Lot 130
BESSIE MACNICOL (SCOTTISH 1869-1904)
THE VEILED HAT (PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST'S SISTER)
Estimate: £15,000 - £20,000
Scottish Paintings & Sculpture
Auction: Evening Sale | Lots 103-196 | Thursday 05 December from 6pm
Description
Signed, oil on board
Dimensions
30.5cm x 21cm (12in x 8.25in)
Provenance
The Fine Art Society Ltd, London and Edinburgh, October 1974, no.98/5833;
Ewan Mundy Fine Art Ltd, Glasgow where acquired by the present owner.
Literature: Ailsa Tanner, Bessie MacNicol: New Woman, privately published 1998, p.80, ill.col.pl.46
Footnote
The Veiled Hat was described as ‘one of the loveliest pictures Bessie MacNicol ever painted’ by Ailsa Tanner, the artist’s biographer. (Tanner, A., Bessie MacNicol: New Woman, privately published 1998, p.80). Tanner has identified the portrait’s subject as Bessie’s sister Minnie Phoebe MacNicol, on account of her ‘very attractive face and very characteristic, slightly protruding teeth, which betray her identity unmistakeably’. (op.cit. p.80)
The sisters’ intimacy is evident in the portrait’s psychological insight. Minnie is dressed in fashionable finery as if ready for a social engagement or a day in town, but her expression suggests a state of reverie, inviting us to wonder what - or who - so preoccupies her. The Veiled Hat is undated, but Tanner suggests that it might have been painted shortly before Minnie’s marriage to theatre worker Victor Lionel Alexander in April 1901, whom she may have met at the Glasgow Athanaeum while studying solo singing. (op.cit, p.80) Perhaps, then, Minnie dreams of Victor.
The suggestion of an inner life in a ‘society’-style portrait is characteristic of James Abbott McNell Whistler, whose work MacNicol ardently admired. In late 19th-century Glasgow Whistler’s paintings were revered as the modern ideal of artistic expression, and his influence can be detected in The Veiled Hat’s sensitive interiority, as well as its soft tonality and painterly technique. Indeed, Whistler was likely to have been interested in MacNicol’s work, as she was invited to exhibit at the International Society of Painters, Sculptors and Gravers when Whistler was President in 1898.
By the time MacNicol is believed to have completed The Veiled Hat she had been working as an artist for well over ten years, and her technical and compositional confidence is evident in ‘bravura’ flourishes such as the three parallel strokes of cornflower blue articulating the rim of Minnie’s hat, topped with scumbled lavender suggesting sculptural layers of lace and ruffles, or the picture hanging to the upper-left of the composition evoked by a single daub of cream-coloured paint drawn horizontally until the brush was exhausted of pigment. There are also passages of striking subtlety: Minnie’s features are realised with notably spare strokes of paint, so that her face appears diffused through her translucent lace veil, the folds of which are intimated by extending tones from Minnie’s hair or hat through the still-wet paint over her face in fine diagonal strokes.
MacNicol was an artist of exceptional talent whose life was tragically extinguished by complications during childbirth at the age of 34. Following the death of her husband Alexander Frew in 1908, his second wife sold all of Bessie MacNicol’s paintings. (Tanner, op.cit., pp.97-101) The dispersal of her oeuvre, the brevity of her career, and her perceived status as a woman artist have resulted in MacNicol’s importance long being overlooked. Fortunately, her stature as a ‘Glasgow Girl’ painter par excellence is now better understood.
