The Glasgow Boys

There’s a wonderful exhibition at the Royal Academy, running until the end of January. I’d never heard of the Glasgow Boys before, but I was struck by one of the posters on the tube, and found the time to go this week.

These comments are from the Royal Academy website, where you can also find the opening times, etc.

The Royal Academy of Arts presents the first major exhibition in London for over 40 years to celebrate the achievement of the Glasgow Boys, the loosely knit group of young painters who created a stir at home and abroad in the final decades of the nineteenth century.

The exhibition features over 80 oil paintings, watercolours and pastels from public and private collections by such artists as Guthrie, Lavery, Melville, Crawhall, Walton, Henry and Hornel. Together they presented a new art, which had a major impact at home and abroad in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. The resultant works were, from c. 1880 to 1900, among the most experimental and ambitious to be produced in the UK.

Taking inspiration from such French Naturalist painters as Bastien-Lepage and also from Whistler, the Glasgow Boys produced some of the most revolutionary painting in Britain, drawing praise in London, Munich, Vienna and further afield. Their symbolist pictures were admired and emulated in secessionist circles in Germany and Austria.

The exhibition maps the Glasgow Boys’ responses in both subject matter and technique to developments in art which were taking place in Paris in the 1870s and 1880s. These artists sought to liberate their art from the staid, dark toned narrative paintings being produced in Glasgow and Edinburgh in order to explore the effects of realist subject matter and the particular effects of light captured through working out of doors, directly in front of the motif.

The themes of the earlier works were certainly naturalistic, but many of the figures had a formality and stillness that reminded me of the paintings of Piero della Francesca.

Here are people caught up in the most ordinary activities (waiting for a ferry, digging potatoes, walking home from the fields), yet somehow involved in a hidden ritual, a carefully choreographed dance – as if their inner poise resulted from an assurance that they had a place in a larger order. Something contemplative about them. I don’t think this is just the artist (or myself) romanticising rural life. I think it’s about a human dignity that has been rendered visually through the individual compositions.

And I loved the colours. As maymay1 commented on the Guardian website (see below): “I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many beautiful shades of green.”

There are interesting reviews here from the Guardian, and the Telegraph; and you can see a slide show here of eight of the pictures.

It’s well worth seeing.