£11,250
Scottish Paintings & Sculpture | 623
Auction: Scottish Paintings & Sculpture
Signed, oil on canvas
Note: Sir Herbert James Gunn is best known as the society artist of the 1930s-50s; his polished, sophisticated technique making him the artist of choice of High Society and the Establishment; from judges to socialites, composers to the Queen. He was both an elected Royal Academician, and the President of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. Gunn was ultimately knighted for his services to the arts in 1962. To refer to Gunn solely as a portrait painter, however, is to risk over-looking the wonderful landscape and cityscapes of his early career, most of which were painted prior to 1930.
Born in Glasgow, Gunn trained in the Glasgow School of Art and the Edinburgh College of Art, before travelling to Paris, as so many of his countrymen had before him, to study at the Académie Julian. He subsequently saw active service in WW1, famously depicting the troops on the eve of the Battle of the Somme. A period of European travel followed, and many of his best-known early landscapes are of idyllic, sun-baked Italian vistas viewed from hilltop villas.
He also frequently took London as his subject, the bustle of the Thames and its banks of striking architecture drawing the focus of his brush on several occasions. Here we have a beautiful example of one such view. The elegance of style that would win him so many commissions as a portrait artist is abundantly evident. Forthright and representational in a way not dissimilar to his forebears the Glasgow Boys, there is also a clear absorption of French Impressionistic tendencies, and the muted palette of harmonious taupes seems to nod to the contemporaneous Modern British movements of the time. As such, this attractive work exemplifies the melting pot of influences Gunn utilised to create his own style.