JAMES COWIE R.S.A., L.L.D (SCOTTISH 1886-1956) §
COMPOSITION (STUDY)
£8,750
Scottish Paintings & Sculpture
Auction: Evening Sale: 16 June 2022 | From 19:00
Description
Signed, mixed media
Dimensions
41cm x 40cm (15.75in x 16in)
Footnote
This work is very closely related to Cowie’s Composition of 1947 (oil on wood, 46.3 x 45.5cm) which was presented to the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) by the artist Sir William Oliphant Hutchison in 1970 (accession number GMA 1167). Both works date from Cowie’s time as Warden of Hospitalfield House, Arbroath between 1937 and 1947. He is renowned for his painstaking working method and could spend up to a week assembling still-life objects before beginning to draw or paint them. As is the case with the present work, he often made multiple detailed studies, in materials including pastel, gouache and chalk. He considered some of them to be complete, independent works of art and would frame and exhibit them in their own right.
The artist and critic Cordelia Oliver has described the NGS Composition thus: ‘The culmination of the metaphysical still-lifes is a painting called, simply, Composition….In it illusion and reality, as with the apple that appears and reappears amid the interlocking planes of glass and the layers, in depth, of concrete objects and printed images, are so blurred and intermingled that to unravel one from the other is impossible. The rear view of the statuette on the left (it may be a small medieval Madonna)…is here balanced by a new, vaguely disturbing Pan-presence, a figure modelled by Cowie himself in some self-hardening plastic material…Cowie’s figure is modelled with a soft, but muscular and highly charged plasticity, which is echoed in the dissolving voluptuous forms of Cranach’s Diana and Ingres’s Grande Odalisque. Several layers farther into the complex space a print of a peasant ploughman (after Millet) and beyond that a hint of those narrow filaments of sandy road together speak for the perennial link with…the countryside… a love of which James Cowie never disguised.’ (Cordelia Oliver, Modern Scottish Painters: James Cowie, Edinburgh University Press, 1980, p. 54).