ERIC HARALD MACBETH ROBERTSON (SCOTTISH 1887-1941)
BY THE ROCK POOL
£20,160
Scottish Paintings & Sculpture
Auction: Evening Sale: 08 June 2023 | From 18:00
Description
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
44cm x 59cm (17.25in x 23.25in)
Provenance
Provenance:
The Artist's Estate
Kemplay & Robertson, Edinburgh (AK 1064)
Bonhams Edinburgh, The Scottish Sale, 25 August 2006, lot 1091, where acquired by the present owner
Footnote
Note: Anne Finlay (1898-1963) trained at Edinburgh College of Art where she became friends with her teacher Dorothy Johnstone and thus Johnstone’s fellow members of the Edinburgh Group exhibiting society, including Eric Robertson and his wife Cecile Walton.
1920 was a key year for the artists, with the Group’s second post-war exhibition in the New Gallery, Shandwick Place and Robertson’s solo exhibition at The Petit Salon on South Castle Street. Of the former, the critic Frederic Quinton exclaimed:
Usually people look to the Edinburgh Group, as we know them, for something unique rather than universal: for something of pagan brazenness rather than parlour propriety. Half of Edinburgh goes to Shandwick Place secretly desiring to be righteously shocked and the other half goes feeling deliciously uncertain it may be disappointed by not finding anything sufficiently shocking. And so these young and talented artists are primarily expected to provide entertainment rather than enlightenment. Hence so much splendid achievement goes unnoticed. (Frederic Quinton, The National Outlook, November 1920, pp.102-103)
In his turn, the critic of The Scots Pictorial declared of Robertson:
[He did]…much to lend spice and variety to the show. He is nothing if not alive! Vitality is the very essence of his art. Mr Robertson ranks as the vital unit of the group. In landscape he deals with the eternal aspect of mountains…and in quite another mood paints portraits and figure subjects of rare imaginative quality. (As quoted in John Kemplay, The Two Companions: The Story of Two Scottish Artists – Eric Robertson and Cecile Walton, Ronald Crowhurst & Co., Edinburgh, 1991, p.88)
Furthermore, 1920 was a significant year for the group’s friendships, as John Kemplay has recounted:
[Cecile]…had made a new friend in Anne Finlay, a very attractive and vivacious student…Eric used her more and more to model for him and when he and Cecile rented a house at Crianlarich in Perthshire for May and June of 1920, Anne Finlay was invited to join them for part of the time. Behind the house, there was a waterfall leading to a pool where Eric, Cecile, Anne Finlay and others would bath in the nude together; and it was this setting which figured in a number of paintings and drawings he completed during the two months they spent there. (John Kemplay, op.cit., pp.89-90)
By the Rock Pool (Lot 128) and Anne Finlay (Lot 130) were both made during this happy, carefree and somewhat daring holiday and reveal the sitter’s plentiful attractions. She moved to London in 1922, where she held various teaching posts before becoming Registrar of the City & Guilds of London Art School. Throughout, she maintained her own practice, exhibiting regularly at the Royal Academy of Arts, with the Society of Women Artists and the Royal Scottish Academy; she was elected a member of the New English Art Club in 1953.
We are grateful to John Kemplay for his help in researching these works.