Lot 118
JAMES PATERSON R.S.A., R.S.W., R.W.S. (SCOTTISH 1854-1932)
IN ARCADY
£5,040
Scottish Paintings & Sculpture
Auction: Evening Sale: 08 June 2023 | From 18:00
Description
Signed and dated 1897, signed and inscribed verso, oil on canvas
Dimensions
Provenance
Provenance: Bruno and Paul Cassirer, Berlin
Exhibited: VI Internationale Kunst-Ausstellung der Münchener Secession, Munich, 1899, no. 27 (lent by the Artist)
Footnote
Note: In Arcady exemplifies the success of the ‘Glasgow Boys’, including James Paterson, in progressive art circles in Germany in the late 1890s. The ‘Boys’ first came to international notice when their work was shown to great acclaim at the Grosvenor Gallery, London in 1890. As Roger Billcliffe has explained:
Their exhibition was the final show at the Grosvenor Gallery and so attracted much press attention. This in turn caught the eyes of several of the new exhibiting bodies in Europe, principally secessionist, where naturalism was becoming accepted as a logical compromise between academic painting and the avant-garde work of the Impressionists.
The Grosvenor Gallery exhibition was taken to Munich and from there the Boys began to exhibit throughout Europe and beyond…The Boys also began individually to send their work to the Paris Salon and similar institutions in Europe. (Roger Billcliffe, Glasgow Boys, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, on-line edition accessed 9 May 2023)
Illustrating this positive reception to Paterson’s work on the Continent, In Arcady was accepted for inclusion in the sixth exhibition of the Munich Secession in 1899. This forward-looking artists society was founded in 1892, as an alternative to the conservative Munich Artists Association.
Such was the appreciation of the Boys in Munich that, as Henry Prais has written:
In the course of the next decade the Boys showed in Munich alone, between the exhibitions of the Munich Art Society in the Glaspalaste and those of the Secession in the Prinzregentenstrasse, more than six hundred of their works…It is scarcely surprising then that Sir William Rothenstein in his Men and Memories…should remark: ‘I used to say of the Glasgow school, so much admired in Munich and Dresden, that their reputation was made in Germany!’ (Henry Prais, ‘The Boys Abroad: On the Continent’, The Glasgow Boys, Scottish Arts Council, 1971, p.69)
Moreover, In Arcady was acquired by the cousins Bruno and Paul Cassirer who established a gallery and publishing house in Berlin in 1898. They were key champions of modern and contemporary art and were, for example, founding secretaries of the Berlin Secession, also in 1898.
