Lot 166
Estimate: £40,000 - £60,000
Scottish Paintings & Sculpture
Auction: Evening Sale | Lots 103-196 | Thursday 05 December from 6pm
Signed, oil on canvas
100cm x 126cm (39.5in x 49.5in)
Sotheby's, Gleneagles, Scottish and Sporting Pictures and Sculpture, 28th August 2002, lot 1094;
Private Collection, Scotland.
John Maclauchlan Milne made many trips to the south of France in the 1920s, beginning in 1924. Some of his picture titles show that he roamed from L’Estaque, near Marseille in the west, to St Paul-de-Vence, near Nice in the east. A View in the South of France relates to some of his various, dated paintings from Cassis and St Tropez in 1924.
Maclauchlan Milne returned to Dundee from military service with the Royal Air Force in June 1919. He returned then removed to France, and his Paris paintings date from 1920 to 1922, along with others from Lavardin in the Loire Valley. He was painting in Scotland in 1923, before returning to France again in 1924, to the Côte d’Azur.
In September 1924 he passed through Paris and was quoted by Arthur Moss in his ‘Over The River’ column in The Paris Times on the 12th of that month: ‘There is a revolution going on in Bonnie Scotland. It’s particularly violent in Dundee and in Edinburgh…This is an artistic revolution. So says the painter Maclauchlan Milne…Mac divides his time between Montparnasse and the city that marmalade made famous. He recently had an exhibition in Scotland of his own vigorous landscapes.’
Maclauchlan Milne began exhibiting his pictures from the south of France in 1925 at the Royal Scottish Academy, Royal Glasgow Institute, Society of Scottish Artists and in his studio exhibitions, and these were a major part of his output into the early 1930s.
We are grateful to Maurice Millar, author of The Missing Colourist: The Search for John Maclauchlan Milne RSA (privately published in 2022 and available via The Missing Colourist website) for writing this catalogue note.