WILLIAM YORK MACGREGOR R.S.A., R.S.W. (SCOTTISH 1855-1923)
NETHY BRIDGE
Estimate: £2,000 - £3,000
Auction: 26 September 2024 From 18:00 BST
Description
Signed verso, with the Artist's Trustee's stamp, oil on canvas
Dimensions
79cm x 89cm (31in x 39in)
Provenance
Presented by J. A. D. McKean, Esq., 1924.
Footnote
Exhibited:
Glasgow Art Club, Exhibition of Works by Deceased Members, Glasgow, 6th April-11th May 1935, cat.no.5;
Hankyu Department Store, Umeda Main Store, Osaka, Japan, The Beautiful Landscape of Scotland, 11-16 November 1983; touring to Tenmaya Department Store, Okayama Main Store, Okayama, Japan, 18-23 November 1983.
William York Macgregor is remembered as one of the leading figures of the Glasgow Boys. This meeting of minds was catalysed when Macgregor and his former school friend, the artist James Paterson, co-founded “The Glasgow School” in 1878 out of Macgregor’s studio at 134 Bath Street.
Regarded as a member of “The First Wave” of Glasgow Boys, Macgregor’s work typifies the movement. With strong ties to Glasgow (he was born there to a wealthy merchant family), he began his art education in the city, followed by a time in the Slade Schools under the tutelage of Alphonse Legros.
It is this French connection that famously became so pivotal to the aesthetic of the movement. Macgregor and his peers absorbed the artistic developments of the Impressionist and Realist schools, adapting these exciting new visual languages into something uniquely theirs - with the work of ‘The Boys’ being committed to a naturalism of subject and a progressiveness of painterly technique.
Extensive travels in Europe exposed Macgregor and the group’s palettes to light and colour unlike anything seen before in the characteristically dreich canon of earlier Scottish art, with its moody mountainscapes and dim interiors. As here in the work offered for sale, Scotland was interpreted as never before. A fresh and vivid perspective, informed by the latest developments in the art world’s Parisian epicentre, was transplanted back home into a new Scottish Art which is still admired and celebrated by collectors to this day.
