Moira Jeffrey, in her Saturday Scotsman review of the J.D.
Fergusson exhibition, found a few nice things to say about the artist. But she
had reservations. The work could be ‘just too sweet and palatable against the
acid flavours of his times,’ there were ‘comically proportioned busts and
bottoms’ and ‘the irksome nature of some of Fergusson’s paintings speaks for
itself. There is their repetiveness, their monumentality, their unique way of
being both saccharine and butch.’ My reaction to this, just before the
beginning of the year of the referendum on Scottish independence, was to
exclaim out loud, ‘Well, there’s a brave girl!’ It seemed like putting a NO
sticker in your window and endangering the glazing.
The Scottish Colourists are sacrosanct for much of the
Scottish public. Nationalist-inclined politicians like to be photographed in
front of their paintings and buy them if they can afford them. The Colourists’
work forms the visual part of the distinctiveness that separatists hope will be
boosted by independence. Superiority over English art of the period is claimed,
because the Scottish painters with their bright colours, were more in tune with
what might be termed the significant forward stream of art history taking place
in France with the Post-Impressionists and the Fauves. There were additional
Brownie points for the Scots because Fergusson actually took part in a Paris
exhibition with some of the French masters.
Such vicarious claims to respectability, however, are
double-edged. If you are not in the field for buying, why be content with the
substitutes when you can get the real thing? Why look at Peploe when you can
look at Cézanne? Why bother with Cadell when you can see what is perhaps
Manet’s best still life in a public gallery in Glasgow and his masterpiece of
figure composition at the Courtauld in London. As a non-obligated Scot, some of
the English Post-Impressionists do seem to me to be more individual, Wilson
Steer, for instance and Harold Gilman. And England has throughout produced an
array of artists who stand proudly outside the supposed vital juggernaut of art
history: Blake, Hogarth, Palmer, Stanley Spencer, Burra, Lowry. There is no
Scottishness of Scottish art like there is the Englishness of English art, as
Pevsner titled his Reith Lectures.
This not to say there are no very fine Scottish painters.
Ramsay’s royal portraits stand up well with any of England’s numerous
continental imports (always excepting Holbein and Van Dyck) and his portraits
of Rousseau and Hume are works that we look at not just to see what the
philosophers were like, but for the art itself. Raeburn stands in the middle of
a triumvirate of painters who could construct a perfect human face from a few
broad brushstrokes. As he was a jobbing portrait painter, there are some dull
works in his oeuvre, but it is remarkable how many are excellent. Yet I
wouldn’t quite rank him as the equal of Frans Hals and Manet who make up the
trio.
And then, earlier than the Colourists, there is William
McTaggart. He is not popular like the former and has probably suffered from
attempts to give him significance by linking him to French art as a Scottish
Impressionist. But McTaggart cannot be pigeon holed. In some of his best work,
he is an odd mixture of landscapist, genre artist and history painter. He also
constructed large-scale works from small plein air sketches. If he is to be
judged as an Impressionist these things will downgrade him. Many years ago at
the Edinburgh International Festival, when a large exhibition of his paintings
was mounted, some academics moonlighting as art critics on radio detected some
narrative in his work and did just that. Martin Kemp, the Leonardo specialist,
who taught art history at St. Andrew and then moved to Oxford (I’m not sure
whether he was an Englishman ‘white settling’ in Scotland or a Scotsman who
went on to ‘white settle’ in England or vice versa) said at the time that he
thought that the exhibition would finally establish McTaggart as an important
artist. He also said that he was less sure of the Scottish Colourists.
Three of McTaggart’s greatest works belong to a group which
has been called by a biographer his Celtic paintings.They are Emigrants Leaving
the Hebrides (Tate Britain), The Emigrants - America (private collection) and
The Sailing of the Emigrant Ship which apparently belongs to the Scottish
National Gallery. I have never seen it there. Is it because this historical,
narrative painting does not fit with the idea of McTaggart as a Scottish
Impressionist? Is it another example of the way that nationalist emotion, in
trying to escape an inferiority complex, distorts aesthetic judgment?
