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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.
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