the day, a loose-knit, group who were to establish an international reputation for realism and “plein-air” painting. The group burst on the scene at the 1885 Glasgow Institute exhibition and their impact spread across Europe and beyond to America.

Some 80 works feature, watercolours and pastels in addition to the oils, among the most innovative and experimental of the period from Britain.

Leading members represented include John Lavery, James Guthrie, Arthur Melville, George Henry, Edward Atkinson Hornel, Joseph Crawhall, James Paterson, William Kennedy, Thomas Millie Dow, Edward Arthur Walton and William York Macgregor.

The Boys’ work is seen in the context of developments in France and elsewhere in the 1870s and 1880s. For example, the Belfast-born Lavery, acknowledged his “…debt to French teaching” regarding his memorable work, The Tennis Party, of 1885. 

That debt he put down inn part to having once met Jules Bastien-Lepage who advised him always to carry a sketch-book, choose a person and put down what was remembered, but never to look twice. Lavery later wrote: “From that day on I became obsessed with figures in movement, which resulted finally in the Tennis Party and drew attention to what became known as The Glasgow School.”

There were a host of other influences in addition to the Naturalist Bastien-Lepage, and these included Jean-François Millet, and James McNeill Whistler “regarded as the greatest artist of the day” said Lavery, though he noted “…we at Glasgow worked with a richer palette”.

The exhibition follows the development of ideas and tech­niques with the Boys working out of Glasgow “in pursuit of nature” at St Andrews, Nairn, Brig O’Turk, Kirkcudbright Cockburnspath and elsewhere. Shifting alliances, collaborations and friendships drew them together.

Powerful works resulted from unsentimental depictions of the poor, field workers and rural scenes, experiments with design, space and light. Guthrie and Crawhall ventured south to Crowland in Lincolnshire and five members worked at the colony of Grez-sur-Loing, outside Paris, where they rubbed shoulders with artists from Scandinavia, America and even Japan. There are also nods to more commercial scenes from suburban life.  

Other highlights of the show include later works such as George Henry’s A Galloway Landscape of 1889 – compared to the work of Gauguin – and his truly remarkable collaborative painting with Hornel, The Druids – Bringing in the Mistletoe of 1890, with innovative use of gold leaf and embossing in search of the spirit of a Celtic past.

The two would later travel to Japan. And the results of the Boys’ travels are also seen in such works as Dow’s oil of the Hudson River 1884 and technically brilliant watercolours by Melville from his regular trips to Spain and north Africa, notably a view of the Basque port of Passages and a bullfighting scene. 

• Pioneering Painters: The Glasgow Boys 1880-1900 is at the Royal Academy of Arts, Piccadilly, from October 30-January 23, £9, www.royalacademy.org.uk