<b>Andrew Cranston</b>
(b. 1969)
 

 Andrew Cranston ) is a Scottish painter. His work has been reviewed and discussed in various publications such as The Guardian and The Spectator.
Andrew Cranston exhibited work at East International in 2007 and had a solo exhibition at International Project Space in Birmingham entitled What a Man Does in the Privacy of his Own Attic is his Affair in 2009.
But the dream had no sound (27 October - 21 December 2018) is the largest exhibition of Cranston's work of his career to date, that took place at the Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh. The work, a series of paintings on hardback book covers, was described by the Scotsman as drawing its inspiration from post-impressionism, reminiscent of artists such as Bonnard, Vuillard, Seurat or Signac.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Cranston

Those who hide well live well
2022
Distemper on linen
210,4 x 150,6 cm
National Galleries Scotland
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/fr/art-and-artists/257107

In Those who hide well, live well, Cranston paints the view of a woodland from an interior setting inspired by the top-floor flat in Glasgow that he moved into during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. He enjoys sitting by the window (the translucent figure in the lower left corner could be him) and watching the morning sun come through the canopy of 80-foot-tall beech trees which stand outside the flats. The forest is Cranston’s preferred natural habitat: he grew up in Hawick, a town surrounded by woods and forests. Albrecht Altdorfer’s painting Saint George in the Forest, 1510 (Alte Pinakothek, Munich) influenced Cranston’s decision to make the woodland the focal point of this painting. He intended to show what he describes as a ‘gentle ghostly sense of habitation’, as the tortoise, watermelon, and pot of tea in the foreground create an environment of comfort. The title is a translation from a Latin quote by Cicero, which Cranston felt captured his appreciation of the intimate aspects of the forced isolation during the Covid-19 lockdown.

Ken Currie
(b. 1960)
 

Ken Currie is a Scottish artist and a graduate of Glasgow School of Art (1978–1983). Ken grew up in industrial Glasgow. This has had a significant influence on his early works. In the 1980s Currie produced a series of works that romanticised Red Clydeside depicting heroic Dockworkers, Shop-stewards and urban areas along the River Clyde. These works were also in response to then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's policies that he believed were the greatest threat to culture of labour.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Currie

Three Oncologists
(Professor RJ Steele, Professor Sir Alfred Cuschieri and Professor Sir David P Lane)
2002
Oil on canvas
195 x 243,8 cm
National Galleries Scotland
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/65127/three-oncologists-professor-rj-steele-professor-sir-alfred-cuschieri-and-professor-sir-david-p-lane

 

The men represented in this painting are professors in the Department of Surgery and Molecular Oncology at Ninewells Hospital and Medical School in Dundee. The Head of Department and Professor of Surgery, Sir Alfred Cuschieri, is in the centre. Sir David Lane, Professor of Molecular Oncology is on the right. On the left is surgeon Professor Steele. All three men appear to have been disturbed in the middle of their duties: Professor Steele has blood on his hands and Sir Alfred Cuschieri is holding a medical implement. The luminous quality of the paint makes the figures look almost ghostly, expressing the sense of horror and anxiety associated with cancer.

Alison Watt
(b. 1965)
 

Alison Watt OBE FRSE RSA is a British painter who first came to national attention while still at college when she won the 1987 Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery in London.
Watt's work has been widely exhibited. Her paintings are held in many public collections, including the National Portrait Gallery, London, Glasgow Museums, Aberdeen Art Gallery, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Scottish Parliament Art Collection, Southampton City Art Gallery, the Freud Museum, London, The Fleming Collection, London, the British Council, and the Uffizi Gallery, Florence. In 2012, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery purchased her painting Self-portrait (1986/7) from her private collection for £20,000, to celebrate re-opening after a refurbishment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alison_Watt_(Scottish_painter)

Sabine
2000
Oil on Canvas
213,5 x 231,5 cm
National Galleries Scotland
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/59538

 

Sabine comes from a series of four paintings entitled Shift that Watt showed in an exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 2000. She was inspired by the sensuous nature of the fabric that features in Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres's paintings of women. Watt found a way of representing the body using the shapes created in fabric, focusing on the suggestive power of material. In this monumental painting, the meticulously painted folds and creases of the fabric evoke the human figure and create a sense of rhythm and movement.

Gerhard Richter
(b. 1932)
 

Gerhard Richter is a German visual artist. Richter has produced abstract as well as photorealistic paintings, and also photographs and glass pieces. He is widely regarded as one of the most important contemporary German artists and several of his works have set record prices at auction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Richter

 

Abstraktes Bild [Abstract Painting]
1994
Oil on Canvas
230 x 204,8 cm
National Galleries Scotland
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/67591

 

Richter's lusciously coloured, abstract paintings appear to be in the tradition of both American Abstract Expressionism and German expressionist painting. However, the artist undermines the heroic and emotive tendencies of these styles by painting in a detached and mechanical manner. Richter's abstract paintings relate to a series of works in which he paints images from photographs but blurs them slightly to remove the focus from their composition and subject matter. This painting has been created by dragging a board over the canvas to smear the paint and reveal the layers underneath. In other words, he 'blurs' what he himself has painted.

Calum Colvin
(b. 1961)
 

Calum Colvin OBE RSA is a Scottish artist whose work combines photography, painting, and installation, and often deals with issues of Scottish identity and culture and with the history of art. He has had solo exhibitions at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, and Royal Scottish Academy and has a number of works in the collections of the National Galleries of Scotland, Tate Galleries, and the British Council. He is also Professor of Fine Art Photography and Programme Director, Art & Media at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, part of the University of Dundee.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calum_Colvin

Untitled, from 'Constructed Narratives'
1985
Cibachrome colour print
25,3 x 20,3 cm
National Galleries Scotland
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/fr/art-and-artists/10446

Alexander Moffat
(b. 1943)
 

Alexander Moffat OBE RSA  known as Sandy Moffat, is a painter, author, philosopher, and teacher. Examples of Moffat's work are held in the collections of the National Galleries of Scotland, the Russell-Cotes art gallery, the University of Edinburgh, Fife Council, the University of St Andrews, the Museum of the Isles, the Orkney Islands Council, the North Ayrshire Council, and the Royal Scottish Academy of Art and Architecture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Moffat

Poets' Pub
1980
Oil on Canvas
183 x 244 cm
National Galleries Scotland
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/8217

Moffat's group portrait is an imaginary vision of the major Scottish poets and writers of the second half of the twentieth century gathered around the central figure of Hugh MacDiarmid. From left to right, they are: Norman MacCaig, Hugh MacDiarmid, Sorley Maclean, Iain Crichton Smith, George Mackay Brown, Sydney Goodsir Smith, Edwin Morgan and Robert Garioch. In the foreground is Alan Bold and, on the steps behind, the art critic, John Tonge. The setting is an amalgam of the interiors of their favourite drinking haunts in Edinburgh: Milne's Bar, the Abbotsford and the Café Royal.

John Byrne
(1940 - 2023)
 

John Patrick Byrne was a Scottish playwright, screenwriter, artist and designer. He wrote The Slab Boys Trilogy, plays which explore working-class life in Scotland, and the TV dramas Tutti Frutti and Your Cheatin' Heart. Byrne was also a painter, printmaker and scenic designer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Byrne_(playwright)

Self-portrait in a Flowered Jacket
1971-1973
Oil on blackboard
147 x 91 cm
National Galleries Scotland
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/48552

John Byrne combined several careers - playwright, theatre designer and artist. In his most famous play, The Slab Boys, Byrne drew on his experience as a paint mixer in a Paisley carpet factory. During the 1980s Byrne wrote the cult television series Tutti Frutti, followed by Your Cheatin' Heart, which used country and western music as a backdrop to a comedy of Glasgow life. Byrne painted this self-portrait after returning from California and the influence of the 'Flower Power' hippy era can be seen in his appearance.

David Hockney
(b. 1937)
 

David Hockney OM CH RA  is an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer. As an important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hockney

Rocky Mountains and Tired Indians
1965
Acrylic on canvas
170,4 × 252,8 cm
National Galleries Scotland
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/603

This was painted at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where the campus is on the edge of the Rocky Mountains. However Hockney's studio had no windows, so he painted this imaginary picture instead. It is inspired entirely by pictures in magazines and romantic ideas of the 'Wild West'. The nearest 'Indians' are in fact at least three hundred miles from Boulder. The chair was included for compositional purposes, and to explain its being there Hockney called the Indians 'tired'. The striped mountains in the background were a light-hearted response to contemporary striped, abstract paintings by American artists. They may also be influenced by pictures of rock layers from geographical magazines.

Roy Lichtenstein
(1923 - 1997)

Roy Fox Lichtenstein was an American pop artist. During the 1960s, along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and James Rosenquist, he became a leading figure in the new art movement. His work defined the premise of pop art through parody. Inspired by the comic strip, Lichtenstein produced precise compositions that documented while they parodied, often in a tongue-in-cheek manner. His work was influenced by popular advertising and the comic book style. His artwork was considered to be "disruptive". He described pop art as "not 'American' painting but actually industrial painting". His paintings were exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Lichtenstein

In the Car
1963
Oil and magna on Canvas
172 x 203,5 cm
National Galleries Scotland
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/664

This painting is one of a series from the early 1960s in which Lichtenstein deals with the theme of romance. He would paint his works on a monumental scale, much enlarged from his original source material of comic-strip illustrations. This work is based on an image from the comic Girls' Romances by Tony Abruzzo. The original illustration included a thought bubble which read, 'I vowed to myself I would not miss my appointment – That I would not go riding with him – Yet before I knew it…' His paintings present archetypal images of contemporary America, simultaneously glamorous, mundane, dramatic and impersonal. Lichtenstein conveys the essence of the time, depicting recognisable 'types', such as the beautiful blonde woman and handsome, square-jawed man seen in this painting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Car
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girls'_Romances

Alan Davie
(1920 - 2014)
 

James Alan Davie was a Scottish painter and musician.  Davie travelled widely and in Venice became influenced by other painters of the period, such as Paul Klee, Jackson Pollock and Joan Miró, as well as by a wide range of cultural symbols. In particular, his painting style owes much to his affinity with Zen. Having read Eugen Herrigel's book Zen in the Art of Archery (1953), he assimilated the spontaneity which Zen emphasises. Declaring that the spiritual path is incompatible with planning ahead, he attempted to paint as automatically as possible, which was intended to bring forth elements of his unconscious. In this, he shared a vision with surrealist painters such as Miró, and he was also fascinated by the work of psychoanalyst Carl Jung. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Davie

Lush Life No. 1
1961
Oil on canvas
213 x 173 cm
National Galleries Scotland

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/43468

In this painting Davie strove to paint spontaneously, without consciously deciding on the structure of the work. He was interested in the Zen Buddhist idea of being free from conscious control. However, the paintings he made during this period still have a definite structure and often have similar features. For example, the green triangle in the top left of the painting is reminiscent of Blue Triangle Enters. In the later 1950s and 1960s Davie's brushwork became more controlled and the imagery more legible; mysterious signs and symbols began to appear.

Joan Eardley
(1921 - 1963)
 

Joan Kathleen Harding Eardley was a British artist noted for her portraiture of street children in Glasgow and for her landscapes of the fishing village of Catterline and surroundings on the North-East coast of Scotland. One of Scotland's most enduringly popular artists, her career was cut short by breast cancer. Her artistic career had three distinct phases. The first was from 1940 when she enrolled at the Glasgow School of Art through to 1949 when she had a successful exhibition of paintings created while travelling in Italy. From 1950 to 1957, Eardley's work focused on the city of Glasgow and in particular the slum area of Townhead. In the late 1950s, while still living in Glasgow, she spent much time in Catterline before moving there permanently in 1961. During the last years of her life, seascapes and landscapes painted in and around Catterline dominated her output.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Eardley

Harvest
1960-61
Oil and grit on hardboard
118,1 × 118,1 cm
National Galleries Scotland
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/491

 

This painting was exhibited in Edinburgh in April 1961, and judging by the title, Harvest, it would probably have been painted in the autumn of 1960. Eardley has added grit to the paint surface to give texture and movement to the work and the colours are expressive of the warm hues typical of autumnal crops.

Alan Reynolds
(1926 - 2014)

Alan Munro Reynolds was a British painter born on 27 April 1926 at Newmarket, Suffolk, where his father worked as a stableman. He studied at the Woolwich Polytechnic from 1948 to 1952 and in 1954, and at the Royal College of Art from 1952 to 1953. He taught at the Central School of Art and Design from 1954 to 1961, and from 1961 or 1962 at Saint Martin's School of Art, where he became a senior lecturer in painting in 1985. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the National Museum of Canada, the V&A and the Tate among others. He was known first as a landscape painter, but changed to a totally abstract style from 1960. He lived and worked in Kent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Reynolds_(artist)

Winter Seeding Hillside
1953
Oil on hardboard
76,5 x 101,5 cm
National Galleries Scotland
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/826

'Winter Seeding Hillside’ is an example of Reynolds’ painterly style of the 1950s. The landscape is composed of expressionistic, bold brush strokes of muted colours, which help suggest a winter scene. The brash black, and simplification of tree-like structures into jagged shapes, focuses attention towards a skull-like form near the centre, and calls to mind the work of the artist William Gear from the early 1950s. In 1952 the critic Herbert Read grouped the work of several emerging sculptors under the tag, “the geometry of fear”, and although this painting could be viewed in this vein, Reynolds was more concerned with creating a structured balance between the horizontal and vertical forces in the composition.

Geoffrey Tibble
(1909 - 1952)
 

Geoffrey Arthur Tibble was an English artist prominent in the Objective Abstraction movement. Tibble was a significant figure in the short-lived Objective Abstraction movement. In 1934, Tibble exhibited abstract works at the Exhibition of Objective Abstractions at the Zwemmer Gallery, London (works described as "vortices in pigment, suggesting rather than representing something in nature") He later destroyed or overpainted most of the works from this abstract period.
After briefly experimenting with surrealism, by 1937 he had returned to figurative painting, moving toward the Euston Road School of urban realism founded by William Coldstream. In 1944 he became a member of the New English Art Club. He also exhibited with the London Group, after his military service during World War II.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Tibble

The Print Room
1950
Oil on Canvas
61,2 x 45,8 cm
National Galleries Scotland
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/884/print-room

Ethel Walker
(1861 - 1951)
 

Dame Ethel Walker DBE ARA was a Scottish painter of portraits, flower-pieces, sea-pieces and decorative compositions. From 1936, Walker was a member of The London Group. Her work displays the influence of Impressionism, Puvis de Chavannes, Gauguin and Asian art. Walker achieved considerable success throughout her career, becoming the first female member elected to the New English Art Club in 1900. Walker's works were exhibited widely during her lifetime, at the Royal Academy, the Royal Society of Arts and at the Lefevre Gallery. She represented Britain at the Venice Biennale four times, in 1922, 1924, 1928 and 1930.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethel_Walker

Portrait of Lucien Pissarro
1938 - 1939
Oil on canvas
61 x 50,8 cm
National Galleries Scotland
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/901

Lucien Pissarro (20 February 1863 – 10 July 1944) was a French landscape painter, printmaker, wood engraver, designer, and printer of fine books. His landscape paintings employ techniques of Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism, but he also exhibited with Les XX. Apart from his landscapes, he painted a few still lifes and family portraits. Until 1890 he worked in France, but thereafter was based in Great Britain. He was the oldest son of the French Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro and his wife Julie (née Vellay).

 Ben Nicholson
(1894 - 1982)
 

Benjamin Lauder Nicholson, was an English painter of abstract compositions (sometimes in low relief), landscapes, and still-life. He was one of the leading promoters of abstract art in his country . He was the son of the painters Sir William Nicholson and Mabel Pryde.
Sir William Nicholson  was posted here on the 6th of March.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Nicholson

1935 (white relief)
1935
Oil on carved board
54 x 64,3 cm
National Galleries Scotland
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/734/1935-white-relief

 

Nicholson's first relief painting was made on a trip to Paris in 1933. While working on a painting, part of the thick white ground chipped off, leaving two distinct layers. He exploited this accident in a series of white reliefs made in the mid-to-late 1930s, and continued to produce reliefs throughout his career. Nicholson was influenced by the purity of the works of Mondrian, whose studio he had visited in 1933. His friendships with Barbara Hepworth (they were married in 1938) and Henry Moore may also have prompted this move into three-dimensional art.

Cyril Power
(1872 - 1951)
 

Cyril Edward Power was an English artist best known for his linocut prints, long-standing artistic partnership with artist Sybil Andrews and for co-founding the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in London in 1925. He was also a successful architect and teacher.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyril_Power

Folk Dance
1932
Linocut on Japan paper
22 x 24,6 cm
National Galleries Scotland
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/56298/folk-dance

René Magritte
(1898 - 1967)

René François Ghislain Magritte was a Belgian surrealist artist known for his depictions of familiar objects in unfamiliar, unexpected contexts, which often provoked questions about the nature and boundaries of reality and representation. His imagery has influenced pop art, minimalist art, and conceptual art.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/René_Magritte

Le Temps Menaçant (Threatening Weather)
1929
Oil on Canvas
54 x 73 cm
National Galleries Scotland
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/38159

Threatening Weather was painted during the summer of 1929 while Magritte was staying with Dalí near Cadaqués, in Spain. This painting is a perfect example of Magritte's use of familiar objects in an unexpected manner. The three objects float like clouds over the sea, in a way that suggests the scene is both natural and unnatural. They bear all the hallmarks of a dream image, both unsettling and erotic.

William Roberts
(1895 - 1980)
 

William Patrick Roberts RA was a British artist.
In the years before the First World War Roberts was a pioneer, among English artists, in his use of abstract images. In later years he described his approach as that of an "English Cubist". In the First World War he served as a gunner on the Western Front, and in 1918 became an official war artist. Roberts's first one-man show was at the Chenil Gallery in London in 1923, and a number of his paintings from the twenties were purchased by the Contemporary Art Society for provincial galleries in the UK. In the 1930s it could be argued that Roberts was artistically at the top of his game; but, although his work was exhibited regularly in London and, increasingly, internationally, he always struggled financially. This situation became worse during the Second World War – although Roberts did carry out some commissions as a war artist.
Roberts is probably best remembered for the large, complex and colourful compositions that he exhibited annually at the Royal Academy summer exhibition from the 1950s until his death. He had a major retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1965, and was elected a full member of the Royal Academy in 1966. There has recently been a revival of interest in the work of this artist who always worked outside the mainstream.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Roberts_(painter)

The Rhine Boat
1927
Oil on Canvas
50.80 x 40.60 cm
National Galleries Scotland
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/835

This painting was inspired by a boat trip made by the artist down the river Rhine in the summer of 1927. The style owes much to the highly formalised manner adopted by Fernand Léger and his circle, sometimes referred to - for obvious reasons - as 'Tubism'. During the 1920s, Roberts painted many pictures of people engaged in ordinary social activities such as playing, relaxing and working. He would establish the composition in drawings, creating strong formal rhythms and rhymes, and would then square these up and methodically transfer the design onto canvas.

 Ian Cheyne
(1895 - 1955)
 

Born in Broughty Ferry, Cheyne was educated at Glasgow Academy and studied at Glasgow School of Art. Originally a painter, he began to experiment with woodcuts, and colour woodcuts of Scottish, Spanish and French landscapes became his prime interest. However he continued to produce still lifes and landscapes in oils. In his woodcuts, Cheyne’s use of flat planes and curved forms gives his work an Art Deco feel. Japanese woodcuts were also an influence, particularly their lack of tonal depth and treatment of perspective. Cheyne exhibited regularly at the Royal Scottish Academy from 1920 until the end of his life.

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/artists/ian-cheyne

Hell's Glen
1928
Colour woodcut on paper (16/20)
25.20 x 29.80 cm (paper 28.00 x 32.10 cm)
National Galleries Scotland
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/15559/hells-glen

Hell’s Glen can be found on the way to Lochgoilhead, a small village on the Cowal Peninsula in the west coast of Scotland. The rocks to the left of the bridge are known locally as ‘Moses Well’. The flat planes of colour and curving lines of this woodcut are influenced by Art Deco designs and Japanese prints. The hills in the foreground appear to be dappled with sunlight, which contrasts with the forbidding dark mountain and heavy grey clouds overhead, which give the image an ominous feeling.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh
(1868–1928)

Charles Rennie Mackintosh was a Scottish architect, designer, water colourist and artist. His artistic approach had much in common with European Symbolism. His work, alongside that of his wife Margaret Macdonald, was influential on European design movements such as Art Nouveau and Secessionism and praised by great modernists such as Josef Hoffmann. Mackintosh was born in Glasgow and died in London. He is among the most important figures of Modern Style (British Art Nouveau style).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Rennie_Mackintosh

Mont Alba
Ca. 1924 - 1927
Watercolour on paper
38,7 x 43,8 cm
National Galleries Scotland
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/1652

The view shown here is of a remote farm situated on a twisting road that leads south from Amélie-les-Bains, following the spectacular gorge of the river Montdony up into the mountains to the hamlet of Montalba. Typically, Mackintosh has chosen a high viewpoint, looking down on the scenery, omitting any glimpse of sky so that the hillside seems compressed 7into a series of shapes and exaggerated patterns. The lack of growth suggests that this is a winter scene, and the intricate folds and dents of the landscape are shown in sharp relief in a cool, bright sunlight. The colour scheme of soft greens, greys and pale pinks is enlivened by strips of vivid blue shadow. Mackintosh documents the terrain with painstaking care, but the sweep of his washes of watercolour and the dynamic lines formed by the twisting roads and cultivated terraces lend life and vigour to the composition. As in the best of his architecture, his sensitivity to detail is combined with an elegant sense of stylisation. In Mackintosh’s vision the forms of nature and the workings of man come together in an organic and pleasing harmony.

Paul Klee
(1879 - 19409)

Paul Klee was a Swiss-born German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually deeply explored color theory, writing about it extensively; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory (Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre), published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are held to be as important for modern art as Leonardo da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting was for the Renaissance.He and his colleague, Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture in Germany. His works reflect his dry humor and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Klee

Gespenst eines Genies [Ghost of a Genius]
1922
Oil transfer and watercolour on paper laid on card
50 x 35,40 cm
National Galleries Scotland
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/1329

This work may be a self-portrait. Klee had very large eyes, a domed head and a closely cropped beard. The artist made many puppets for his son, and this figure, with its arms flopping down and tilted head, appears to have been inspired by a puppet. The figure was created by a process of oil transfer, rather like making a carbon copy. The artist used a sharp instrument to draw the outline of the figure on a sheet painted with special oil paint on the underside. The black smudges show where Klee's hand rested on the paper.

Joan Miró
(1893 - 1983)
 

Joan Miró i Ferrà was a Spanish painter, sculptor and ceramist born in Barcelona. Professionally, he was simply known as Joan Miró. A museum dedicated to his work, the Fundació Joan Miró, was established in his native city of Barcelona in 1975, and another, the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, was established in his adoptive city of Palma in 1981.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Miró

Maternité [Maternity]
1924
Oil on Canvas
92.1 x 73.1 cm
National Galleries Scotland
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/8720

 

Miró invented his own pictorial language, which became increasingly abstract over time. Although reduced to basic forms, in this painting we can recognise that the central figure is female. One of her breasts is shown in profile, the other from the front. Two insect-like infants, one male, the other female, are suspended from her breasts. The figures seem to be floating in space. The painting has its origins in a postcard of a Spanish dancer wearing a polka-dot dress. The only remaining trace of this in the painting is the pierced skirt, which refers to the dancer's dress.

Max Ernst
(1891 - 1976)

Max Ernst was a German (naturalised American in 1948 and French in 1958) painter, sculptor, printmaker, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and Surrealism in Europe. He had no formal artistic training, but his experimental attitude toward the making of art resulted in his invention of frottage—a technique that uses pencil rubbings of textured objects and relief surfaces to create images—and grattage, an analogous technique in which paint is scraped across canvas to reveal the imprints of the objects placed beneath. Ernst is noted for his unconventional drawing methods as well as for creating novels and pamphlets using the method of collages. He served as a soldier for four years during World War I, and this experience left him shocked, traumatised and critical of the modern world. During World War II he was designated an "undesirable foreigner" while living in France. 

 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Ernst

Mer et soleil [Sea and Sun]
1925
oil on canvas
54 x 37 cm
National Galleries Scotland
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/497

Like many Surrealist artists, Ernst was interested in the use of chance and automatism to try and produce new images from his unconscious mind. He often used techniques which created unusual and unplanned paint effects. Here, Ernst has created textured lines on the surface of the painting by dragging a comb through wet paint. The cloud-covered sun is reflected in the sea, which is suggested by combed waves in the lower half of the painting. Ernst painted many seascapes, and this painting is one of a number of works which feature a large circle floating above the horizon. The work was also influenced by alchemical illustrations.

Marc Chagall
(1887-1985)
 

Marc Chagall (born Moishe Shagal) was a Jewish artist. An early modernist, he was associated with the École de Paris as well as several major artistic styles and created works in a wide range of artistic formats, including painting, drawings, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramics, tapestries and fine art prints.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Chagall

L’Écuyère [The Horse Rider]
1949 - 1953
Gouache on paper
49 x 46,7 cm
National Galleries Scotland
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/197085

 

The female circus horse-rider is a recurring subject in Chagall’s work. In 1926 the art dealer Ambroise Vollard invited Chagall to make a project based on the circus. They visited Paris’s historic Cirque d’Hiver Bouglione together; Vollard lent Chagall his private box seats. Chagall completed the 19 gouaches known as The Vollard Circus in 1927. Our gouache was made during a five-year period from 1949–53. The artist’s return to France from America in 1948 represented an emotional journey back to his adopted home country following the Nazi occupation. In 1949 Chagall relocated temporarily to Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat on the Côte d'Azur, but by 1950 had moved to Les Collines, an estate that became his permanent home in nearby Saint-Paul-de-Vence. It was around this time that gouache became a preferred medium for the artist, who focused on rich blues as a response to the beautiful sunlight in the south of France.

Paul Gauguin
(1848 - 1903)
 

Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a French painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramist, and writer, whose work has been primarily associated with the Post-Impressionist and Symbolist movements. He was also an influential practitioner of wood engraving and woodcuts as art forms. While only moderately successful during his lifetime, Gauguin has since been recognized for his experimental use of color and Synthetist style that were distinct from Impressionism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Gauguin

Three Tahitians
1899
Oil on canvas
73 x 94 cm.
National Galleries Scotland
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/4942

Gauguin lived on the Polynesian island of Tahiti, then a French colony, between 1891-1893 and again in 1895-1901. Working in his radical new style, he viewed the local people and their culture through a decidedly western, male lens. When his paintings were exhibited in Britain, artist John Singer Sargent questioned whether they could be considered art, such was the degree of simplification. Others, however, believed that the bold colours and flattened forms lent greater authenticity to his vision of Tahiti.

 Sir William Nicholson
(1872 - 1949)

 

Sir William Newzam Prior Nicholson was a British painter of still-life, landscape and portraits. He also worked as a printmaker in techniques including woodcut, wood-engraving and lithography, as an illustrator, as an author of children's books and as a designer for the theatre.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Nicholson_(artist)

The Lustre Bowl with Green Peas
1911
Oil on Canvas
55 x 60 cm
National Galleries Scotland
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/43475

 

Nicholson was exceptionally good at rendering the specific qualities of materials. Lead, pewter, tin and glazed ceramic vessels feature prominently in his many still-lifes and are given their own particular lustre. The skilful depiction of light on the bowl in this painting can be compared to the work of the Spanish artist Velázquez, whom Nicholson greatly admired. Nicholson reduced the still life motif to its basic ingredients. This tendency had a strong influence on his son Ben Nicholson, the abstract artist.

William Crozier
(1893 - 1930)

 

William Crozier was a Scottish landscape painter. Born in Edinburgh, Crozier studied at Edinburgh College of Art and was a fellow student and friendly with William Geissler, William Gillies, Anne Redpath, Adam Bruce Thomson and William MacTaggart. These artists are all associated with The Edinburgh School.
Crozier suffered from haemophilia and was affected by ill health for most of his life. He died aged only 37 after a fall in his studio. An exhibition of his work was given at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh in 1995

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Crozier_(Scottish_artist)

Edinburgh (from Salisbury Crags)
C. 1927
oil on canvas
71,1× 92,2 cm
National Galleries Scotland
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/452

This is one of a number of paintings by Crozier which show views of Edinburgh. The work shows strong affinities with Cubism, in the way the buildings are reduced to simple cubic blocks. The use of light, with the sunlit fronts of the buildings contrasting with the deeply-shaded sides, is influenced by the strong sunlight found in Italy, where the artist had travelled several years previously on a travelling scholarship. During this same trip, Crozier had also studied with the painter André Lhote in Paris, who taught him how to break down a subject geometrically, as in this painting.

 Robert Burns
(1869 - 1941)
 

Robert Burns, HRSA, RSW (1869–1941) was a Scottish painter, limner and designer. He was an early exponent of the Art Nouveau style in Scotland and an outstanding decorative artist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Burns_(artist)

The Hunt
Oil on canvas
Ca 1926
198 x 198 cm
National Galleries Scotland
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/5704

 

The vibrant colours and patterns of this panel provide an exotic jungle-like setting for the Roman goddess Diana, and her nymphs. The wild birds and animals, including the striking leopards at the front, allude to her role as the goddess of hunting. The panel is filled with exuberant rhythm and energy characteristic of 1920s design. It was created as part of the ambitious first floor decoration for Crawford's Tea Rooms at 70 Princes Street, Edinburgh. Burns was responsible for every detail of the interior design from the murals to the cake-stands.

Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh
(1864 - 1933)
 

Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh was an English-born artist who worked in Scotland, and whose design work became one of the defining features of the Glasgow Style during the 1890s to 1900s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Macdonald_Mackintosh

The Mysterious Garden
1911
Watercolour and ink over pencil on vellum, laid on board
45,1 x 47,7
National Galleries Scotland
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/115533

From about 1900 Macdonald began to produce larger, independent watercolours alongside her craftwork. Here, a figure is seemingly asleep and may be dreaming, while above her stands a row of eight heads or masks which are perhaps part of her dream. The subject may have been inspired by Maurice Maeterlinck’s play The Blue Bird, which was performed in Glasgow in autumn 1910. Also, stylistically it owes much to the work of Aubrey Beardsley and the Dutch artist Jan Toorop, both of whom had a huge impact on Glasgow artists at the time. In 1912 Macdonald exhibited the work alongside two other watercolours in Edinburgh. They were very well received with a reviewer for The Glasgow Herald considering them 'decoratively exotic fantasies born as it were in another sphere'.

Sir David Young Cameron
(1865 – 1945)
 

Sir David Young Cameron RA was a Scottish painter and, with greater success, etcher, mostly of townscapes and landscapes in both cases. He was a leading figure in the final decades of the Etching Revival.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Young_Cameron

Ben Ledi: Late Autumn
Date unknown
oil on canvas
35 by 36 cm
National Galleries Scotland
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/5697/ben-ledi-late-autumn

Ben Ledi is a prominent mountain which rises above the plain of Stirling to the north of Callander and, like the surrounding area of the Trossachs, features in Sir Walter Scott’s poem The Lady of the Lake (1810). Glimpsed daily from Cameron’s house at Dun Eaglais in Kippen, the Ben became an iconic motif in his work including one of his most highly prized original etchings. Ben Ledi means ‘Hill of the Gods’ in Gaelic. It was a constant source of inspiration for Cameron, who painted it many times and in a variety of different seasons and atmospheres. In this picture Cameron adapted some of the compositional conventions of Japanese woodblock prints, both in the choice of a flattened perspective and the decorative deployment of silver birch trees as a framing device. A Hokusai print of Mount Fuji was among his later gifts to Perth Museum and Art Gallery.

Alfred Buckham
(1879 - 1956)

Alfred George Buckham was a British photographer who specialised in aerial photography.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Buckham

Aerial View of Edinburgh
ca.1920
Gelatin silver print
45.80 x 37.80 cm
National Galleries of Scotland
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/17391

 

From the earliest days of manned flight, photographers sought to capture the strange and unfamiliar beauty of the view from above. Whether it was from balloons, airships or later, fixed-wing aircraft, enterprising pioneers overcame formida­ble technical obstacles to create striking new images of the world below. It was, however, through warfare in the twentieth century that aerial photography came to prominence. Alfred Buckham’s remarkable body of work in the air had its origins in a brief, eventful career with the Royal Navy in the last phase of the First World War, but he was also able to develop a highly personal approach that combined his skills in documentary reconnaissance with an artist’s feeling for mood and atmosphere.