Download a PDF of the exhibition catalogue - The Scottish Gallery

“To few men has a more beautiful vision of the world been granted than that revealed in his pictures. His landscapes bring
us close in touch with that poetry of earth which Keats assures us is never dead, and, if one loves nature well, they must
assuredly awaken a responsive thrill. They are reminiscent of all times and seasons, but most of hours when winds are
soft and Nature smiles. They breathe of country lanes and sunlit fields, of dewy pastures, of quivering leaves and hay or
hawthorn-scented breezes. To the majority of men, consigned by fate to toil in stony cities, communion with Nature
and the content and joy it brings is granted seldom, but, if they may not meet her face to face, pictures such as these,
drenched in her spirit, bring her very near.”
James Caw, Scottish Painting, (T.C. and E.C. Jack, London, 1908), p.320
Wingate was born at Kelvinheugh near Glasgow and came late to art enrolling in the Trustees Academy aged 26,
encouraged by his friend WD Mackay. He lived from 1881 in Muthill in Perthshire and his paintings of rural life depict a
disappearing world. He then moved to Colinton in Edinburgh and became increasingly a painter of atmospheric effects.
He was a very successful and prolific painter exhibiting 225 pictures in the RSA in his lifetime and showing four times
with The Scottish Gallery from 1900 where his Memorial show was mounted in 1924.
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