Lot 90
OLIVE CARLETON SMYTH (SCOTTISH 1882-1949)
BACCHANALE
Estimate: £4,000 - £6,000
Auction: 26 September 2024 From 18:00 BST
Description
Signed, gouache and gold paint on vellum
Dimensions
32cm x 48cm (12.5in x 18.75in)
Provenance
Presented by J. A. D. McKean, 1929.
Footnote
Titled ‘Bacchant’ in Illustrated Catalogue of Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture in the Collections of Paisley Corporation and Paisley Art Institute, 1948.
Exhibited:
Kirkcudbright Town Hall, The Glasgow Girls 1920-1960, 2014, cat.no.8.
Literature:
Jude Burkhauser (ed), Glasgow Girls, Women in Art and Design 1880-1920, Canongate, Edinburgh, 1990, p.171, illustrated, no.226;
Liz Arthur, Glasgow Girls - Artists and Designers, 1920-1960, Kirkcudbright 2000 Ltd, 2014, cat.no.8, reproduced in colour p.75;
Charlotte Rostek, Scottish Women Artists, The Fleming Collection, London, 2021, a detail reproduced in colour p. 18.
Olive Carleton Smyth embodied the Glasgow School’s polymath approach to image-making. Her work implemented sgraffito, illumination, gesso and fresco techniques, and she engaged as much with developments made by her Glasgow contemporaries as she did with exemplars from Celtic design and Japanese and Viennese Secessionist art. Carleton Smyth worked closely with her two sisters, one of whom was a costume designer and the other a composer, but regrettably few biographical details about Olive Carleton Smyth’s life have survived. A 1937 Glasgow art critic affords us a glimpse of this elusive artist’s character by describing her as ‘small, fast taking and tweed-suited.’ (Press clipping, ‘As Dainty as a Baby’s Sneeze’. Glasgow Herald, 1937, Glasgow School of Art Press Cutting Book; Jude Burkhauser (ed), Glasgow Girls, Women in Art and Design 1880-1920, Canongate, Edinburgh, 1990, pp.170-171).
Bacchanale is an outstanding example of Olive Carleyon Smyth’s talent, and dates to the period just before she was appointed Head of the Design Department at the Glasgow School of Art. The prancing troupe of figures and animals in the Bacchanalian revel are organised around diagonal lines from the lower right to the upper left, which lends the complex composition a decorative refinement. Carleton Smyth is recorded as having enjoyed painting on vellum as it ‘gave the effect of figures drawn on ivory’. (ibid.)
