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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
Page 1: the taste of JW Blyth
Page 5 and 6: Foreword Michael Portillo I knew my
Page 7 and 8: elevation plan to Wilby house, 1909
Page 9 and 10: Collecting Blyth kept a simple reco
Page 11 and 12: the hawcklymuir factory, Kirkcaldy
Page 13 and 14: and Explanatory Notes on the Art of
Page 15 and 16: Peploe in terms of colour: ‘altho
Page 17: Blyth’s conversion was certainly
Page 22 and 23: Most contemporary publications, exh
Page 24 and 25: a warning of what we have escaped i
Page 26 and 27: Vale “No plans were ever made for
Page 28 and 29: catalogue Eugène Boudin was born i
Page 30 and 31: “everything that is painted on th
Page 32 and 33: Wintour was born in Edinburgh and a
Page 34 and 35: Two years senior to his great frien
Page 36 and 37: Paintings by William McTaggart, R.S
Page 38 and 39: there are a number of pictures of R
Page 40 and 41: In July 1947 Blyth bought a picture
Page 42 and 43: “The remarkable place which he ho
Page 44 and 45: “To few men has a more beautiful
Page 46 and 47: Wingate’s first arran subject exh
Page 48 and 49: Wingate’s Farm seems close in spi
Page 50 and 51: Alexander was born in Edinburgh, so
Page 52 and 53: edwin alexander (1870-1926) Moorlan
Page 54 and 55: edwin alexander (1870-1926) Doves a
Page 56 and 57: edwin alexander (1870-1926) Gullane
Page 58 and 59: edwin alexander (1870-1926) Storeho
Page 61 and 62: s.J. Peploe (1871-1935) The Lobster
Page 64 and 65: Peploe is strongly associated with
Page 66 and 67: Comrie is a village on the River ea
Page 68 and 69:
s.J. Peploe (1871-1935) Paris Plage
Page 70 and 71:
s.J. Peploe (1871-1935) Royan, 1910
Page 72 and 73:
Peploe began to visit the south-wes
Page 74 and 75:
fergusson held his first one-man-sh
Page 76 and 77:
Blyth bought three hunters the othe
Page 78 and 79:
Grant first visited Cassis in 1927
Page 80 and 81:
Lily McDougall was born in Glasgow
Page 82:
Walter Richard Sickert was born in
Page 85 and 86:
Walter Richard sickert (1860-1942)
Page 87 and 88:
ernest stephen lumsden (1883-1948)
Page 89 and 90:
James McBey (1883-1959) Venice Gran
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