ROBERT BROUGH R.A., A.R.S.A (SCOTTISH 1872-1905)
GIRL BY THE FIRESIDE
£11,250
Scottish Paintings & Sculpture
Auction: Evening Sale: 09 December 2021 | From 18:00
Description
Signed, oil on canvas
Dimensions
30.5cm x 41cm (12in x 16in)
Provenance
Exhibited: Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums, Robert Brough, 1995, no.65
Footnote
Note: Robert Brough’s talent and approach was beautifully summarised by his great friend and mentor, John Singer Sargent: ‘. . . the grace, the fluidity, the lightness of touch that are so delightful in Brough; that very rare quality of surface that seems to make the actual paint a precious substance.’ That is exactly what we can see in ‘Girl by the Fireside,’ a sumptuous, elegant piece of painting where the fluid and dextrous handling of the paint is a great joy in and of itself. The subject is an elegant lady wrapped still in her richly trimmed winter coat relaxing into a chair, her legs outstretched in front of the smouldering embers of the fire. This seems to be a peaceful, almost indulgent moment of relaxation yet her head tilt and direct gaze asserts her presence and acknowledges the position of artist and viewer. Brough suggest all these details with a sparsity of paint but a fluidity of brushwork, dashing across the canvas, the application thin but the effect luxurious.
Brough was a precocious talent, exposed to art from an early age by neighbours including Sir George Reid. He commenced his training in the local city of Aberdeen, with an apprenticeship to a lithographer and evening classes at the newly opened Gray’s School of Art but moved down to Edinburgh to attend the Royal Scottish Academy Life School. By the end of his first year he was awarded three significant prizes, the most accomplished student of the year. Brough completed further training in Paris, enrolling at the Acadamie Julien in Paris with his great friend, the Scottish Colourist S.J. Peploe, before travelling on in search of Sisley at Moret-sur-Seine and then Gauguin at Pont Aven in Brittany. By 1897, and the age of twenty-five, he was working in London alongside Sargent. Brough’s life was tragically cut short at the age of thirty-two when he suffered significant burns as the result of a train accident, Sargent hurried to be by his side at the end.
The entirety of his artistic career lasted just sixteen years and in the period following his death, artistic fashions moved quite quickly away from the elegant portraiture that artists like Brough and Sargent had favoured. This may explain why an artist so lauded in his day is relatively little known now. Yet to engage with his paintings transports us back to the perception of him in life, as a formidably talented painter, confident, elegant and dashing, each work a true pleasure to behold.