The Glasgow Boys (also known as the Glasgow School) rejected the traditional art of the dominant Edinburgh artistic elite in favour of the realist works of French artists such as Millais and Bastien-Lepage. They also admired the American painter, James McNeil Whistler.
The artists mentioned in this article represent the nucleus of the Glasgow Boys but there were other artists who drifted through the Group and who influenced them.
The Glasgow Boys and The Scottish Art Establishment
The acceptable style of Scottish painting in the mid to late nineteenth century was determined in the main by Queen Victoria’s love of Scotland. As a result, romantic landscapes, society portraits and sentimental pictures of the poor dominated the Edinburgh Academy and the Glasgow Institute.
However, a few modern paintings from Europe and London found space on the walls of the Institute exhibitions, offering a rare view of radical developments in the art world beyond Scotland. Young painters were inspired by French paintings of agricultural life and work depicted with realism and a lack of moral tone.
Who Were the Glasgow Boys?
The Glasgow Boys did not form a self-conscious grouping, but became united whilst exploring alternative ways of working. Nor did they all come from Glasgow, but some were connected through family contacts to the Glasgow shipbuilding industry or professions such as architecture or the law. The Glasgow Boys would reflect the tenacity of this new industrialism in their fight to be accepted by the art establishment.
And a hard fight it would be. In 1877 four of the future Glasgow Boys ( James Guthrie, Edward Arthur Walton, James Paterson and William York Macgregor) were all refused membership of the Glasgow Arts Club. Unable to study art in London, Guthrie opted for art classes at the St Mungo Art Society in Glasgow, a simple club free from artistic constraints. Here he met Walton and Joseph Crowhall.
Paterson and MacGregor had gone to school together and both studied at Glasgow School of Art. However, MacGregor left to study at the Slade in London. Here he became familiar with French realist painting through his tutor who was a friend of Edgar Degas.
The Glasgow Boys – Painting en plein air
As individuals some Glasgow Boys would travel all over the world, including Japan and Morocco, to paint. But in the late nineteenth century the hot-house atmosphere of the Parisian cutting-edge art world was the place to be. Amongst those Glasgow Boys who worked in draughty Paris studios and whose paths crossed were James Paterson, Alexander Roche, Thomas Millie Dow, William Kennedy and John Lavery.
All the Glasgow Boys were united by their enthusiasm for the French habit of painting outdoors in natural light – a method known as plein air. Plein air painting was initiated by the Baribizon artists, a group of painters who, in 1848, worked in the village of Barbizon, near Fontainebleu in France. Influenced by John Constable, their aim was to counteract Romanticism and bring a new reality to their work by painting rural life without sentimentality. Paul Gauguin worked en plein air in Brittany whilst developing his increasingly Symbolist style.
Enthused by the new naturalism, those Glasgow Boys who spent time in Paris studios also worked together in the French village of Grez-sur-Loing. Similarly, back in Scotland the Boys spent time in the village of Cockburnspath in Berwickshire which served the same objective – a new realism, freshness of colour, an interest in tonality and bold, visible brush-strokes.
Their subjects, the agricultural labourers and peasants, were painted with a dignity usually reserved for society portraits (click here for James Guthrie Old Willie) and a monumentality normally associated with history painting. (Click here for James Guthrie: A Highland Funeral.)
The Glasgow Boys – Acceptance by the Establishment
The Glasgow Boys found respect and acknowledgement in London, America and in Europe. Their work became less naturalist and developed a more decorative, linear and Symbolist approach. Some of their work came to be exhibited at the Royal Academy in London, but what they ultimately desired was acceptance by their own Scottish art establishment.
As the years went by many of the Boys did become acceptable to the Scottish art establishment by compromising their art. Others drifted away from Scotland altogether to pursue their own projects or to protect their artistic integrity. Ties of friendship were inevitably broken.
Whilst never quite relinquishing all they had learned from their foreign experiences, for some of the Boys inevitably the paintings of agricultural labourers gave way to more profitable portrait paintings, often influenced by Whistler, or depictions of the lives of the rich middle classes. Amongst the inevitable backward-looking subjects, some fine pieces of work were produced which showed middle class life in a realistic light. In particular, The Tennis Match by John Lavery, although not popular with the Scottish establishment, was an extraordinary example of realism applied to a modern subject.
The Glasgow Boys – Their Legacy
The Glasgow Boys, products of a mighty industrial city and acknowledged as masters of naturalism on the continent and America, were unappreciated in Britain for many years. Now, however, they have been given their rightful place in British art history.
Despite the conservatism of their later years and their rejection of artists like Matisse, the dogged determinism of the Glasgow Boys paved the way for the next generation of great British painters – the Scottish Colourists.
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Source:
The Glasgow Boys by Roger Billcliffe (John Murray, 1985)
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