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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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