EXCELLENT IONAS

A  fine auction of modern Scottish painting is coming up on June 9 2016 at Lyon and Turnbull in Edinburgh. There are several works from the Wood collection. That is the eminent surgeon Walter Quarry Wood who was President of the RCS in Edinburgh.Some of the works from the sale are shown below. This is a treat for those who love Iona paintings by Cadell and Peploe. The standard here and with the great majority of works in this auction is rather high.You can see that here below.

Sandbank and the Sound of Mull: FCB Cadell (Wood Coll)

Roina in the Sound of Mull:FCB Cadell.(Wood Coll)

Ben More from Clachanach: FCB Cadell

Iona Abbey: S J Peploe (Wood Coll)

LISMORE AND BENDERLOCH BY ADAM BRUCE THOMSON

Two paintings-the first a watercolour and the second an oil, by the eminent Scottish artist Adam Bruce Thomson, have just been sold by Lyon&Turnbull in Edinburgh. They represent places I know and like and for me they raise questions about artistic   licence. To me they are pleasant  works but they raise the kind of thoughts that chime with Constable's views about painting and what he calls manner. I think that manner is dominant here.I think it is the easiest and most seductive state for artists to pursue. You might call it poetic licence-and I would agree that there is no doubting the charm of Thomson's work.

Castle Coeffin, Lismore: Adam Bruce Thomson

Castle Coeffin,2015.

Caastle Coeffin,by Adam Bruce Thomson 

Castle Coeffin on Lismore is presented by Thomson in his watercolour as an apparently mighty stronghold perched on a towering cliff in what looks like an extremely strong defensive position. A cottage appears below and gives a considerable effect to the scale of gigantism There is a croft nearby but the scale here is extraordinary.If you visit Castle Coeffin the main ruin appears as if sitting on a humpy piece of grassland; you must descend a steep and rough path to get there. There is a croft near the castle but not quite in this position.

From the Mull ferry, for example, you can just see it as a stump, like a broken tooth in the distance. Close at hand it is still not vastly impressive and I doubt if it can have changed much in the decades since Thomson's visit.In the painting it appears as a much more upright and substantial run than it is now. The hills across Loch Linnhe seem to be put in for some kind of rhythm.The colour in the painting is perhaps its best point, it is very harmonious.

The pen drawing once again exaggerates proportions. The cliffs in the distance are rather perfunctory.It is interesting to see the land around the castle has hay stooks.

Thomson's view of the Dun at Benderloch is an equally striking image with richer colour.There are cliffs as you come up from Connel to the village so I am presuming a viewpoint to the west of them It is good in showing the dramatic light and shade effects which you get on a day of rain and sun. There is a rainbow to be seen over the crags and the sky in the east has a lowering appearance which suggests that more rain is coming.The glimpse of sea in the distance and light picks out some rocks above the water. You might be looking towards Loch Etive.

CADELL'S VIEW OF EILEAN ANNHRAID, IONA

Another post as a follow up to Philip MacLeod Coupe's identification of painting sites for Cadell and Peploe on Iona, (see passim). This comparison is not in Coupe.

The watercolour was once with the Bourne Fine Arts. The view shows the small island of Eilean Annraidh the foreground and in the distance the cliffs of Gribun on the right and the small islands in Loch na Keal.The difference between the landscape in the photo and the landscape in the painting (apart from the weather)is that the machair has extended-rather than as sometimes happens diminished since Cadell's time.Cadell's viewpoint seems to have been somewhere approximately on Ard Annraidh.

THE BASSANO BRIDGE BY CHARLES HODGE MACKIE

The Bassano Bridge:woodblock print by Charles Hodge Mackie

A copy of this large woodblock print by Charles Hodge Mackie is to be sold by Lyon and Turnbull in Edinburgh on 18/05/2016. Mackie died in 1920 and one can see this print as an example from the movement to use the Japanese woodblock tradition in a European context. This print measures approx 20" square. I have not attempted to work out how many blocks were used but it may be fewer than one suspects-given that careful inking of different areas can sometimes allow the use of relatively few blocks.It is something of a creative experiment. I suspect that he isn't really interested in the concept of an edition and that each print is an individual creation.Because of the labour involved in this kind of work the number of examples produced will be small.

Mackie seems to be an interesting artist, Personally I can only recall seeing one of his works.It was another copy of the Bassano Bridge. But the fact that he  met modern French artists in the 1880s and that he was a friend of Hornel the Kircudbright artist should make us alert to the possibility that we are dealing with an artist to be investigated. In fact a book on Mackie has been announced and will be published later this year, and in four years (2020) there will be an exhibition of his work in Edinburgh.

The Bluebell Wood: woodblock print by Charles Hodge Mackie

The Bluebell Wood: woodblock print by Charles Hodge Mackie

Venetian Terrace; woodblock print by Charles Hodge Mackie.

Forthcoming book-late 2016,by Pat Clark

IONA NORTH END- THEMES FROM PEPLOE AND CADELL

I  have been to Iona recently and as an artist  with a strong interest in Cadell and Peploe paintings of Iona one of the first places I made for  was the North End and the White Strand.I did not take Coupe with me to the scene but preferred to walk around and hopefully produce some reasonably composed photos of this iconic area.So here are some illustrations which show one of the  favourite areas where they painted.These identifications could scarcely have been made without Mr Coupe's excellent book. My review is here. One or two of the works I illustrate are not mentioned by him. There is no implied criticism. The number of Iona works Cadell and Pepoe produced is high and to illustrate them all would  require  a huge book. All the paintings ( and therefore photographs) have viewpoints literally within yards of each other amongst  the variety of curiously formed rocks- often quite tall when seen from beach level.

S Peploe: Cathedral Rock, Iona. (sold Lyon& Turnbull,
For comparison see photo below. Not in Coupe.

Cadell's view of Cathedral Rock.Staffa on the horizon. Note the pyramidal split stones which appear about half way up this painting. Also seen in the Peploe above.Coupe does not seem to mention them.You could call them the "Split Pyramid".Not in Coupe.

Cadell's view of the same area. Not in Coupe.(Hunterian circa 1923)

Cadell's painting  (Hunterian circa 1923) featuring a similar viewpoint to Peploe's below.See Coupe page 124.Also below and penultimate photo .

 S Peploe:Little Pinnacle on Right and  part of Pulpit Rock on left of painting.

For this painting in the Hunterian we can imagine Cadell working somewhere to the top left of the beach shown below where you can see Cathedral Rock and a flat "Table Rock" as I shall call it.See below. Coupe p 144.

White Strand Iona: Cathedral Rock on left, Pulpit Rock crouching like a lion on right. with Eilean Annrhaid  upper right.The "Little Pinnacle" is on the extreme right of the photo."Table Rock" -my name for it -is just to the right of Cathedral Rock.

Rocks at the North End: Cows Rock in middle distance and Ross of Mull on horizon.
This photo corresponds very closely with Peploe's painting of the same subject which is plate 137 in Coupe.In this case the sand has come back-it was not apparent in his photo of 2009.

Now that I have my own copy of the book Iona Portrayed by Jessica Christian and Charles Stiller  I can see that some of my work was already done. The authors have a nice double page spread of paintings of Pulpit Rock. This very pleasant book records the multitude of other artists who painted Iona.
Last Revised 17/08/15.

My main post about Philip Coupe's excellent book is here.

ARTHUR MELVILLE-A BRILLIANT WATERCOLOURIST

If you should ask me for the name of the cleverest, most cunning watercolourist of all I would unhesitatingly propose the name of Arthur Melville. This Scotsman who lived only for 46 years and died in 1904, evolved a complex and extraordinarily rich method of working. This can be described but it is difficult to comprehend without examination of the work itself.

Melville is at the  extreme of the nineteenth century  trend to elaborate and more complex effects which earlier masters such as J R Cozens would scarcely have recognised. It isn't difficult to describe the mehanics of Melville's technique. The more important aspects of how he visualised and developed his work is another matter. The certainties and ambiguities which he allows are what matters here. Not everything is painted with overall Pre-Raphaelite evenness-far from it. Blots and pools of watercolour are all part of the process.And so is the lifting or wiping out of colour. Melville is  master of the lost and found contour.

His  watercolour subjects are typically either Scottish landscapes, scenes from southern English  landscape or  Spanish andOrientalist subjects. His brilliant technique is particularly suitable for the painting of intense contrasts of light and shade.

HIS TECHNIQUE

Take a sheet of watercolour paper and flood it with an even coating of white. Let  this dry and repeat the process if you wish.

If you have already painted in watercolour you may be thinking, "What, do you really mean that I should paint on such a surface? Won't the wash become immediately corrupted by the underlying white?" My answer is that will surely happen if you are indecisive and push the paint about too much. But if you are certain and unhesitating in placing your colour, you should not have a problem.This should give you some idea of the deliberateness of Melville's method. Some considerable previsualisation  must be happening here. And  you would be right.You can hardly establish an architectural setting without considerable forethought. The painting of figures and groups of figures and animals is another matter.

A Moorish Procession-National Gallery of Scotland

The human element, often a crowd or group of figures is  treated as a group and not as an assembly of individuals. Once you start to look for individuals you will see the economy with which Melville works. Some parts are vague and appear almost as ghost images do on a photographic negative.In the original of the work shown above the  animal at left appears as a wraith like figure. So too the persons next to it.

The Little Bullfight "Bravo Toro!" Victoria & Albert Museum

This technique  allows the artist to remove or sponge out paint so that a figure may appear as partly solid ad partly wraith like through the trace left behind. Melville exploits this in Bravo Toro where the dust and smoke of a bullring are evoked. He does not paint a dust cloud over figures but rather sponges out something which is already there.Sponging out is a venerable watercolour technique but here Melville is wiping into the original white ground beneath-hence the peculiar subtlety of the blurring effect. Certainty and ambiguity once more.

When the white ground is dry you may work on it.Very liquid washes may be appropriate, so too puddles of very wet paint, also blots and abstract dabs which may meld together in the eye to produce an image.If you want to make a correction you may use a sponge or rag and remove the paint with it. You will be left with a white ground as a blurred, unfocused patch.The white ground gives added luminosity to the
work-all the more essential for these orientalist paintings.

There are accounts of him placing a sheet of glass over a painting so that he could try out the effects  he was working with. I am a little sceptical about that idea because  glass is not receptive to watercolour. But even if untrue it does say something about the artist's attitude to his craft.

There is little literature on Melville and most is rare and extremely expensive to purchase.The clearest short account is in  volume three of Martin Hardie's history of British Watercolour Painters.

Excellent news: The National Gallery of Scotland is planning an exhibition on Arthur Melville from Oct 10 2015 to 17 Jan 2016.This will be the first substantial grouping of his work in a generation and will hopefully result in a good catalogue with excellent illustrations.

Water-Colour Painting in Britain, Vol 3, The Victorian Period,by  Martin Hardie, London 1968.

That's Gneiss-Glenfinlas Again

Ruskin in Glenfinlas. This is Millais' portrait of the author.

The Glenfinlas burn, photo by JH . 2013.

I was in Glenfinlas last week, never for long enough, I'm sure.But this time I did get down to view the site of Ruskin's portrait by Millais. I climbed down twice. Once the hard way and then the somewhat easier .The hard way is not to be recommended, for one thing there are bilberries(?) growing on the bank and for another the easy way is just a bit more practical with a DSLR and tripod. Do it the easier way and you get the view which Millais saw.(Hint,turn to the left under a beech as you approach the new viewing platform.)

You can see the rock on which JR stood in the foreground of my photo and the curve of the darker rock which is also visible in the painting behind it.The whole scene was of considerable importance for Ruskin whose geological interests still seem to await attention from someone in that discipline.He said himself that he often stood in such a pose meditating on nature.One notion of Ruskin's which Lutyens quotes is his idea that Glenfinlas would be a good site for Millais to work in because he habitually painted brightly-which this shaded spot would scarcely permit.

There were very considerable practical difficulties in making the painting, certainly in so far as the work that was done in Glenfinlas.There are reports of Acland holding the canvas  at one point while Millais worked on it. There is  Millais' own account of his lonely autumnal sojourn when he had to return and had a kind of makeshift shelter constructed complete with woodburning stove.It wasn't very efficient, he said, but the smell of the woodsmoke was pleasant. It scarcely seems possible that Millais could have worked in such a cramped and uncomfortable area.But toil he did and it is to the credit of Alastair Grieve that the site was rediscovered in the 1960s.

The best acount of the circumstances surrounding the commission is still: Millais and the Ruskins-by Mary Lutyens.

For another post on the portrait look here