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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
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