Download a PDF of the exhibition catalogue - The Scottish Gallery

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:
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