Download a PDF of the exhibition catalogue - The Scottish Gallery

the taste of
JW Blyth

The Taste
of JW BLYTH
4 – 28 JULY 2012
CONTENTS
FOREWORD 1
THE taste OF JW BLYTH
Origins and beginnings 2
Collecting 5
Themes and motivations 17
Vale 22
CATALOGUE 24
16 Dundas Street, Edinburgh EH3 6HZ
Tel 0131 558 1200 Email mail@scottish-gallery.co.uk
Web www.scottish-gallery.co.uk

Foreword
Michael Portillo
I knew my grandfather John Waldegrave Blyth only when I was a child, and my only recollections of him are childish.
He was fond of his grandchildren and he played with us well, especially when we went to the linen factory (disused by
then) and he could wheel us around on the trolleys that had once moved product.
I have a clearer memory of his lifestyle than of him. My family’s home was a semi-detached in suburban London,
so my grandparents’ generously proportioned Wilby House in Kirkcaldy seemed to us a mansion, and its gardens a
vast playground. When we descended wearily from the overnight train from London, having spent the night in its
cheapest seats, a chauffeur in double-breasted coat, peaked cap and massive driving gloves, was there to whisk us in the
monogrammed Daimler to breakfast. Like other meals it was announced with a gong, and the table was laid with silver
cruets and sugar shakers, and stiff linen napkins.
Even then, the paintings were what most drew my naïve attention. I was struck by their subject matter: intensely
colourful flowers in vases; images that disintegrated as you came too close, but that magically revealed cows, houses and
fields as you withdrew; and children cowering on a beach being battered by wind and surf.
One of my ordeals was going to bed, because on the stairs hung the largest of the William McTaggarts, with the
youngsters who were evidently about to perish. More than that, with their heavy frames the pictures were amongst the
biggest objects I had ever seen, and I feared being crushed if they fell. I had to steel myself and then scamper by.
Luckily, my acquaintance with John Blyth’s collection did not end on the sad day that my brothers and
I accompanied my mother to clear out Wilby House following his death. My grandmother Alice May Blyth moved to be
close to us in the suburbs, sharing a house there with my aunts. She brought with her some of the outstanding Peploes,
Fergussons, McTaggarts, Wingates, Sickerts and Boudins. Rarely can such a modest dwelling have sheltered such a fine
and valuable collection. Certainly there was not room there even for the small number of works that remained with the
family, and so some superb pieces graced my parents’ walls too.
We were fortunate, too, that a large part of the collection passed to the Kirkcaldy art gallery where my
grandfather had been curator for 36 years. On many occasions when other business takes me to Scotland I make the
detour to re-visit those paintings, and I know that other family members do the same.
It is difficult for me to judge John Blyth’s taste because it has so deeply influenced my own. In my youth art was
what he had collected. Before I went much to galleries I lived amongst outstanding examples of Scottish, English and
French painting from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Reviewing his purchases over many years it is clear that John Blyth had a passionate commitment to Scottish
artists. He collected them, befriended them and fought for them to be recognised. The Scottish Colourists, and many
Scottish artists who have appeared since, are widely acclaimed today and their work is instantly recognisable to a broad
discerning public. So it is hard to grasp that during my grandfather’s lifetime Scottish painters struggled to be taken
seriously. I like to think that he made a contribution to the radical change of perception that has occurred since his death.
Evidently, John Blyth was sometimes in the vanguard of taste. The Peploes that he bought are worth a fortune
now, and the Sickerts and Boudins command high prices. But, having enjoyed the Wingates, McTaggarts and Alexanders
over half a century, I am sorry that they are today less appreciated. This exhibition enables us to consider the so-called
lesser works that drew his discerning eye, and perhaps to re-evaluate them free from considerations of art fashion.
My family has had the extraordinary privilege of living with beautiful paintings thanks to John Blyth. The joy that
these pictures bring will now pass to others, which is a happy thought. My grandfather’s motives for collecting seem to
have been genuinely selfless. Nonetheless I hope that he would be cheered, or at least not annoyed, to know that fifty
years after his death an exhibition celebrates his taste and his advocacy of Scottish painting.
Left: Jack Blyth on board John Nairn’s yacht
1

The Taste of JW Blyth
Peter Arkell and Guy Peploe
Origins and beginnings
John Waldegrave Blyth (1873–1962) was a Kirkcaldy linen manufacturer with a passion
for art collecting that began in his early thirties. By the time of his death he owned 237
paintings including 84 by Samuel John Peploe (1871–1935) and 45 by William McTaggart
(1835–1910). There were also 24 works by Walter Richard Sickert (1860–1942),
examples by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875), Eugène Boudin (1824–98) and
Édouard Vuillard (1868–1940), an L.S. Lowry (1887–1976), a Matthew Smith (1879–
1959) and many more. The first paintings were bought in 1909 and he was still buying six
years before his death. A large part of the collection is now in the Kirkcaldy Art Gallery,
but a very significant portion was retained, and the exhibition which accompanies this
publication represents the last works held by the family. It is more than fitting that this
exhibition takes place at The Scottish Gallery from where so much of the collection was
bought and with whom Blyth enjoyed such a long and fruitful relationship. His faith in
The Scottish Gallery over fifty years and four generations of senior partners and staff
and the access the gallery provided to great works of art speak of an unusually strong
and fruitful relationship between a gallery and a collector. The story of his collection
and his developing passion for art spans two world wars, the Depression and the struggle
in Scotland to identify a national school and establish institutions to best represent
Scottish art.
The family was of Fife origin, and his grandfather, John, moved to Kirkcaldy
in the early 1830s and became involved in the linen business. Flax was imported from
Germany and the Low Countries and improvements to the harbour in the mid-nineteenth
century greatly enhanced Kirkcaldy’s ability to import jute and flax and export coal and
manufactured products. Linen manufacture had been established in 1672 but was little
more than a cottage industry on the outskirts of the town. By the end of the century John
Blyth’s grandfather was able to build the Hawklymuir Factory on Park Road and was in
charge of a substantial, profitable business.
Blyth’s father left the firm in the 1850s and moved to Lincolnshire to work in a
bakery; bakers were a major market for linen products and this may well have been the
connection, but for our story most importantly it was here that he met and married
Elizabeth Waldegrave. The family returned to Kirkcaldy in the 1870s, drawn back into
the fold of the family business, and John, the eldest of four brothers and one sister, was
sent to be educated at the Kirkcaldy High School. Aged 18, John Waldegrave Blyth left
school and took up a position as a travelling salesman in the family firm.
Their firm’s fortunes were based on demand created for linen goods for use in
the British military for the defence of the Empire, and procurement contracts for the
First World War led to a period of prosperity which coincided with Blyth’s burgeoning
interest in art. However the introduction of cotton into Europe, and especially the
series of late-eighteenth-century inventions that enabled it to be spun strongly and
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elevation plan to
Wilby house, 1909
to be produced cheaply, eventually put an end to the mass consumption of linen.
from the 1930s the hawklymuir factory become gradually less profitable, especially
after the arrival of man-made fibres, and the firm eventually closed down in 1961.
John Blyth, known as ‘Jack’ in adult life, married alice May lowe from
Manchester in 1908 and the following year he inherited a plot of land from his father on
loughborough Road, Kirkcaldy and commissioned an architect to design Wilby house.
the house had large windows and high ceilings typical of large edwardian homes built in
abundance during this period in edinburgh and Glasgow. the marriage was to produce
three daughters: Dorothy, Margery and Cora. Cora, the youngest daughter, went on to
marry a refugee from franco’s spain called luis Gabriel Portillo, a Professor of Civic
law and prominent Republican. they provided several grandsons for John and alice, the
youngest of whom is Michael.
Jack Blyth had no artistic training whatsoever apart from in music. he regularly
played the organ in the Dysart Parish Church and always had the capacity to be
emotionally stirred by music or great art. his parents had no pictures apart from two
lithographs of their own portraits.
although it is not known what sparked off Blyth’s love of art, there were plenty
of opportunities in early twentieth-century Glasgow and edinburgh for him to form his
tastes; and he was not alone. a number of collectors with fortunes made in manufacture
and shipping were beginning their collections, most notably William Burrell, whose
collection eventually came to be housed in the eponymous gallery as part of Glasgow
Museums. others such as William McInnes, D.W.t. Cargill and leonard Gow were
friends and rivals assembling significant collections of British and continental art. John
Nairn was another collector from Kirkcaldy whose substantial linoleum manufacturing
business was the town’s largest employer. his daughter married Robert Wemyss
honeyman who also became an important collector in his own right and another patron
of s.J. Peploe as well as a friend of Jack Blyth. this market was in part created and
3

serviced by two discerning dealers: Alexander (‘Alex’) Reid, who in 1889 opened his
gallery in Glasgow, La Société des Beaux-Arts; and in Edinburgh the firm of Aitken
Dott. Reid, who had shared rooms with Vincent van Gogh in Paris when he was learning
the trade with Vincent’s brother Theo, was a persuasive and charismatic gallerist who
established a family business which eventually left Glasgow to form Reid & Lefèvre in
London, where it trades still today.
Aitken Dott opened his art business in May 1842 in Edinburgh and it was his
son Peter McOmish Dott who developed the business as a picture dealer by opening
The Scottish Gallery in 1896. Blyth formed a stronger relationship with this firm than
with any other dealer, and the majority of pictures acquired over his long life were
bought from The Scottish Gallery. His first major purchase of a work by McTaggart, Away
to the West, was from an exhibition held in the Castle Street premises in 1910, the year
of the artist’s death. The first work by Peploe, Town in Brittany, was purchased in 1915
from Reid’s gallery in Glasgow. Blyth was able to visit Glasgow and Edinburgh at least
one or two times a week as a travelling salesman for the family firm; he visited London
about twice a year. His daughter Margery remembered that ‘he would hardly ever go to
London without returning with a picture or two.’
Describing her father as ‘extrovert and popular but contented in his own
home’, Margery remembered his strong and ‘very Scottish’ emotions for music and art:
‘He would weep at a touch but also be adamant.’ Lillian Browse, who supplied Blyth with
a number of Sickerts in the 1940s, also used the word ‘adamant’ to describe his character.
She remembered distinctly his ‘Raeburn head’, and spoke of his passion for art: ‘He used
to lick his lips in front of a painting as if it were a huge feast.’ She talked of his great sense
of fun and recalled that he was very ‘touchy’ about the London dealers’ attitudes to the
Scottish artists. Never an easy client, he was strong minded and liked to haggle over
prices in order to secure bargains. Margery remembered that ‘he used to groan heavily
when he had to write a cheque’.
Blyth never ventured across the Channel in pursuit of pictures. He would have
seen works by Degas, Manet and Cézanne at Alex Reid’s gallery in Glasgow before
the Great War, but at that time was not tempted. He was never able to compete with
collectors such as Burrell, who could afford to spend £6,500 on a Degas in 1926, but nor
was competition with rival collectors his motivation. He had very strong and particular
taste – taste which did develop. For example, he began to collect Sickert in earnest
in the 1940s, but not at the expense of his advocacy for McTaggart; when McTaggart
prices fell in the depressed years of the Second World War, Blyth saw opportunities for
new purchases rather than bemoaning his lack of judgment in paying so much before.
The most expensive item Blyth ever purchased was White Surf by McTaggart for £1,050
in 1920 from The Scottish Gallery. W.J. Macaulay, director of The Scottish Gallery in
the 1960s, recalled that Blyth actually had to sell his car in order to buy his first work
by McTaggart, although this was a period of relative prosperity for Blyth. His love of a
bargain may well have been the motivation for some of his purchases, and the works by
Vuillard, Corot and Boudin that were added to his collection at a relatively late stage
were certainly bought advantageously.
As a natural extension to his interest in art he was drawn into public life and
became closely identified with the development of the Kirkcaldy Art Gallery. In February
1925 he was appointed the Gallery’s first convenor, a position which he occupied for the
rest of his life. He was made chairman of the Scottish Modern Arts Association (SMAA),
an organisation set up in 1907 to buy pieces to form the nucleus of a national collection
of modern work. His knowledge and his passion as a collector made him a natural choice
as a trustee of the National Gallery of Scotland in 1944.
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Collecting
Blyth kept a simple record of his purchases from 1910 to 1956 in a single ‘address book’.
the artists’ names are listed in alphabetical order, with the sizes and purchase prices
of their works. he did not record the dates of any works or the dates when they were
purchased. fortunately he also kept a large number of purchase receipts and letters from
dealers and these have been an invaluable record of the range and scale of his collecting.
two hundred and ten pictures are documented with purchase dates and purchase receipts.
In December 1909, while still living in Mayview, sinclairtown, Kirkcaldy, his
home before Wilby house was built, Blyth spent almost thirty pounds at James Connell
& sons in Glasgow on a vast collection of items. It is probable that Blyth had the decoration
of his new home in mind when he bought these works, which were never recorded in his
purchase book and therefore not considered part of the collection.
for the next ten years Blyth confined his acquisitions almost exclusively to
the works of James lawton Wingate (1846–1924) and William Mctaggart. the level
of spending during this period was high: the average expenditure up until 1920 on
Mctaggart alone was £550 per year.
Jack and alice Blyth
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the years from 1918 up until the early 1920s were a boom period for the art
world and prices were considerably higher than they were to be again, relative to inflation,
until after Blyth’s death. Perception of value and the phases of the economic cycle would
not be irrelevant to Blyth, but he bought foremost what he loved, at prices which he
could at that moment afford. after 1920 Blyth’s expenditure rarely exceeded £1,000 in
one year and the greatest amount he spent on one work was to be £800 paid for La Porte
St Denis by W.R. sickert in 1951.
Wilby house was not large enough to hold his growing collection and as a solution
Blyth lent pictures to the Kirkcaldy art Gallery which had opened in 1925, the costs
funded by John Nairn in memory of his son killed in the first World War. Margery Blyth
recalled that her father thought of the Gallery as ‘a dumping ground of representative
pictures from his collection. they had a Boudin already bequeathed to the Gallery and
so he didn’t give them one.’ While the handsome rooms of the first floor did provide
a splendid annexe for his collection, there is no question that the health and eventual
further endowment of the Gallery was an important part of his thinking. Blyth visited the
Gallery at least every Monday morning throughout his life.
the second phase began in 1924, the year in which Blyth acquired his second
work by s.J. Peploe. the majority of pictures purchased up until 1939 were by either
Mctaggart or Peploe.
6

the hawcklymuir factory,
Kirkcaldy
Blyth was a man of firm likes and dislikes but he was prepared to take advice from
dealers he trusted. the most important figures in this respect were initially alex Reid and
Peter Mcomish Dott. Blyth bought consistently from the scottish Gallery in edinburgh,
which was run by George Proudfoot after Dott’s retirement during the first World War.
Peter Mcomish Dott was a great admirer and collector of the works of three
scottish landscape artists – James lawton Wingate, William Mctaggart and George
Paul Chalmers (1833–78) – and Blyth’s initial choices can be seen as influenced by
the advocacy of the dealer for these painters. this said, it was Dott who was the first
champion of Peploe, giving his first exhibition in 1903 and his second in 1909.
from 1906 onwards there were a number of Mctaggart exhibitions in both
Glasgow and edinburgh which Blyth would have had the opportunity to see. In 1906
there was an exhibition of pictures and drawings by the artist at la société des Beauxarts
in Glasgow, followed a year later by a show of his most recent pictures at the scottish
Gallery in edinburgh. ‘the most outstanding and memorable exhibition’, according to
sir James Caw, Mctaggart’s biographer and an influential critic, was brought together at
the scottish National exhibition in 1908.
as has been noted, Blyth’s first Mctaggart, Away to the West, was bought for £280
from Dott in edinburgh during 1910. It is possible that the first business contact between
alex Reid and Blyth is a letter written by Reid on 23rd June 1910. It reads: ‘If you care
to send me a cheque for £350 for the picture I will accept for the purpose of opening
with you.’ the transaction was not concluded and we can assume that the purchase from
the scottish Galley was made in preference.
Blyth had thus made contact with the two most influential dealers in scotland,
and was willing to spend relatively large sums on the work of William Mctaggart.
his confidence can in part be put down to the growth in the importance of the dealer as
a necessary link between the artist and the collector in scotland. the increasing wealth
of the rising mercantile classes had provided a new source of patronage for artists, but it
was a patronage of a different kind from that which had gone before. the old contractual
system between the well-educated, well-travelled and leisured man of property and the
artist was becoming less common. the new men of wealth were middle-class businessmen
like Blyth who responded to the service provided by the dealers and actively sought their
advice and expertise in the formation of their collections. the increase in the number
7

of enlightened collectors was paralleled by an increase in the number of artists working
in Scotland and in the number of works which they produced. It was the dealers who
brought these two groups together and provided an outlet for the artists’ work.
In Glasgow, La Société des Beaux-Arts at 232 West George Street represented
the ‘Glasgow Boys’, putting on exhibitions for Edward Atkinson Hornel (1864–1933),
George Henry (1858–1943) and Joseph Crawhall (1861–1913), and as early as 1891 an
exhibition was held of the works of Degas and other Post-Impressionists. In 1906 Reid
took up McTaggart and, according to Caw, ‘put up prices at once by trying to secure
almost every fine picture by that painter which “came on the market”.’ Two letters, the
first written on 2nd February 1911 by Reid and the second written on 21st February
the same year by George Proudfoot, Peter McOmish Dott’s partner in The Scottish
Gallery, illustrate the different approaches by the two dealers and also demonstrate the
competition for business between the two galleries. Both dealers were interested in
selling works by McTaggart entitled Cornfields to Blyth. The picture in The Scottish Gallery
is documented as being 52 by 35 inches. The picture in Glasgow is referred to in George
Proudfoot’s letter: ‘Mr Reid’s snow picture is 54 by 35 inches and is in a rather heavier
frame than our picture.’ Reid demands ‘promised payment’ and a picture by George
Houston for his painting: ‘You are remembering you promised me £50 at Martinmas.
Also I would very much like to have the Houston now.’ Proudfoot, in contrast, is more
sympathetic to Blyth’s position: ‘You are quite right not to decide about the McTaggart
too hurriedly. It is an important purchase and one you should be sure about.’
The outcome of the competition is documented in a purchase receipt of 3rd
April 1911, from The Scottish Gallery: Cornfields Midlothian by McTaggart was sold to
Blyth for £285 along with the purchase of a landscape by George Houston. The difference
between the characters of the dealers is further illustrated in a letter dated June 1917,
from Reid to Blyth: ‘If you are serious in thinking about the Xmas Morning there is no use
in talking nonsense to us.’
McTaggart was born at Aros, by Machrihanish on the Mull of Kintyre in 1835
and came to Edinburgh when he was 16. He was one of a group of students that included
Hugh Cameron, George Reid, George Paul Chalmers and William Quiller Orchardson,
who studied under Robert Scott Lauder between 1852 and 1861. Under Lauder’s tuition,
the use of colour – particularly the use of different tones and gradations of light and
colour – was given equal emphasis to draughtsmanship.
McTaggart became a ‘Scottish Impressionist’, leaving behind the typically
Victorian subject matter and finely detailed technique apparent in his production until
the 1880s in favour of broad application of oil paint and sparkling landscapes made en
plein air, as much about light as location. It is not hard to see how these works would
have appealed to Blyth. At their best his paintings elicit a strong, emotional response akin
to orchestral music, quite apart from their ‘subject matter’ which became increasingly
irrelevant. Besides Turner there is no other example of a British painter with such
ambition, matched by sheer painterly ability, who is able to express his wonder in front
of his landscape subject and invest it with such power and universal relevance.
Stanley Cursiter pays tribute to Peter McOmish Dott, who was senior partner
by the time Blyth began to collect. He was a man ‘of fine taste, generous and warm
hearted and a real friend to many of the artists he encouraged and supported’. And this
sympathy must have won the trust of the young enthusiast. Dott was uniquely qualified to
introduce McTaggart, by then the grand old man of Scottish painting. In 1900 he agreed
to purchase 29 works by McTaggart for £5,000 and the pictures were subsequently
exhibited in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee. It is doubtful whether Blyth would have
seen this exhibition but Dott later sent Blyth the guide he had written, entitled Technical
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and Explanatory Notes on the Art of Mr William McTaggart as Displayed in his Exhibition of Thirtytwo
Pictures in 1901. The overall impression from the notes is expressed clearly by Dott
in his statement that ‘In Art, colour and light are certainly measures of higher faculties in
the artist than form.’ He commends McTaggart’s works to the untutored in painting for
their sheer ‘bonniness’. We cannot censure the salesman for his hagiography, but clearly
Dott’s passion for McTaggart was genuine, and such commendations supported Blyth’s
own judgement which was initially based on immediate appeal rather than analysis.
In 1954 Blyth wrote the introduction to an exhibition of works by McTaggart
at the Royal Scottish Academy. Blyth selected all the works for the exhibition, and
contributed 23 works from his collection, dating from Dora of 1866 to Cornfield, Sandy
Dean of 1905. He wrote: ‘McTaggart’s impressionism was inborn and spontaneous.
It was not influenced by any theories or dogmas, and he was unaware of the movement
in France.’ Blyth also dwells on McTaggart’s background and education: ‘Whence came
that talent is a mystery … this lad from a croft at the extreme corner of the Mull of
Kintyre pursued his own course and became the first and foremost Impressionist painter
in Scotland.’ Likewise Blyth had no artistic background, and where his fascination for
art came from is equally a mystery. Thus there were close links between the artist and
collector which Blyth perhaps was aware of and enjoyed.
McTaggart’s most ambitious and monumental works can still be read as genre or
history painting, but his figures are increasingly subsumed into the landscape, as Blyth
himself notes:
McTaggart’s use of figures in his composition is one of the most fascinating
features of his art. They are always part of the impression. In some cases
the impression is a strong one, in others it is more fleeting, or it may be
so slight that the figures appear only as notes of lovely colour.
The handling is vital and there is a great, raw energy perhaps at its most dramatic
when McTaggart paints the sea exemplified in Blyth’s most expensive acquisition, White
Surf of 1908, purchased in 1920. The artist can work as successfully on a heroic or tiny
scale, and the subtle play of light on broken water is beautifully handled in many small
works such as Sunset at Machrihanish (page 33). Blyth recognised that the seascapes were
deemed more successful than the landscapes, writing: ‘McTaggart’s pictures of the sea
are the most wonderful ever painted, and his supremacy in this branch of art is apt to
minimise the interest in his landscapes.’
As well as works by McTaggart, Blyth consistently bought works by James
Lawton Wingate. If McTaggart is a Scots Turner then Wingate has to be considered a petit
maître who owes his vision to Corot and the French painters of the Barbizon School. Blyth
did not include work of the nineteenth-century Hague School, which was immensely
popular with Scottish collectors and influential on the landscapes and genre works of
many senior Academicians such as Robert Macgregor and Robert Gemmell Hutchison.
He was not interested in genre painting per se but more drawn to depictions of the natural
world, which might contain an element of sentimentality, but are essentially truthful to
their subject. In this sense Wingate’s ability to capture a time of day within a season
and (sometimes) to include a working horse or a labourer chimed with his own sense
of emotional engagement with the Scottish landscape. Today perhaps we can see more
clearly how McTaggart was able to tap into universal emotions, while Wingate seems
to belong to an essentially nineteenth-century vision untouched by modernism; but his
ability to render a time and place cannot be dismissed. Typically loyal and consistent,
Blyth certainly thought of his Wingate works as amongst his most treasured pictures:
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at the time of his death in 1962, six of them dominated the walls of his sitting room at
Wilby House. Another early favourite was Edwin Alexander (1870–1926), a naturalist
who worked exclusively in watercolour and gouache; his charming depictions of birds
like Blackbird (page 55) and animals and the gentle landscape of East Lothian might have
spoken to Blyth of his own boyhood in Fife and certainly chimed perfectly with his love
of nature.
There is no dominant theme in the collection; indeed with more than a third of
the entire holding being by one artist, S.J. Peploe, the idea of a theme falls away. In this
sense Blyth was modernist as a collector, both trusting his own judgment of quality against
a shifting canvas of definition and trusting also the painter, with whom he shared values.
It is George Proudfoot, who also was a keen collector of Peploe and a close friend
of Blyth, who can be credited with confirming Blyth on his epic decision to collect the
artist. The two men were of an age and temperamentally similar: Peploe was intensely
shy and Blyth respected his natural reticence and unwillingness to represent himself in
the public arena.
As has been noted, Peploe had begun to exhibit from 1903 with The Scottish
Gallery who had considerable success with the early work. The artist’s early influences
were the Realists and Symbolists of the late nineteenth century as well as Manet and
the Dutch School. His conversion to the way of colour and his own brand of Post-
Impressionism at first alienated Peter McOmish Dott when faced with the brilliant
fauvist panels he brought back from France in 1912. During the war years, with Peploe
established in a studio in Queen Street and making several extended painting trips to
the south-west of Scotland (where Jessie M. King and E.A. Taylor, his artist friends from
Paris, had settled in Kirkcudbright), The Scottish Gallery began to take work for sale.
After the war Peploe began to paint his distinctive, brilliantly coloured rose and tulip
still-lifes and both Proudfoot and Alex Reid recognised the arrival of a mature talent
with huge commercial potential. Exhibitions followed apace and Peploe accepted a joint
contract with the two galleries.
The first documented record of a link between the works of Peploe and Blyth the
collector is in a letter from Alex Reid to Blyth, dated 8th November 1915. Reid writes:
‘I think you ought to consider the Peploes more seriously than you seem to do.’ There
exists a receipt dated 15th November 1915, one week after the letter was written, for
a picture called Town in Brittany, bought from Reid’s gallery in Glasgow, for a price of
£12. This purchase coincides with the Peploe exhibition at Reid’s gallery in that month.
However the first recorded purchase by Blyth of a work by Peploe is in January 1924, for
Summer Day, Iona from The Scottish Gallery.
There are many possible reasons why Blyth did not begin to collect Peploe’s
works in earnest until after 1924. Firstly, we should take into account the rather sharp
tone of Reid’s correspondence; Blyth would have been used to this by now. In addition,
the fact that Peter McOmish Dott had refused to sell any of Peploe’s work after the
artist’s return from Paris in 1911, referring to him as ‘a lost soul’, is quite likely to have
discouraged Blyth from taking his work seriously in these early years. Besides, before
1920 Blyth’s interests were in large part restricted to landscape, and to McTaggart in
particular. The link between McTaggart’s art and the work of Peploe is often referred
to, however, and we can see Blyth’s ‘discovery’ of Peploe as a natural progression
(although a man with Blyth’s passion could only be an evangelist and his conversion to
Peploe became all-consuming). Stanley Cursiter wrote in his 1947 biography of Peploe:
‘The richness of pigmental content is a quality which they have in common … Peploe
had a high regard for McTaggart and one of his greatest regrets was that he never met
this fine artist.’ T.J. Honeyman, in his book Three Scottish Colourists, links McTaggart to
10

Peploe in terms of colour: ‘although these two painters may, at first glance seem poles
apart, they had the same basic appreciation of colour and of the importance of colour
context in their work.’
Blyth’s decision to collect the works of Peploe would have been strengthened by
the success of Peploe’s work when it was exhibited alongside that of his fellow scottish
Colourists George leslie hunter (1877–1931), francis Campbell Boileau Cadell (1883–
1937) and John Duncan fergusson (1874–1961) at the leicester Galleries in london
in January 1925. Peploe was particularly praised by W.R. sickert in the preface to the
exhibition catalogue:
Mr Peploe has carried a certain kind of delicious skill to a pitch of
virtuosity that might have led to more repetition, and his present
orientation has certainly been a kind of rebirth. he has transferred
his unit of attention from attenuated and exquisite gradations of tone
to no less skilfully related colour. and by relating all his lines with
frankness to the 180 degrees of two right angles, he is able to capture
and digest a wider field of vision than before. and time, as the poet sings,
is an important element in the gathering of roses. his volte-face has been
an intellectual progress. and it is probably for this reason that, obviously
beautiful as was Mr Peploe’s earlier quality, his present one will establish
itself as the more beautiful of the two.
11

letter from Margaret Peploe to Jack Blyth, post-marked 19th May 1936
12

Blyth’s conversion was certainly complete and in 1928 for the ‘Second
Inaugural Exhibition’ organised at the Kirkcaldy Art Gallery it was
decided to devote one room of 25 pictures to Peploe. Stanley Cursiter,
in his biography of the artist, states that this was ‘in a large measure due
to the convener J.W. Blyth and another member of the committee Mr R.
Wemyss Honeyman’. The reviews of the exhibition were good, especially
for Peploe.
However, apart from two Iona landscapes and a still-life, Blyth bought very few
pictures between 1926 and 1933 because of the Depression; if business had been better
(or indeed prices at that time lower) he would undoubtedly have bought more, earlier.
The pictures collected by Blyth up to his last purchase in 1956 show Peploe’s range in
still-life, landscapes, seascapes and a few figure subjects. He had ample opportunity to
fill in gaps from the periods before he began his purchases of new work, particularly
from the dealers’ inventories after the painter’s early death in 1935. This said, he lent
pictures for The Scottish Gallery’s 1936 Peploe Memorial Exhibition and contributed
an introduction to its catalogue, and it is clear from a letter of gratitude written to him
by the painter’s widow shortly afterwards that he was already recognised as a significant
collector of Peploe’s best work long before the artist’s death. Her letter refers to a rare
visit made to see the Blyths at Wilby House, and is testament to the Peploes’ appreciation
of the support Blyth’s patronage provided.
An early picture, A Street in Comrie of 1902, purchased by Blyth during the 1920s,
is a good example of the influence of French Impressionism and Sisley in particular.
The Lobster was bought in May 1937 and is a pre-eminent example of his early style.
However, the period that dominates the works by Peploe in Blyth’s collection is the last
phase, 1920–35. Once again it is not far-fetched to see in Peploe’s mature work a musical
parallel which would have appealed to Blyth on both an intellectual and emotional level.
In March 1941, in his introduction to the catalogue for a Peploe restrospective at the
National Gallery of Scotland, Stanley Cursiter wrote:
His concentration on still-life arose from the desire to have complete
control over conditions and circumstances. He could plan the limits of his
colour scheme and devise intermediate notes; the intensity and direction
of light; the form and pattern of his group. In this way Peploe’s work
became a form of visual music in which every note of colour took its
place in a melodic scheme, to which the setting or background presented
the harmony and the design pattern stated the tempo.
Blyth did not purchase a work by one of the three other Scottish Colourists until
1939. In total he collected only 11 works by these artists including the beautiful Paris-
Plage street scene (page 71) which, though on the small-panel pochard scale, is a key work
in J.D. Fergusson’s journey into modernism.
Blyth acquired two works by English painter Philip Wilson Steer (1860–1942)
in 1934: Farm at Long Crendon and Sandy Road. Both were purchased from the Barbizon
House, run by the influential Scottish dealer David Croal Thomson in London. These
are the only two major works bought before 1939 which are not by a Scottish artist.
In his later biography of Steer, D.S. MacColl would link McTaggart to Steer as modern
successors to Constable.
During 1939 and 1940 Blyth spent a lot of time in London and certainly visited
Reid & Lefèvre, who continued to represent the Peploe estate and where Peploe’s older
13

son Willy was making his career. However it was his relationship with the energetic
young dealer Lillian Browse of Roland, Browse & Delbanco in Cork Street which was to
have the greater impact, in particular nurturing his love of Sickert’s work.
Blyth had purchased his first work by Sickert in 1939: Chez Vernet (1920), an
exquisite example of his Dieppe period, from the fine-art dealers Robertson & Bruce
in Dundee. Paintings by Sickert would have been known in Scottish galleries from the
early 1890s: his association with the New English Art Club and with Scottish artists such
as Alexander Roche (1861–1921), Sir John Lavery (1856–1941) and Sir James Guthrie
(1859–1930) would have introduced him to dealers north of the border.
An interesting letter from George Proudfoot to Blyth, dated November 1941,
informs the latter of six new works by Sickert which would shortly be for sale in The
Scottish Gallery. The three works purchased by Blyth – Romeo and Juliet at Reculver, Bath
(1937), The Doorstep (1941) and Belmont, Bath (1940) – were examples of Sickert’s
late style. Between 1930 and his death in 1942, Sickert’s paint texture grew drier, the
application sparser, and his engagement with his subject less direct: he sometimes painted
from photographs and began to produce his enigmatic re-creations of the melodramatic
images of late Victorian painters and illustrators, his The Holocaust (page 79) being a fine
example.
Lillian Browse remembers the discussions between herself and Blyth over the
late Sickerts: ‘He liked the late Sickerts too; I didn’t, preferring the “rich juicy paint” and
we constantly used to tease and argue.’ Although Browse said that Blyth ‘was a passionate
lover of Sickert and always adamant in his choice’, as with his collection of Peploe there
is a balance between the collector’s personal predilections and the desire for a complete
representation of the artist’s oeuvre.
In 1954 he purchased one of the few Sickert portraits in the collection,
La Giuseppina (1903). It is a portrait profile showing head and shoulders. The picture is
light in tone, the hair forming a dark mass, and the handling free. The painting would
have made an interesting comparison with Peploe’s depiction of his model Peggy Macrae
– Elegance (c.1908) – purchased four years before.
Thirteen of Blyth’s 24 works by Sickert were hanging in the Wilby House drawing
room in 1962, including the last picture he acquired for the collection: Reclining Nude
(1904), bought from Roland, Browse & Delbanco in 1956 in exchange for Cliff, Dieppe
– Study in Mauve by the same artist (purchased six years before from the same gallery)
and £450; even in his eighties, his ability to strike a deal remained undiminished. It is
informative to compare Sickert’s Lobster on a Tray (1919), acquired in 1951, with Peploe’s
Lobster (c.1902) (page 59); he told Lillian Browse, perhaps only partly tongue-in-cheek,
‘that he would have liked to have turned Sickert into a Scot if he could have’.
The Sickert paintings dominate the English section of the collection and there is
no question that his regard for the artist was as substantial as that for Peploe or McTaggart.
Between 1939 and 1951 Blyth purchased three works by Duncan Grant (1885–1978),
two by Harold Gilman (1876–1919), four by Spencer Gore (1878–1914), three by
P. Wilson Steer and four by William Nicholson (1872–1949). In 1939 he purchased a
Lowry, Old Street, and in 1951 a single work by Matthew Smith, Roses. It is interesting
that the only English artists other than Sickert who were represented in Wilby House
at the time of Blyth’s death were Wilson Steer (two works) and William Nicholson.
It is furthermore tempting to speculate that some purchases of English and French work
were to make informative contrasting comparisons with his Peploes and other Scottish
works.
He purchased a work by Boudin, Les Fourges, in February 1912 but traded it in for
McTaggart’s The Emigrants in April 1914. In 1943 he acquired two further Boudin works,
14

Trouville Harbour and Deauville (pages 25 and 27), from The Scottish Gallery. One year
earlier he had bought a work by Corot, Souvenir de La Spezia (Effet du Matin) of 1874, also
from The Scottish Gallery. Works by both of these artists had originally been introduced
to Scotland by Alex Reid: between 1900 and 1913 he arranged five exhibitions of works
by Boudin and in 1920 he leased the McLellan Galleries in Glasgow and exhibited 171
works by 29 artists, including 57 by Boudin, 19 by Vuillard and 15 by Fantin-Latour, as
well as works by many of the Impressionists.
In 1950 Blyth purchased a Vuillard Paysage (1890). Vuillard had studied at the
Académie Julian where Peploe was later to study. His work of 1890, such as Paysage,
utilises simplified design, strong colour and energetic brushwork, and would have
provided an interesting comparison with Peploe’s studies of Iona, painted in the 1920s.
He would also have been aware that paintings by Boudin had not increased in price over
twenty years: William Burrell paid £250 for The Empress Eugénie on the Beach at Trouville by
Boudin in 1923, while Blyth paid £280 for Trouville Harbour, a similar painting, in 1943.
The works by Vuillard and Corot were hanging in the Gallery in 1962. The only
other major works by foreign artists are Dolly by Jacques-Émile Blanche (1861–1942),
Flowers by Bernard de Hoog (1867–1943) and Still-Life by Maurice Louvrier (1878–
1954). Blyth may have purchased these paintings as bargains and therefore investments,
but also because they gave him the opportunity to display a comparison between some
prominent French (and Dutch) artists and their ‘overlooked’ Scottish contemporaries,
especially Peploe and McTaggart. The landscape by Boudin, of Deauville, hung between
landscapes by Peploe and McTaggart in the hall of Wilby House in 1962.
15

Themes and motivations
As has been noted, Blyth’s possession of 84 works by S.J. Peploe rather undermines the
idea of a theme for his collection; but it is worth exploring some commonalities and
speculating about what drove him to make particular choices.
In Blyth’s foreword for the Peploe Memorial Exhibition at The Scottish Gallery,
written in April 1936, he praises Peploe for his ‘masterpieces of each period [which] are
eloquent of … supreme skill in the art of picture-making’. The mastery of design that
Peploe could deploy in still-life composition was recognised by Blyth, who would see no
tired repetition in the 30 still-lifes he collected by Peploe; and he would say the same
for Sickert.
In his choice of work by earlier Scottish painters, Blyth seems particularly
interested in the representation of scenes from Scottish rural life. Many suggested a rural
idyll which had been extremely popular since the 1880s, with the new collectors from
the mercantile classes demanding images of nostalgia for the ‘pastoral’. But for Blyth this
would not be sufficient: he would recognise that such subject matter could produce good
or indifferent pictures.
As part of the introduction for the McTaggart exhibition at the Royal Scottish
Academy in 1954, Blyth describes in detail the charm of the narrative in the McTaggart
work titled Country Lane:
A beautiful example of these differences will be found in ‘A Country Lane’.
Here the artist’s attention has been momentarily arrested by a rather
charming incident. A boy instructing a little girl in the manipulation of a
penny whistle. How beautifully the incident has been portrayed, the boy
with his head inclined, intent on his job, the girl eagerly extending her hands
for the whistle, and all conveyed to the canvas by few vital brush strokes.
Blyth lived in an increasingly industrialised town from which he would escape
to Machrihanish, the same place to which McTaggart returned many times to paint.
Similarly he collected paintings by Peploe of Iona, by Sickert of Dieppe, and by Wingate
of Gargunnock. Blyth clearly responded to the sense of place and time and an artist’s
ability to capture the beauty of the natural world.
Throughout his life as a collector, Blyth tried to secure a better position for
Scottish art in both England and Scotland. Against the background of a decline in the
demand for pictures in Scotland during the late 1920s, this proved difficult. Alex Reid,
who had supported the Glasgow School in the 1890s at home and abroad and had also
given his backing to the Scottish Colourists, had noticed the decline and consequently in
1926 moved his gallery from Glasgow to London, where he combined with the Lefèvre
Galeries as Reid & Lefèvre and allowed his son A.J. McNeil Reid to head up the business.
In this climate galleries in Glasgow, Dundee and Edinburgh had to close, with
the result that Scottish art lost some of its financial and critical support. Blyth was
determined to revive and sustain Scottish artists’ positions in the British art world and
make his contribution to a debate that continues to this day. In his W.A. Cargill Lecture
at the University of Glasgow in 1968, T.J. Honeyman would outline the problems which
confronted Scottish art during this period:
17

Most contemporary publications, exhibitions, talks, and articles carrying
the general title of British art should be more properly termed english
art because of the almost complete absence of reference to native
resident scottish artists. the fault lies in ourselves. It has often been
said that if scottish art had been entitled to a more prominent place
in the histories of British art it would have won it without difficulty.
the assumption is that fame and distinction are made solely to merit.
this is not so. If the arts are to be sustained in a flourishing condition they
must be continuously refreshed in the hearts and minds of the people.
similar objectives were followed by the sMaa, of which Blyth was Chairman
from 1944 until his death. the constitution stresses the supportive role played by the
association in maintaining an interest in, and representation for, scottish artists. Blyth
was further able to contribute to the position of scottish art by his involvement with the
Kirkcaldy art Gallery and with various exhibitions held in london.
During and after the second World War, Blyth extended his collection of works by
scottish artists, purchasing examples of alfred edward Borthwick (1871–1955), Robert
Burns (1869–1941), sir David young Cameron (1865–1945), Katherine Cameron
(1874–1965), sir George Clausen (1852–1944), Joseph Crawhall, stanley Cursiter
(1887–1976), sir James Guthrie, e.a. hornel, George henry, sir John lavery, ernest
stephen lumsden (1883–1948), William Mactaggart (1903–81), James McIntosh
Patrick (1907–98), arthur Melville (1858–1904), John Maclauchlan Milne (1885–
1957), thomas Corsan Morton (1859–1928), James Campbell Noble (1846–1913),
James Paterson (1854–1932), Denis (1914–93) and Willy Peploe (1910–65), sir George
Reid (1841–1913), John Crawford Wintour (1825–82) and Peter Wishart (1846–1932).
the largest number of works Blyth collected by a scottish artist during this period was
six pieces by William George Gillies (1898–1973) which are now all in the Kirkcaldy
art Gallery.
Mr and Mrs Blyth with
Robert Wemyss honeyman
and ‘tim’
18

It is tempting to posit that the primary reason why Blyth collected so many
pictures by Scottish artists after the beginning of the Second World War was the very
low prices. He liked a bargain and rarely had to spend more than thirty pounds on a
picture by one of these artists. The cost of all the pictures by the above-mentioned artists
comes to less than he paid for Venture Fair in 1920 by William McTaggart. But this is not
sufficient: his motivations were complex and varied. He certainly liked to support young
Scottish painters (and even the galleries, in difficult times) and it is not unreasonable to
describe his pattern of purchasing as compulsive. But he did not buy exclusively Scottish
works (nor limit the quantum of his spending) and would defend his favourite Scottish
painters only if he sensed an injustice in how they might be treated by the critical and
curatorial establishment.
In 1939 Blyth became involved with an ambitious exhibition being organised
by Stanley Cursiter, who was by then Director of the National Gallery of Scotland.
The ‘Scottish Art Exhibition’ took place in Burlington House, the home of the Royal
Academy, and was not a critical success. The critics attacked the paintings of McTaggart
especially, which was galling to Blyth since he had personally selected them from his own
collection. He recounted how:
Whenever these art critics in London know a thing comes from Scotland
it is suspect at once. … We had this McTaggart room which I helped
to choose and one critic wrote that we had done a poor service to
McTaggart by showing a succession of seashore pictures round the room.
Actually there were more landscapes than seascapes for I had chosen
them myself. I very much doubt it, because the pictures were Scottish,
the critic had never come to see them. And then another had written
‘McTaggart piles on the paint till he gets his effect!’ I feel that critic wrote
without going to see the pictures. He would probably say ‘Oh it’s Scottish
which is of no interest to high-brow people like us.’
Representative of the ‘more advanced and emphatic phase of recent painting in
Scotland’, as the catalogue introduction defined it, were 21 S.J. Peploes, eight Cadells,
five Hunters, along with two by Walter Grieve (1872–1937) and one each by William
York Macgregor (1855–1923), T. Corsan Morton and William Crozier (1897–1930).
The mixed critical reception may well have been a disappointment to the curators but
cannot have been altogether a surprise; with the benefit of hindsight, the selection could
have been balanced with the inclusion of William Gillies and William MacTaggart to
represent the living.
With the advent of war and the evacuation of so many pictures into safe storage
from the National Galleries, Lillian Browse persuaded the Director Kenneth Clark to let
her curate a series of shows of contemporary work, and from March to the end of August
1940 she put on ‘British Painting Since Whistler’ which contained no Scottish art at all.
As a result Blyth wrote some ‘extremely stormy’ letters to his young friend, demanding
Scottish representation in the exhibition. A Scottish room was granted for 15 works, and
pictures by Edwin Alexander, Robert Alexander (1840–1923), S.J. Peploe, McTaggart
and Wingate were sent from the Blyth Collection. To these works were added three
from other sources, including an early Guthrie, Pastoral, Cockburnspath and Orchardson’s
An Enigma.
The reviews were again disappointing. D.S. MacColl, Wilson Steer’s biographer,
wrote in a letter to The Times:
19

a warning of what we have escaped is the over-patriotic room of scottish
painters, parked by themselves. We have too often seen Mctaggart in
quantity, admirable though his buffetings of sea weather and strange
bleachings at the end of light undoubtedly are. a few of them and
of lawton Wingate’s landscapes would have been more effective if
distributed and the later, bold Peploes would be better away.
the london exhibition was Blyth’s last involvement in a major show south of the
border, but he was neither embittered nor persuaded to go in a new direction; indeed the
collection continued to grow with both scottish and english additions.
there is no doubt that Blyth’s loans to the Kirkcaldy art Gallery allowed him
greater scope as a collector. the existence of two geographically separate locations for
the Blyth Collection raises the question as to whether he saw his collection as a whole or
as two separate entities. either way, he could surely never have imagined 84 s.J. Peploes
and 45 Mctaggarts in one building.
he generally acquired good examples of a particular phase of an artist’s work
which fitted in to the collection as a whole; and, while all the works were still legally
his, one can speculate that having the receptacle of the Gallery to hand gave him full
licence to indulge his passion. ‘once hooked he could not stop collecting,’ recalled his
daughter Margery. for many collectors, possession is secondary to the pursuit. there
are numerous instances of collectors working closely with a particular institution with
clear objectives, often the perpetuation of the name and reputation of the benefactor;
but Blyth did not seem to share this vanity, which is partly why his name is not better
known today. the arrangement with the Gallery allowed not only a sensible management
of his obsession, but also, perhaps, a justification: works on public display had a purpose
and could do good. he spoke to local Rotarians in 1954 and was quoted in the Fifeshire
Advertiser under the headline ‘John Blyth says go and enjoy the pictures again’.
Jack Blyth with henry
Willies, curator of Kirkcaldy
Museum, discussing a Peploe
still life in the harley Bequest
of 1950.
20

Very little information is available concerning the movement of pictures between
the Kirkcaldy Art Gallery and Wilby House. One document, dated 1962, lists the
paintings under room headings and shows that they were largely organised as ‘one artist
to one room’. Essentially McTaggarts were hung in the dining room, Sickerts in the
drawing room, Wingates in the sitting room, a mix in the hall and stair, and Peploes
dominated the master bedroom. There were five bedrooms in all: the first was entirely
devoted to Peploe, the second to McTaggart’s smaller works, and the third, fourth and
fifth bedrooms were decorated by a selection of works by different artists. Still-lifes were
put next to portraits and landscapes. Little importance was given to the dates of pictures
in relation to the positioning in the house; as has been mentioned, Blyth did not keep a
record of the dates of his pictures, and therefore we can assume that they were relatively
unimportant to him.
The 1962 list indicates that 114 works were hanging in Wilby House and 123
in the Kirkcaldy Art Gallery. It does not give any indication as to why certain pictures
went to the Gallery, while others remained in Wilby House. It does however show that
the Gallery was very much representative of the collection: all the phases, developments
and artists represented in Wilby House were also evident to a greater or lesser extent
in the Gallery, and in no way are the works in the Kirkcaldy Gallery inferior to those
in Wilby House. For example, The Waves by McTaggart, Blyth’s favourite picture, was
hanging in the Gallery at this date. The lighting in the new Gallery was particularly good
and certainly better than at Wilby House: the Gallery picture rooms were illuminated by
the topside lighting principle, a system which reduces reflection to a minimum.
Margery Blyth remembered a constant coming and going of pictures between
house and Gallery. What is most likely is that, having divided his home up into rooms
representative of the four major artists in his collection along with other ‘mixed’ rooms,
Jack Blyth could have kept a flow of works, regularly refreshing both the Gallery and
Wilby House with new examples. Moreover, he felt responsible to keep a representative,
non-repetitive selection for the collections in the Gallery for the public eye in order to
maintain the status and popularity of the Gallery.
Blyth was always generous about loans to exhibitions, not surprisingly taking
the view that lending was a duty and the availability of great art to the general public a
public good.
In August 1956 an exhibition of selected modern Scottish, English and French
paintings in the Blyth Collection was held by the Scottish Arts Council at Rothesay
Terrace in Edinburgh. The display was made up of only 25 pictures by 13 different
artists and is the only exhibition representative of the Blyth Collection to have been held
until now.
21

Vale
“No plans were ever made for the Collection. He didn’t even consider dying.”
Margery Blyth
John Waldegrave Blyth died on 19th March 1962 in his ninetieth year. His estate was
inherited by his three daughters Dorothy, Margery and Cora.
By the end of September 1963 the Kirkcaldy Town Council had decided to accept
an offer from Blyth’s daughters, formalised in a letter from Messrs Gibson & Spears,
Dow & Son dated the 12th of that month, of 128 paintings from the Collection for a total
price of £9,000.
The decision as to which pictures were to be sold to the Kirkcaldy Art Gallery and
which were to be auctioned at Sotheby’s was made on the basis of where each picture was
hanging in March 1962. Those in the Kirkcaldy Art Gallery remained there as part of the
Collection sold to the Kirkcaldy Town Council for £9,000, apart from a selection which
the legatees wanted to keep for themselves. The pictures hanging in Wilby House in 1962
were destined for the saleroom, with the exception of a few that were retained by the
legatees and three works by William McTaggart: White Surf, Cornfields and Cornfield, Sandy
Dean. The latter three pictures were among the largest in the Collection and important
examples of McTaggart’s work. All three had been purchased from Aitken Dott before
1920 and were among the most treasured works in the Collection. It was therefore fitting
that they should remain in Kirkcaldy.
Two Sotheby’s sales took place in 1964, on 15th and 29th April. Among the works
sold in the first, an auction titled ‘Modern British Drawings, Paintings and Sculpture’,
were six paintings by Sickert, including two fine early examples – La Giuseppina (his
Venetian model) of c.1904 and Reclining Nude – Red and Green of c.1908 – and two
paintings of Dieppe. There were also six pictures by William McTaggart, including a
study for the painting of The Coming of St Columba which is in the National Gallery of
Scotland, and four pictures by S.J. Peploe.
Two important foreign works were sold in the auction on 29th April. Both had
been taken from the Collection hanging in the Kirkcaldy Art Gallery before the rest
were sold to the Kirkcaldy Town Council, on the basis of Margery’s assertion that she
felt her father had bought them as investments relatively late in the development of his
Collection. The selection in the Kirkcaldy Art Gallery in 1962 included only four major
works by foreign artists: a Vuillard, a Corot and Dolly by Jacques-Émile Blanche. Blyth
clearly did not intend the Collection to be representative of foreign schools and therefore
the sale of the Corot and Vuillard does not detract from the comprehensive nature of the
Collection sold to the Kirkcaldy Town Council.
The two foreign works were indeed sound investments and without them many
more pictures from the Collection would probably have been sold. The Corot, titled
Souvenir de La Spezia (Effet du Matin) (1874), had been purchased by Blyth in 1942 for £250
and was sold for £5,800. The Vuillard, titled Paysage (1890), was purchased in 1950 for
£180 and sold at this sale 14 years later for £3,200.
The last sale was held on 20th April 1966. Ten paintings by William McTaggart,
11 works by S.J. Peploe, two by J.D. Fergusson, six by W.R. Sickert, two by Philip Wilson
Steer, one by W.G. Gillies and a still-life by Bernard de Hoog were sold. All had been
22

hanging in Wilby House in 1962. The most important of these was Sickert’s Woman in a
Red Dress, bought by Roland, Browse & Delbanco for £1,000; Blyth had acquired it from
the same dealer in 1955 for £450. The remainder were sold either to small galleries or
to larger provincial galleries, for example Aberdeen Art Gallery which purchased Steer’s
Sandy Road at Long Clarendon (1925).
Today’s exhibition contains many works not seen for two generations and
more. Some are masterpieces and some minor works; all speak of the taste of a great
collector who would today be rightly proud of his Collection’s history since his passing.
Kirkcaldy, thanks to his generosity and foresight, is the gem in the municipal crown of
Scottish museums and de facto the centre of study for Peploe and McTaggart. Others
of his pictures are in museum collections far and wide, and the sensible nurture of the
works retained by the family has done much good. Today as the final 38 are sold we can
tell his story and invite buyers, readers and lovers of fine paintings to wonder at the taste
of Jack Blyth.
PETER ARKELL AND GUY PEPLOE
23

catalogue
Eugène Boudin was born in Normandy in 1824. He spent his childhood on the sea, working as the cabin boy on his
father’s cargo ship. This early exposure to the sea and skies of the French Coast was to form his primary focus as a painter
later in life. It was Boudin who would form the all important link between traditional French landscape and the start of
the Impressionist movement.
His early career consisted predominantly of painting outdoor sketches in the summer, which he would then
complete in his studio over the winter months. During this period he also painted genre scenes and still life but it
was the vast skies and seas of the Normandy Coast that he always returned to. In 1862 he began to paint the crowds
of fashionable tourists who flocked to the coast from Paris on summer weekends. To paint people on a beach, smartly
dressed and enjoying themselves was daringly modern. The Impressionists developed this subject in the coming decades,
but it marked Boudin out as distinctly avant-garde. By the middle of the 1850s he recognized the ‘falseness’ of painting
landscapes from memory and bean to paint almost exclusively en plein air a practice that was to be so influential on the
Impressionists. The immediacy of the work Boudin painted outdoors and the attention paid to the changing atmosphere
had a particular effect on the young Claude Monet, who first worked alongside him in 1856. He said, ‘…it was as if a
veil had been torn from my eyes. I had understood, had grasped what painting could be. Boudin’s absorption of his work,
and his independence, were enough to decide the entire future and development of my painting.’ 1
Although he had been exhibiting at the Paris Salon since 1959, he displayed little appetite for increasing his
profile and chose not to move to Paris permanently. By the late 1860’s he stopped painting the scenes of stylish figures
on the beach, and dedicated himself entirely to his coastal scenes. Despite this, his reputation was such that in 1874 he
was included in the first Impressionist exhibition and although he chose not to become part of the notorious group he
still exhibited with many of the artists.
Our painting depicts the mouth of the river Toques flanked by two jetties which form the entrance to Trouville
harbour. It was a favourite subject for Boudin (another version is in the National Gallery collection – The Entrance to
Trouville Harbour, 1888 and was the first ‘modern’ French work to be acquired for the State). Boudin captures his scene
on a blustery summer’s day. The tide is far out with the break water just visible on the horizon. The primary focus of
the painting is the fishing boat which rests, lazily on a sandbank. The immediacy and vibrancy with which he captures
the effect of bright sunlight on the boat’s deck and rigging demonstrate the ideals which Impressionism was to take
further, all rendered with rapid, short brushstrokes. More boats rest against the jetty walls, while a local tries his luck
at fishing on the left side of the river. Tourists with parasols amble on either side of the harbour toward the two brilliant
white lighthouses, all captured with quick, measured dabs of Boudin’s brush.
Blyth acquired this and the following painting from The Scottish Gallery in 1943. Although Alexander Reid had
introduced the Boudin to Scotland in the 1890s it seems that Blyth asked The Scottish Gallery to acquire these works on
his behalf. In the receipt it itemizes ‘packing’ and ‘forwarding’ of the pictures from London.
1 G. Jean-Aubry & Robert Schmit, Eugène Boudin, (New York Graphic Society, Greenwhich, 1968), p.27
24

eugène Boudin (1824–1898)
Trouville, Les Jetées, 1890
oil on canvas, 40.5 x 55 cms
signed and inscribed with title lower left
exhibited:
adams Brothers, london, 1943
aitken Dott & son, the scottish Gallery, 1943
A Selection of Modern Scottish, English and French Paintings, art Council Gallery, edinburgh, 1956, (no. 3)
25

“everything that is painted on the spot has strength, a power, a vividness of touch that one does not find again in
the studio.”
eugène Boudin, 1869
this small panel is of a three-masted cargo vessel anchored in Deauville harbor. It is early morning, as the sun begins
to burn through the early haar, a glow reflected on the water’s surface. two crew members glide towards the shore in
a small rowing boat. the day is calm; the tricolore ripples lightly in at the stern of the ship rendered with bright jewel
like touches of paint. Boudin’s knowledge of the sea and of seafaring enables him to capture the complex rigging and
architecture of the vessel with the minimum amount of paint. his rapid brushwork suggests movement in the boat,
figures and in the water’s surface. this painting, like many he made of shipping at Deauville is typically concerned with
light, and contains the immediacy, vibrancy, and rapid brushwork that demonstrate the influence that he had on the
Impressionists.
26

eugène Boudin (1824–1898)
Deauville, Les Trois Mats
oil on panel, 26.5 x 21 cms
signed lower left
exhibited:
Ralph h. Proud fine art Dealers, Glasgow
adams Brothers, london, 1943
aitken Dott & son, the scottish Gallery, 1943
27

Wintour was born in Edinburgh and attended the Trustees Academy under William Allan. He devoted the first half of
his professional life to portrait and genre painting before concentrating on landscape and so follows a similar course
to William McTaggart. His later landscape owes more to the romanticism of John Thomson of Duddingston or John
Constable than to the prevailing realism of the day exemplified in Scotland by Sam Bough and Alexander Fraser.
Caw identifies his best work as being of his last years; poetic celebrations of nature made by moonlight or in the
gloaming, often in front of the subject so small in scale and at their best close in spirit to Corot. Sadly his work seemed
out of step with The Academy in Scotland and as his career declined he turned to drink and further alienated his
supporters. He can be seen today as an underrated figure representing the ‘romantic’ in Scottish art in an era when
realism and naturalism prevailed.
28

John Crawford Wintour (1825–1882)
On the Devon
oil on panel, 24 x 36 cms
signed lower right
exhibited:
aitken Dott & son, the scottish Gallery, 1941
29

Two years senior to his great friend William McTaggart, Chalmers was recognized in his lifetime as one of Scotland’s
greatest painters. They met as students of Robert Scott-Lorimer at The Trustees Academy in Edinburgh where they
were schooled well in drawing from the antique and life classes as well as painting. Both would move away from genre
and portrait towards ‘pure’ landscape but were temperamentally very different. Chalmers led an irregular life, rising
late and was far from prolific. There is a story of how McTaggart and another friend visited Chalmers on the eve of
submission day for the RSA to assist; the friend sat on Chalmers while McTaggart ‘finished’ the picture. Chalmers’ life
was cut short when he died from injuries sustained from an assault in Charlotte Square aged only forty-five.
Chalmers merits a whole chapter in Caw’s Scottish Painting Past and Present and George Pinnington’s biography
was published in 1896, by T & R Annan. His best work is characterized by a rich chiaroscuro, warm colour and free
handling of the paint and Sheep in the Snow painted in the glow of evening seems a perfect example of a genre to be
popularized by Joseph Farquharson.
30

George Paul Chalmers (1833–1878)
Sheep in the Snow
oil on canvas, 23.5 x 33.5 cms
signed lower right
exhibited:
aitken Dott & son, the scottish Gallery, 1937
31

Paintings by William McTaggart, R.S.A.
Selected for the Scottish Committee of the Arts Council by J. W. Blyth, Esq.
In his admirable biography of the artist Sir James L. Caw wrote: “Nobody could have suspected when in 1835 the name
of William McTaggart was registered amongst the births in Campbeltown parish, that the name of the most original and
fascinating painters of the nineteenth century had been recorded for the first time.”
Well it was so, and as the years passed and his art progressed we found more and more to excite our wonder
and admiration. We are told in the same biography that as a young boy he drew precociously well – whence came that
talent is a mystery – and when after much opposition his wish to study art was conceded, he soon showed that his talent
was outstanding and of an original character. When at the age of sixteen he joined the Trustees Academy in Edinburgh,
he came into close contact with many of the strongest personalities in Scottish Art. Orchardson, Pettie, Tom Graham
and George Paul Chalmers were all there, and became his close friends. One would naturally have expected that their
art would influence his, but no, this lad from a croft at the extreme corner of the Mull at Kintyre pursued his own
course and became the first and foremost impressionist painter in Scotland. McTaggart’s impressionism was inborn and
spontaneous. It was not influenced by any theories or dogmas, and he was unaware of the movement in France. On a
varnishing day at the Royal Scottish Academy he took Wingate aside and asked: “What is this impressionism they are
all talking about?” Wingate’s naïve reply was: “I fancy it is just what you and I have been doing for a good many years.”
It is highly probable that McTaggart’s impressionism may one day be acclaimed the most completely satisfying of
all in this lovely art phase. His impressionism embraces every aspect of his pictures, notably in his use of figures, so often
misunderstood. We frequently hear, as a complaint, that McTaggart’s children are always the same, but this Exhibition
should quickly dispel that erroneous notion. McTaggart’s use of figures in his composition is one of the most fascinating
features in his art. They are always part of the impression. In some cases the impression was a strong one, in others it is
more fleeting, or it may be so light that the figures appear only as notes of lovely colour. A beautiful example of these
differences will be found in “A Country Lane,” No. 37 in the catalogue. Here the artist’s attention has been momentarily
arrested by a rather charming incident. A boy is instructing a little girl in the manipulation of a penny whistle.
How beautifully the incident has been portrayed, the boy with head inclined, intent on his job, the girl eagerly extending
her hands for the whistle, and all conveyed to the canvas by a few vital brush strokes. And how perfectly the incident
takes its place in the composition with another group treated quite differently – its impressionism no the artist being so
slight – but conveying that impressionism just as convincingly and just as happily placed.
McTaggart’s pictures of the sea are the most wonderful ever painted, and his supremacy in this branch of his art
is apt to minimize the interest in his landscapes. In this Exhibition the landscapes have been given their due prominence,
and it must be apparent that it is simply a change of subject, and that all the excellencies of the sea pictures are here
also. In fact, it may well be that some of the landscapes provide even more scope for his exquisite sense of colour, his
resourceful technique and lightness of touch.
McTaggart loved all nature, land, sea, sky, air, and his fellow men. This Love radiates from his pictures.
We finish as we begin, with a quotation. In an able article on McTaggart’s art the late P. McOmish Dott wrote:
“Whether we delight in McTaggart’s pictures for their simple natural beauty, or the art faculties which they reveal, or
the faith, courage and joy in living which inspire them, it is beyond question that they contain the blossom and fruit of
great natural gifts, illuminated by a powerful intelligence and consecrated by earnest endeavor.”
J. W. B.
1954
32

Mctaggart was born into a crofting family (both parents were Gaelic speakers) at aros farm near Machrihanish in
1835. although he lived most of his working life in edinburgh and after 1889 at lasswade he returned nearly every
year to Kintyre to paint and sketch and there is a clutch of paintings he produced including the monumental Rainy Day,
Machrihanish and a number of small sunset works of which this is one. the effect of the dying sun casting a fiery glow
across the sky and sea is captured with marks of intense, broken colour while children float in a rowing boat, fishing in
the shallows.
William Mctaggart (1835–1910)
Sunset at Machrihanish, 1882
oil on panel, 15 x 20 cms
signed and dated lower right
Provenance:
Miss Greenlees, edinburgh.
33

there are a number of pictures of Roslin Castle and Rosslyn Glen recorded as having been painted in 1895 and we can
surmise that A Spate on the Esk is in the glen and so on the North esk. the location is a few miles from the convergence
of the North and south rivers at Dalkeith and seven miles before the esk disgorges into the forth at Musselburgh.
Mctaggart captures the river in full flood, the river bank bursting with autumn rain. a dreich grey sky hangs over the
painting ominously, while a burst of sunshine highlights the curve of the river bend. Mctaggart captures the movement
of the tempestuous waters with strokes of blue, red and white.
William Mctaggart (1835–1910)
A Spate on the Esk, 1895
oil on canvas, 58.5 x 76 cms
signed and dated lower left
Provenance:
Mr. W. h. Wood, slough
exhibited:
Whitechapel art Gallery, 1903
W Mctaggart Collection in Dundee, 1928
aitken Dott & son, the scottish Gallery, 1933
William McTaggart Exhibition, City of Manchester art Gallery, 1937, (no. 6814)
Exhibition of Scottish Art, Royal academy of arts, london, 1939
McTaggart Centenary Exhibition, the tate Gallery, london, 1955
34

this charming panel dating from 1890 was completed the year after the artist had moved to Broomieknowe on the
outskirts of edinburgh where many of his later landscapes were painted, looking out over the farmland to the back of
his garden. James Caw records that our picture is a smaller version of Autumn Sunshine in Sandy Dean, exhibited in the
Rsa in 1891. the figures are almost subsumed within their rural setting to the point where they come to be part of the
landscape itself: their presence vivifying the landscape and suggesting movement. While the presence of figures provides
a narrative element, Mctaggart’s real concern is with light. the sun casts varying shades of shadow across the eldin Dean
road (the ‘sandy Dean’ of his title) and a field of stooks in the middle ground is captured in the autumnal sunshine with
highlights of pure white and yellow.
William Mctaggart (1835–1910)
Dappled Sunlight, Sandy Dean, 1890
oil on panel, 18 x 25.5 cms
exhibited:
John N Kyd sale at Dowell’s, edinburgh, 1932
aitken Dott & son, the scottish Gallery, 1945
Paintings by William McTaggart RSA, Royal scottish academy, edinburgh, 1954, (no.13)
35

In July 1947 Blyth bought a picture he recorded as A Summer Day in his notebook from The Scottish Gallery while the
transaction in the company’s books refers to Summertime. It must be same picture and the likely explanation of the
changed title lies in Blyth’s McTaggart scholarship: he will have researched his new purchase back to Caw’s list and
identified it as that painted in 1898, previously in the collection of John Duncan Jr. of Edinburgh (who had a substantial
collection of the artists’ work), a smaller version of A Summer Day, Machrihanish in the collection of TGS Roberts.
It is as fresh and direct as any Machrihanish painting he ever made. As usual he was there in June and we can almost smell
the ozone in the air as children play in a break in the dunes, the bay hinted at beyond.
36

William Mctaggart (1835–1910)
Summertime, 1898
oil on panel, 20.5 x 30.5 cms
signed lower right
Provenance:
John Duncan Jr, edinburgh
exhibited:
aitken Dott & son, the scottish Gallery, 1947
Paintings by William McTaggart RSA, Royal scottish academy, edinburgh, 1954, (no.50)
37

“The remarkable place which he holds in the history of nineteenth-century painting is little realised. What McTaggart
accomplished can be stated in a very few words. As early as 1875 he had invented a system of Impressionist painting
different from, but comparable with, that of Sisley, Monet or Renoir. This fact takes on greater importance when it
is recollected that the first Impressionist Exhibition held in Paris was in 1874, and that so far as can be ascertained
McTaggart saw his first Monet in the nineties.
“From his own observation it seems that he evolved theories relating to light and movement, in many ways
similar to those which are more familiarly associated with the French Impressionists; and apart from Turner there is
probably no British painter who has succeeded so well in evoking beauty of sunshine and wind and sea.”
This extract from David Fincham’s introduction to the Tate Gallery’s Centenary Exhibition of the artist in 1935
puts McTaggart’s extraordinary contribution to Scottish and British art in context. Blyth lent eleven paintings to the
exhibition and would eventually own forty-five. Sunset was bought from The Scottish Gallery in 1938. McTaggart did
not travel this year but did paint Fishers Landing, Carnoustie and our picture may also be inspired by the North Sea
at Carnoustie. It is an example of pure, ecstatic landscape painting typical of his last period: vivid and painted with
great freedom.
38

William Mctaggart (1835–1910)
Sunset, 1905
oil on canvas, 39 x 68.5 cms
signed and dated lower left
Provenance:
R.h. Brechin, Glasgow
exhibited:
aitken Dott & son, the scottish Gallery, 1933
39

“To few men has a more beautiful vision of the world been granted than that revealed in his pictures. His landscapes bring
us close in touch with that poetry of earth which Keats assures us is never dead, and, if one loves nature well, they must
assuredly awaken a responsive thrill. They are reminiscent of all times and seasons, but most of hours when winds are
soft and Nature smiles. They breathe of country lanes and sunlit fields, of dewy pastures, of quivering leaves and hay or
hawthorn-scented breezes. To the majority of men, consigned by fate to toil in stony cities, communion with Nature
and the content and joy it brings is granted seldom, but, if they may not meet her face to face, pictures such as these,
drenched in her spirit, bring her very near.”
James Caw, Scottish Painting, (T.C. and E.C. Jack, London, 1908), p.320
Wingate was born at Kelvinheugh near Glasgow and came late to art enrolling in the Trustees Academy aged 26,
encouraged by his friend WD Mackay. He lived from 1881 in Muthill in Perthshire and his paintings of rural life depict a
disappearing world. He then moved to Colinton in Edinburgh and became increasingly a painter of atmospheric effects.
He was a very successful and prolific painter exhibiting 225 pictures in the RSA in his lifetime and showing four times
with The Scottish Gallery from 1900 where his Memorial show was mounted in 1924.
40

sir James lawton Wingate (1846–1924)
Gargunnock
oil on canvas, 25.5 x 35.5 cms
signed lower left
exhibited:
aitken Dott & son, the scottish Gallery, 1941
41

Wingate’s first arran subject exhibited in the Rsa was in 1882 and Glen Sannox will also be an early picture. It depicts a
rainy day at the start of a classic walk in to the arran mountains.
sir James lawton Wingate (1846–1924)
Old Bridge, Glen Sannox, c.1885
oil on canvas, 41 x 51 cms
signed lower right
exhibited:
aitken Dott & son, the scottish Gallery, 1941
42

Wingate was frequent visitor to arran and was celebrated as a master of the sunset. In 1919 he succeeded Guthrie as
President of the Rsa by which time his landscape vision concentrate on effects of sunset, storm and summer skies.
sir James lawton Wingate (1846–1924)
Sunset, Arran
oil on canvas, 26 x 36 cms
signed lower right
exhibited:
George Davidson ltd, Glasgow, 1916
43

Wingate’s Farm seems close in spirit to Glasgow school landscapes which seem to have been a strong influence.
the lonely farmstead, handsome trees and turbulent summer sky would have been painted by Walton in suffolk
or Galloway.
sir James lawton Wingate (1846–1924)
Farm
oil on canvas, 28 x 35.5 cms
signed lower right
exhibited:
aitken Dott & son, the scottish Gallery, 1918
44

Gargunnock lies a few miles west of stirling on the south side of the forth valley, in the heart of scotland. It still has an
annual agricultural show and an active cricket club. Wingate takes his view north towards the Bens of Perthshire and
depicts the timeless rural scene of the labourer’s return from work.
sir James lawton Wingate (1846–1924)
Returning from Work, Gargunnock, c.1890
oil on canvas, 41 x 51 cms
signed lower left
exhibited:
aitken Dott & son, the scottish Gallery, 1924
loan exhibition, Kirkcaldy art Gallery and Museum, 1928
Exhibition of Scottish Art, Royal academy of arts, london, 1939
45

Alexander was born in Edinburgh, son of the painter Robert Alexander (1840–1923) from whom he learned much.
He visited Tangier with his father and Joseph Crawhall, nine years his senior, in the winter of 1887–88 which sparked
a lifelong fascination for the desert and the Arab world. He did study in Edinburgh and Paris with his friend Robert
Burns (1861–1941) but was drawn back to North Africa and was based in Egypt, living on a houseboat on the Nile
from 1892–1896. James Caw writing in his book Scottish Painting Past and Present (TC and EC Jack, Edinburgh, 1908)
notes ‘… that this young painter dwelt among the Arabs, living their simple life in the tents and sharing their daily lives.’
His depictions of camels and donkeys and the soft, varied, fawn coloured landscape with warm sunlight and purple
shadow are observed as an intimate not a tourist.
Caw ascribes a similar charm to Alexander’s home landscape. ‘Low-horizoned ploughed lands with birds on
wing on the high airy sky; long ebb-tide sands glimmering in the deepening twilight; and bare uplands with nibbling
sheep seen in the delicate harmony wrought by a grey spring day – these and such-like are the themes he loves.
It is as a painter of birds and the natural world for which he is rightly celebrated. The Fine art Society mounted an
exhibition for The Edinburgh Festival in 1985 called Camels, Cobwebs and Honeysuckles featuring Alexander and Crawhall
and they stand out as two of the most brilliant draftsmen of their generation whose particular, quiet vision has often
been drowned out – by noisier more self-conscious art. Caw was hugely tempted to include Crawhall in his history but
as a strict nationalist the painter’s Northumbrian origin ruled him out. Alexander he praises for his delicacy of drawing,
his colour: ‘fastidious and harmonious’ and his rare regard for decorative placing. His love of birds is clear in so many
delicate, perfect representations of birds and he kept owls and peacocks at his home in Musselburgh.
Alexander had the first of four one-man shows with The Scottish Gallery in 1901 and the following year was
made an associate of The RSA. In 1904 he married into the Dott family and settled in Edinburgh. Sadly he had a stroke
in 1917 and died aged only fifty-six. His memorial exhibition was held at The Gallery.
46

edwin alexander (1870–1926)
A Syrian Camp
Watercolour, 26 x 47 cms
signed lower left
47

edwin alexander (1870–1926)
Moorland
Watercolour, 19 x 33 cms
signed with initials lower right
48

edwin alexander (1870–1926)
Mule, 1894
Watercolour, 27 x 23 cms
signed and dated lower left
exhibited:
aitken Dott & son, the scottish Gallery, 1941
49

edwin alexander (1870–1926)
Doves and Apple Blossom, 1897
Watercolour on linen, 48 x 38 cms
signed and dated lower right
exhibited:
Doig Wilson Wheatley, edinburgh, 1939
Exhibition of Scottish Art, Royal academy of arts, london, 1939
Exhibition of 20th Century British Paintings, National Gallery, london, 1940
50

edwin alexander (1870–1926)
Dead Birds, Great Tit and Blue Tit, 1901
Watercolour on linen, 14 x 21 cms
signed and dated lower left
exhibited:
aitken Dott & son, the scottish Gallery, 1942
51

edwin alexander (1870–1926)
Gullane
Watercolour, 19 x 34 cms
signed with initials lower right
exhibited:
aitken Dott & son, the scottish Gallery, 1913
52

edwin alexander (1870–1926)
Corn Spurry
Watercolour, 31 x 17 cms
signed with initials lower right
53

edwin alexander (1870–1926)
Storehouses
Watercolour, 45 x 20.5 cms
signed with initials upper left
exhibited:
Empire Exhibition, scotland, 1938
Exhibition of 20th Century British Paintings, National Gallery, london, 1940
54

edwin alexander (1870–1926)
Blackbird, 1900
Watercolour on linen, 52 x 42 cms
signed and dated lower left
exhibited:
aitken Dott & son, the scottish Gallery, 1945
55

s.J. Peploe (1871–1935)
The Lobster, c. 1901
oil on canvas, 41 x 51 cms
signed vertically upper right
Provenance:
J.J. Cowan; William home Cook
exhibited:
aitken Dott & son, the scottish Gallery, 1903
Loan Exhibition, Kirkcaldy Museum and art Gallery, 1928
S.J. Peploe Memorial Exhibition, aitken Dott & son, the scottish Gallery, 1936, (no. 39)
S.J. Peploe Memorial Exhibition, Mclellan Galleries, Glasgow, 1937, (no. 64)
Empire Exhibition, scotland, 1938
Exhibition of Scottish Art, Royal academy of arts. london, 1939
S.J. Peploe, National Gallery of scotland, 1941, (no. 6)
British Council and Fine Arts Department Exhibition, Cairo & algiers, 1944
The Scottish Colourists, ewan Mundy fine art, Glasgow, 1989, (no. 1)
s.J. Peploe, Paintings and Drawings, Duncan Miller fine art, london, 1993, (no. 2)
The Scottish Colourists, Royal academy of arts, 2000, (no. 59)
Illustrated:
stanley Cursiter, Peploe, (thomas Nelson and sons ltd, edinburgh, 1947) Plate 5
Guy Peploe, S.J. Peploe, (Mainstream, edinburgh, 2000) Plate 11
and to be included in the second edition to be published in october 2012 by lund humphries
57

By the time of the artist’s death in 1935 James Caw had come to recognise Peploe as one of Scotland’s greatest painters.
Caw was the biographer of his father-in-law William McTaggart and wrote a History of Scottish Art, published in 1908.
He became the director of the Scottish National Gallery and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery from 1907–1930.
When he reviewed Peploe’s first exhibition in 1903 his praise was heavily qualified; he identified a ‘perverse taste for
the ugly or the bizarre in figure and landscape’ 1 and a lack of subtlety of vision. Certainly Peploe’s early work is bold
and his subjects not chosen for their inherent beauty; even The Lobster (which Caw singles out for particular praise) is a
difficult subject; an admirable lunch and a complex, fascinating creature but certainly a challenge to the painter. Peploe
has made out of it one of his masterpieces.
Peploe admired seventeenth century Dutch painting and had made a study trip to Holland in the mid-1890s 2
and that still life tradition, which includes specialist painters of the profusion of the fishmonger’s table, is acknowledged.
His composition however is uncluttered, much closer in spirit to Chardin or Manet. This was Peploe’s first exhibition
and the obsessive care he took in the preparations (including painting and repainting a frieze in one of the rooms)
indicates a personality trait and a recognition after many years of study and preparation that at the age of thirty-three
this exhibition would launch his career as an exhibiting artist.
Peploe’s skill was in perfect balance with his confidence: the bone handle of the knife is made up of three
brushstrokes and every mark is assured and perfectly placed. The beautifully graded tones of the table-top merge into
background: olive to a black enriched with burnt-sienna. The harmony of his arrangement, a loose rhombus made of
lobster, knife, plate and lemon is perfectly lit to allow a maximum impact of colour and tonal contrast. The vertically
placed signature in lobster-colour seems a self-consciously stylish touch: like a piece of oriental calligraphy – but it is
also an essential part of his composition.
1 Sir James Caw, ‘Studio Talk – Edinburgh’, The Studio (Vol XXX, 1904), p.161
2 Guy Peploe, S.J. Peploe, (Mainstream, Edinburgh, 2000), p.16
58

Peploe is strongly associated with Iona where he visited annually from 1919 until 1934 but he did visit other islands
in the hebrides, most significantly Barra. the first visit was in 1894 when he and his older brother Willie sailed with
their friend the painter RC Robertson in his ketch Nell. It was on this trip that he met his future wife Margaret Mackay.
she was from loch Boisdale in s. Uist but was working in the Post office in Castlebay, Barra. they began a correspondence
and she eventually followed her heart to edinburgh, courtesy of a transfer to the post office in frederick street!
there is a reference in a letter to another visit in 1903 so that is the date attributed to most of the known
paintings. he might well have visited again between times and there is significant stylistic variety within the Barra
pictures which could indicate earlier and later visits. he painted on smaller panels, for which he used a ‘pochard’
painting box which allowed him freedom to roam the island to find his subjects. Castlebay itself provided several
subjects, sometimes observed from the rampart of Kisimul Castle in the bay, the ancestral stronghold of the MacNeils
of Barra, but Peploe also ventures to the north of the island where great, sweeping beaches extend below machair and
rocky escarpments. today the airplane lands at low tide on traigh Mhor which is the likely subject of Barra landscape.
Peploe uses a creamy vehicle for his pigment and works with swift, long brushstrokes which enables him to capture the
fleeting in his subject; to paint weather as much as landscape.
60

s.J. Peploe (1871–1935)
Barra Landscape, c.1903
oil on panel, 15.5 x 23.5 cms
signed lower right
exhibited:
alex Reid and lefèvre, london, 1946
61

Comrie is a village on the River earn with a fine church and the highlands rising to the North. It was accessible by train
from 1894 and around 1900 Peploe’s sister and brother-in-law had come to live, Dr fred Porter taking up a position as
village doctor. a number of small, atmospheric panels are inscribed with Comrie titles, Comrie, Perthshire being a good
example. In type they are reminiscent of Constable’s ‘weather’ studies: swift, on the spot records of clouds over a dark
landscape. Peploe went on to paint a few more ambitious, Impressionist pictures of the village itself but we can imagine
him going for long walks, inspired by being on the edge of a highland wilderness, his lightweight painting-box always
in his pocket.
62

s.J. Peploe (1871–1935)
Comrie, c.1900
oil on panel, 12.5 x 21.5 cms
signed verso
exhibited:
aitken Dott & son, the scottish Gallery, 1940
63

s.J. Peploe (1871–1935)
Paris Plage, c.1907
oil on canvas board, 19 x 24 cms
signed verso
exhibited:
aitken Dott & son, the scottish Gallery, 1946
s.J. Peploe, Paintings and Drawings, Duncan Miller fine art, london, 1993, (no. 7)
64

Le Touquet Paris-Plage is a resort on the Normandy coast which has endured as a tourist destination since it was founded
in 1876 by Hippolyte de Villemessant the owner of Le Figaro. The land was bought by an Englishman in 1903 and it became
as fashionable in London as it did in Paris with golf courses and a racecourse being added to the splendid architecture
which characterizes the seafront. At the northern end the River Canche disgorges into the Channel and from there miles
of beach stretch to the south. There is an immense tidal reach and so huge capacity for the holidaymaker to sit, exercise
or bathe. Peploe began to visit in the early years of the century, often with his friend John Duncan Fergusson. They both
painted a variety of subjects including the view across the sand towards the sea and a horizon often lost in haze so that
the subject, devoid of its holidaymakers as dawn or dusk, could be almost abstract and without features. Through one
hundred and eighty degrees the view could not be in more contrast; the traffic of the streets, colourful bathing tents
and fashionable denizens of the grand hotels and casinos taking their afternoon promenade are described in flurries of
paint. By 1907 Peploe was approaching the limit of his engagement with Impressionism and the freedom and fluidity
of his marks are astonishing and indeed in great contrast to the short ‘touche’ deployed by Sisley or Monet. But it is
Impressionism; as much about light and atmosphere as figure and landscape, always made en plein air.
65

s.J. Peploe (1871–1935)
Royan, 1910
oil on panel, 27 x 35 cms
signed verso
Painted on Paris-american art Company board
exhibited:
aitken Dott & son, the scottish Gallery, 1940
Peploe, Cadell, Hunter, Royal scottish academy festival exhibition, 1949
A Selection of Modern Scottish, English and French Paintings, art Council Gallery, edinburgh, 1956, (no. 20)
s.J. Peploe, Paintings and Drawings, Duncan Miller fine art, london, 1993, (no. 15)
66

Peploe married Margaret Mackay on April the fifth 1910 at the Morningside Registry Office. They had decided to
move to Paris and would break the journey at Broadway in the Cotswolds. He had written a month before: ‘I see the
train leaves at 10.15. That is the only morning train and the next is 2.00 o’clock which is too late. Shall we need to get
married at 8.00 o’clock in the morning; why not? Before breakfast.’ The move had long been urged by John Duncan
Fergusson, already living in Montparnasse, but the immediate spur was Margaret’spregnancy. They set up home in a tiny
studio apartment at 278 Boulevard Raspail but by August had joined Fergusson and Anne Estelle Rice in Royan in the
Charante. Royan was fashionable resort with a fine Casino on the promenade, beaches and a busy marina. Willy was
born on August 29th. The work Peploe made here can now be seen as thoroughly modernist: the palette is bold and like
the Fauves at Collioure four years before he moves away from naturalism to push colour as a direct, emotional tool no
doubt reflecting the freedom and excitement he felt as his life moved into a new sphere.
The Royan pictures of the harbour and streets of villas behind the front, of the Paris parks, and those made
in Brittany the following summer can be seen together as one of the great engagements made by a British artist
with French modernism. Light is no longer dissolving form and instead a new structure is sought; natural forms are
simplified and non-naturalistic colour preferred. These were the works that would be initially rejected by the dealers and
collectors who had been his patrons but Peploe was not for turning and the balance of his life as a painter looks forward,
never back.
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Peploe began to visit the south-west of Scotland during the First War no doubt with the encouragement of his friends
Jessie King and EA Taylor who had settled there in 1913. He came to paint but also to get fit; he was not to be deemed
fit for War service but was continuously expecting to be called up. There is no precise record of his visits and the dates
on the back of some of his panels may well have been written on some years later and are not entirely reliable. One
of his most productive locations was on the Solway Firth at Douglas Hall, which overlooks Sandyhills Bay and the land
inland towards Laggan Farm.
He worked exclusively at this time on panels for which he had a transportable painting box so that he could
walk over rough, farming terrain to find his subjects. Trees Douglas Hall, (New Acquisitions, The Scottish Gallery, 2008)
will belong to an earlier visit, perhaps of 1915 and is fauvist in character while work made on the next visit, most likely
in the summer of 1917, have a more lyrical, naturalistic quality. Cornfield, Douglas Hall and Laggan Farm Buildings, (both
Glasgow Museums) are typical. Peploe is now using a gesso ground and thinned paint, with some oil taken out with
blotting paper from which is derived a dry surface and an extraordinary almost luminous brightness.
Our picture entitled Douglas Hall is in fact Laggan Farm, seen from the back. The landowner was the Haslam
family, likely friends of Jessie King who would have welcomed the artist onto their property. Peploe is attracted to the
strong architectural lines of the house (he also enjoyed the stolid geometry of Kirkcudbright’s Tolbooth in several works
also belonging to 1917) and the light on the whitewashed facade is captured in a white as brilliant as any he painted.
At this moment he seems closer to Paul Cézanne than at any other; the attraction to great trees, the rusticity of his
subject choices and analysis of form all owe a debt to the master of Aix. But as always with Peploe the sheer virtuosity
of painting and originality of his colour transcend any influences.
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s.J. Peploe (1871–1935)
Douglas Hall, c.1917
oil on panel, 33 x 41 cms
signed lower right
exhibited:
aitken Dott & son, the scottish Gallery,1940
s.J. Peploe, Paintings and Drawings, Duncan Miller fine art, london, 1993, (no. 41)
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fergusson held his first one-man-show with the Baillie Galleries in london in 1905 and of the fifty-six works exhibited,
sixteen were paintings of Paris Plage. In the catalogue was reproduced what would today be called an artist statement:
“he (the artist) is trying for truth, for reality through light. that to the realist in painting, light is the mystery; for form
and colour which are the painter’s only means of representing life, exist only on account of light.” the success of this
exhibition and excellent critical appraisal, not least from haldane Mcfall in The Studio, gave him the impetus to plan a
permanent move to france. his father died the next year and despite a small inheritance he was, in addition, obliged to
sell his gold watch, a complete set of Beardsley’s The Yellow Book and some furniture. fergusson was ideally placed to take
advantage of the opportunities that a move to Paris would present: he was independent, confident, rebellious and firmly
focused on his own artistic agenda. But at the same time he was quite open to change, to new ideas and experiences.
the date for our picture is 1904, and it could well have been in the exhibition the following year (Blyth acquired
it from the scottish Gallery in 1949). the edwardian resort of Paris Plage (see note on page 65) provided a range of
subject matter for both Peploe and fergusson and the bustle of the streets behind was a favourite. Both painters would
wait a year or two before using a palette which would ally them with european fauvism but already the freedom of
application, with strong colour notes – a sort of Whistlerian Impressionism – makes these exciting small panels unique
in British painting.
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JD fergusson (1874–1961)
Paris Plage, 1904
oil on panel, 19 x 24 cms
signed verso
exhibited:
aitken Dott & son, the scottish Gallery, 1949 (no.23)
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Blyth bought three hunters the other two being still lifes now in the Kirkcaldy Museum collection. this small, beautifully
painted oil is unusual in hunter’s oeuvre for its subject. The Showcase is to be illustrated in William smith’s forthcoming
biography of hunter where he writes: “silhouetting form against a light background and displaying an almost oriental
sense of decoration is evident in The Showcase. the vases, jars and bowl are arranged by shape – long, short or squat – on
the various levels of the sideboard. then to enliven a potentially static display, hunter adorns the largest vase with a
magnificent display of foliage and picks out accents of bright colour in the other vases. the piece of furniture is still in
the possession of hunter’s family.”
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George leslie hunter (1877–1931)
The Showcase, c. 1921
oil on panel, 30.5 x 23 cms
signed upper right
exhibited:
aitken Dott & son, the scottish Gallery, 1953
A Selection of Modern Scottish, English and French Paintings,
art Council Gallery, edinburgh, 1956, (no. 13)
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Grant first visited Cassis in 1927 and returned most summers until the outbreak of war. He was accompanied by his
partner Vanessa Bell and the presence each summer of many of their friends, including Virginia and Leonard Woolf,
staying at La Bergère, a substantial cottage in the grounds of a château a mile or so inland, led to the town being known
as Bloomsbury-by-Sea. Samuel John Peploe was there also in 1924, ’28 and ’30 but it is not known whether they met.
The Tate Gallery holds an archive of photographs of Grant working on canvases in the ground of the house
and our picture is without doubt a view across the fields towards the Château with the high escarpment rising in the
distance. In his portraits, Omega designs and murals Grant seems a modernist and he is present in all the survey shows
and ‘movements’ which shape our understanding of the development of British modernism. In front of the landscape he
is essentially an impressionist and Cassis is a perfect example; fresh, direct; true to place and to the day it was painted.
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Duncan Grant (1885–1978)
Cassis
oil on canvas, 46 x 65 cms
signed lower right
exhibited:
aitken Dott & son, the scottish Gallery, edinburgh, 1945
A Selection of Modern Scottish, English and French Paintings, art Council Gallery, edinburgh, 1956, (no. 10)
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Lily McDougall was born in Glasgow but was trained in Edinburgh, followed by further studies at The Hague, Antwerp
and then Paris where she worked from 1904–06. Her primary subject matter was still life and flower scenes, painted in
oil as well as watercolour. She lived in Edinburgh for most of her life, first exhibiting at the Royal Scottish Academy in
1900. She was a founding member of the Society of Scottish Women Artists, which was reformed as Visual Arts Scotland
in 1999. An award in her name and to her fellow member Anne Redpath is still given every year in recognition of both
artists. She had two solo exhibitions at The Scottish Gallery during her lifetime. This charming oil was purchased from
the Gallery at her second show in 1955.
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lily McDougall (1875–1958)
The Little Posy
oil on panel, 26 x 18 cms
exhibited:
Lily McDougall Retrospective Exhibition, the scottish Gallery, 1955, (no.14)
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Walter Richard Sickert was born in Germany in 1860 and can be seen as one of the most influential British artists of
the 20th century. Sickert’s adoption of new and daring subject matter, twinned with a loose, suggestive handling of
paint directly influenced the Camden Town Group and the Euston Road School, as well as heralding many international
developments of the 20th century. His subject matter included depictions of ordinary people in urban environments,
music hall, theatre and the demi-monde themes much influenced by his mentor Degas, who he had first met in Paris in
1883. His adoption of social realistic subject matter, often with sexual undertones, had not been seen before in British
art and was considered deeply shocking at the time.
Sickert exhibited a series of paintings in the Leicester Galleries in 1937, based on 19th century illustrative
engravings published in popular magazines, the sources of the painting often inscribed in the lower corner – as we see in
this example The Holocaust, after Mary Ellen Edwards. These ‘English Echoes’ as they came to be known appeared to have
little or no link with his earlier work. Some admirers of Sickert of were alarmed by these seemingly static scenes and
regarded them as a decline in the painter’s artistic ability. However they did enjoy success, examples being purchased by
the Louvre and the National Gallery. By appropriating images from popular culture Sickert prefigures Pop Art by twenty
years and emphasizes the ambiguity of the relationship between subject and viewer.
Between 1930 and his death in 1942, Sickert’s paint texture grew drier, the application of it sparser and his
engagement with his subject less direct, painting more and more from photographs. Lillian Browse, from whom Blyth
bought several Sickerts from during the 1940s, did not like the later work; she remembers arguing with Blyth about the
matter. She recalled, “He liked the late Sickerts too; I didn’t, preferring the ‘rich juicy paint’ and we constantly used to
tease and argue.” Although Miss Browse acknowledged that Blyth “was a passionate lover of Sickert and always adamant
in his choice.”
Walter Richard Sickert (1860–1942)
The Holocaust after Mary Ellen Edwards, c.1937
Oil on canvas, 71 x 46 cms
Signed lower right and inscribed with title lower left
Exhibited:
Leicester Galleries, London, 1937
Aitken Dott & Son, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1942
Literature:
Wendy Baron, Sickert Paintings and Drawings, (Yale University Press,
New Haven and London, 2006) p. 515, no. 659
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In 1934 sickert was elected a Royal academician, it was the same year a subscription amongst his friends and followers
was made to enable him to work without financial anxiety – he had been perilously close to bankruptcy. In late November
he signed a three year lease on a house in Broadstairs, st. Peters-in-thanet near Margate. sickert’s art was becoming
more and more photo-based; his subject matter was not conditioned by his geographical location. It was at this time he
did a series of pictures based on photographs of real life events, including the Grand National, a celebrity wedding and
two full length portraits of King edward VIII around the time of his abdication. this landscape of Broadstairs, looking
diagonally across a garden fence toward a row of trees with a town behind is characteristic of the work he produced at
this time. the subject matter is uncluttered, with an emphasis on the contrast between light and shadow empahsised by
the dry, thin application of paint. this painting will have been made from a photograph and not from direct observation.
By alienating himself from the subject (to escape from what Degas referred to as “the tyranny of nature”) sickert is free
to focus on the careful tonal relationships, and the application of paint on canvas. the chalky texture of the picture,
scrubbed dry onto a coarse surface was typical of other paintings depicting Bath made in the late 1930s. the colour
palette is cool and controlled, and suggests summer heat. the choice of such an uncompromising view is testament to
sickert’s artistic drive to find beauty in the urban mundane.
a picture of the same title was thought to have been recently destroyed in the search of traces of sickert’s DNa
by Patricia Cornell – the american author who believes Walter sickert to be the infamous murderer Jack the Ripper.
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Walter Richard sickert (1860–1942)
Broadstairs, 1940
oil on canvas, 61.5 x 51 cms
signed lower right
exhibited:
aitken Dott & son, the scottish Gallery, 1943
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Lumsden was born in London but came to study in Edinburgh where, with his wife the printmaker Mable Royds, he
became associated with much avant-garde practice between the Wars. He was an accomplished printmaker also and his
book on etching, The Art of Etching, is still a standard text. Together he and Royds travelled twice to India so that Street
in Jaipur will have been painted on one these visits during the Great War. In oil and watercolour he is close to John
Lavery and both painters’ landscapes are characterized by thin washes of paint, a limited palette and exquisite drawing
with the brush.
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ernest stephen lumsden (1883–1948)
A Street in Jaipur
oil on board, 23 x 32 cms
signed lower right
exhibited:
aitken Dott & son, the scottish Gallery, 1940
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McBey was born into rural poverty in Aberdeenshire and died with homes in America, London and Tangier. He began
work in a bank in Aberdeen aged 15 but was inspired to teach himself etching from a library book and by 1911 was
able to exhibit his Scottish and Dutch etchings at the Goupil Gallery in London. He made some powerful images on the
Western Front and then became an official war artist attached to the Palestine Expeditionary Force making some of his
most celebrated etched images including Dawn Patrol. He visited Venice first in 1925 and over the next five years made
a series of etchings culminating in the extraordinary Venetian Night of 1930. He worked directly in front of the subject,
using a motorbike mirror so they would print in the right direction. He also painted several beautiful, Impressionist
views of Venice from the Lagoon with a sailing boat. Our picture relates to an etching of the next year which is equally
freely rendered.
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James McBey (1883–1959)
Venice Grand Canal, 1925
oil on canvas, 59 x 100 cms
signed and dated lower right
exhibited:
la société des Beaux-arts, Glasgow, 1926
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Published by The Scottish Gallery to coincide with the exhibition
the taste of jw blyth
4 - 28 July 2012
Exhibition can be viewed online at www.scottish-gallery.co.uk/jwblyth
ISBN 978-1-905146-67-3
Designed by www.kennethgray.co.uk
Photography by William Van Esland Photography
Printed by J Thomson Colour Printers
We are grateful to Peter Arkell for unrestricted access to his
1987 St Andrews undergraduate thesis: The John W Blyth Collection.
We also give thanks to the Portillo family.
All rights reserved. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced
in any form by print, photocopy or by any other means, without
the permission of the copyright holders and of the publishers.
16 Dundas Street, Edinburgh EH3 6HZ
Tel 0131 558 1200 Email mail@scottish-gallery.co.uk
Web www.scottish-gallery.co.uk
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