Private Collections

A Collector's Collection | An Introduction by Bill Hare & Andrew Patrizio

1 April 2026

This September we are proud to present Darkness & Light: Post-War & Contemporary Art in Scotland; an auction that brings an exceptional private collection charting the vitality and ambition of Scottish art from 1945 to the present day to market. Featuring major figures including Eduardo Paolozzi, Joan Eardley, Alan Davie, John Bellany and the New Glasgow Boys, the collection captures a period in which Scottish artists engaged with both international movements and profound cultural change at home.

Introducing the collection are art historians Bill Hare and Andrew Patrizio, co-curators of the acclaimed 2016 Edinburgh Festival exhibition The Scottish Endarkenment: Art and Unreason 1945 to the Present. Here, Hare and Patrizio explore the artists, ideas and turbulent history behind a collection that offers a compelling portrait of post-war and contemporary Scottish art.

Darkness & Light: Post-War & Contemporary Art in Scotland

Browse the catalogue for the collection, to be offered on 30 September in Edinburgh.

Scotland, geographically and demographically, may be a relatively small and, some may even say, an insignificant country. Yet when it comes to science, technological innovation, philosophy and literature it has, over the centuries, punched unexpectedly well above its weight. Turning to the visual arts, the historical scenario is a little more complicated. There have been periods when Scottish art has been stuck in its own parochial doldrums. By contrast however, there have also been at least two very notable eras where Scottish art has successfully engaged on equal footing with the wider international art scene. Most notably they have been during the 18^th and early 19^th centuries - The Scottish Enlightenment’s “Golden Age of Scottish Painting” and that other occasion, much closer to home, the post-World War Two period from 1945 onwards. In both cases this occurred despite Scottish art labouring against the recurring difficulties and shortcomings which continually forced the most ambitious and talented artists to further their careers out with Scotland. One of the main reasons for this recurring artistic exodus has been the lack of major home-grown private collectors. It is therefore truly a rare and very welcome experience to come across this collection (The Collection) of modern and contemporary Scottish art which must be one of the largest and most comprehensive built up over the years by an exceptionally dedicated private collector. Within this impressive body of work most of the major figures in post-war Scottish art are represented by well-chosen examples of their work.

This short introduction will not attempt to cover all the items to be found in this very large body of collected art works. If it did so, it would undoubtedly end up merely a long list of names and titles. Rather, the essay will aim to discuss briefly a select set of examples which can be deemed representative of the most important artists’ work seen within the socio-historical and artistic context of their individual careers.

Most of the younger Scottish artists who came to the fore in the immediate post-war period were much more ambitious in attitude and experimental in practice than their pre-war predecessors. They wanted their challenging and highly innovative art to deal directly and engage authentically with the major issues of that traumatically scarred time – the terrible aftermath of the horrors of World War Two and the ever-growing threat of total atomic annihilation threatened by Cold War conflict. This clearly can be seen in the work of the Independent Group duo of Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005) and William Turnbull (1922-2012). Both in this instance were seeking to represent the human head in an appropriate post-atomic fashion – Paolozzi with his Brutalist fragmented Shattered Head (149) and Turnbull by his raw gestural expressionist Head (90). Furthermore, being also concerned with the nascent multi-media consumerism and popular entertainment coming into British society from across the Atlantic, Paolozzi, a Surrealist at heart, turned to the use of collaged imagery taken from glossy American film fan magazines as seen in Sweater Girl (138). The other outstanding Scottish artists from this period were Robert Colquhoun (1914-62), Robert MacBryde (1913-66) (64) and Joan Eardley (1913-63). Interestingly the “Two Roberts”, as they were soon to be popularly known, took the well-trodden road to London, as seen in the famous photograph of them in their studio by John Deakin (140). On the other hand, English-born Eardley was evacuated as an art student to Glasgow School of Art and then decided to remain in Scotland for the rest of her sadly short career. In their different ways these painters were keen to capture the harsh “kitchen sink” austerity of life for those living at the bottom of British society in the immediate post-war period. This can be seen in Eardley’s affective portrait of one of the members of her famous Glasgow street kids’ family that she regularly depicted, Andrew Sampson (128). It is also found in Colquhoun’s Cubist-Expressionist Grieving Women (72), where the dark red and acid yellow colour combinations adds powerfully to the emotional aura of high tragedy in the painting. The other major figure from this period, Alan Davie (1920-2014) is represented in The Collection by Woman Bewitched by the Moon No.3 (55). Davie, although he also taught at the Central School of Art in London along with Paolozzi and Turnbull, was a decidedly maverick outsider. In his highly expressive painting he too seeks a way of representing the deep apprehension and vulnerability of Western society in the 1950s. His concern is not on a socio-political materialistic basis but on a spiritual psychological one. Using a Jungian approach, along with oriental mysticism, Davie’s work symbolically bodies forth the imagery of the paranoid mind within the collective human subconscious terrified by the nightmare of history.

David Sylvester, the renowned English art critic, judged that there were only two British artists at that time who could hold their own within the international art world, then dominated by American Abstract Expressionism. They were Francis Bacon and Alan Davie. Unfortunately there is no other work by Davie in The Collection from the 1960s. This is probably due to Davie’s work from this decade beginning to take on a marked abstract direction. From the overall evidence of The Collection, abstract painting held less of an appeal to The Collector and its story is held elsewhere. The Pop Art phenomenon of the 1960s also had little appeal to the Scottish art world but the Counter-Culture movement and Conceptualism did attract such admired Scottish artists as Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006) and Bruce McLean (1944- ). McLean’s strong commitment to performance art for instance is illustrated in an unusual black and white painting with a typical quirky McLean title, Two Handbags, Two Ladders (133). Conceptual artist and concrete poet, Ian Hamilton Finlay, famed for his horticultural/maritime inspired art, is represented here by an elegant typographical ceramic text piece, The Rosie (99).

Throughout the 1960s, apart from Pop Art, serious figuration in painting was under threat from Abstraction, Conceptualism and Minimalism. Two young Scottish painters however, resisted this trend and defiantly committed their art to depicting the figure within the human drama of life, using modern portraiture and history painting as their preferred modes of personal expression. This important partnership between John Bellany (1942-2013) and Alexander (Sandy) Moffat (1943- ), who graduated together from Edinburgh College of Art, is embodied in a dual Double Portrait (120) which could be seen, amongst other things, as a manifesto of shared painterly intent. Later Bellany went on to become a challenging champion of figuration on the London art scene in the 1970 and 80s with his highly autobiographical symbolist expressionism, where self-portraiture regularly featured, as seen in Self-Portrait with Cat (86).

There is little or nothing from the 1970s in The Collection, with the majority of works comes from the 1980s onwards. This is not surprising as The Collection has a marked bias towards figurative art. The person who is credited with being most responsible for this return to the depicting the figure in Scottish modern painting is undoubtedly Sandy Moffat. As Head of Drawing and Painting at Glasgow School of Art in the 1980 and 90s he inspired a generation of younger artists to turn to human and socially relevant subject matter in their paintings. This bond of shared endeavour between Moffat and his students is well illustrated by his studio-based depiction of Peter Howson (1958- ), standing in front of Howson’s celebrated Noble Dosser portrait on the easel (107). Furthermore, many of Moffat’s students – soon to be critically labelled as the “New Glasgow Boys” – went on to have very successful careers, especially during the 1980s, when neo-figurative painting was the highly fashionable international movement in the contemporary Western art world.

The 1980s in Scotland was a time of parliamentary disappointment and wide-spread frustration and anger with the failure of the Devolution Referendum in 1979 and the relentless dismantling of Scotland’s heavy industries causing high unemployment and socio-political unrest. The economic and psychological impact of this on working class communities was one of the main concerns of the art of Howson and Ken Currie (1960- ) in the 1980s. This can be seen in such work as the former’s Lonely Hero (18) and the latter’s large pastel drawing Wailing Women (21). While these two “Boys” artistic attention focussed on the socio-economic impact of urban deprivation, the paintings of Steven Campbell (1953-2007) and Adrian Wiszniewski (1958- ) were markedly different in subject and tone. For instance, Campbell tended to set his slap-stick mock-heroic scenarios in a Victorian romantic landscape with absurdist titles attach to them such as Hunter in a Camouflage Decoy Landscape (Page 2). While Wiszniewski usually had his fey young dandies elegantly lounging about in enclosed arbours and communicating with each other in a secret sign language (48).

In the late 1980s and 90s Glasgow School of Art also produced many important woman painters who are included in The Collection, such as Alison Watt (1965- ), Helen Flockhart (1963- ) and Julie Roberts (1963- ). From a slightly older generation there is also good representation from Joyce Cairns (1947- ) a product of Grays School of Art, Aberdeen. Notably, in their different ways all these painters were concerned at the time with the representation of the female figure and the pictorial world in which she is presented. Cairns, for instance, would typically employ a range of masquerades in which to present herself centre-stage in a highly imaginary maritime setting as in Night Flight (97). With a different approach, Watt and Roberts both would sometimes be drawn to use the compositional strategy of “absence of presence”. Here the female figure is actually omitted but her lingering presence is strongly suggested by the empty space left behind as in Roberts’ Operating Table (Page9) and Watt’s Blackthorne (56). While these two artists painted with a highly finished academic naturalistic technique, Flockhart by contrast employed a faux naïve manner; this allowed her to build up the painted patterned surface until it gained the texture of embroidery as demonstrated in her Portrait with Wildflower and Moth (84).

The triumph of Neo-Figuration proved to be relatively short-lived and by the 1990s new approaches to artistic expression were coming to the fore. Ironically, it was Glasgow School of Art again that lead the way in this latest development in the recent history of Scottish art. Painting was now being challenged by different forms of Conceptualism, such as Installation, Performance, Photography and Text-based art. The two of the most successful practitioners of these new modes were Christine Borland (1965-2026) and Douglas Gordon (1966- ). Both created elaborate installation pieces but also produced single works of art as seen here. At that time Borland, who tragically passed away this summer, was particularly interested in medical and criminal forensics and this can be found in the way she mixes them with her subtle use of delicate materials, such as fine porcelain and white linen as seen in Tickle Holes (113). Gordon, on the other hand, was fascinated by the photographic image, whether still or moving, and the way it affects not only our sense of our visual reality but also in the manner we see and judge ourselves and other people. The latter issue is directly confronted in Gordon’s double photographic self-portrait, Monster (155), where we are invited not only to decide which is real and which is mirror image but also which of the two is the monstrous one.

A high proportion of the art in The Collection is by contemporary artists. This is commendable, as having work in such an important collection can be a great boost of encouragement to young Scottish artists in the early stages of their careers. At the same time, it also demonstrates the more independent and adventurous dimension to The Collector’s own taste where selection is not so likely to be based on the artist’s well-established reputation.

In 2016 we co-curated an Edinburgh Festival exhibition called The Scottish Endarkenment in an attempt to offer an alternative reading of Scottish art made precisely over the same period as that covered in The Collection. Some works from The Collection were generously lent including Jock McFadyen’s Calton Hill (53), a work which we both quickly agreed should be the one used on the exhibition poster. The exhibition proved to be a popular and critical success, being included in The Guardian’s top 10 best international exhibitions of that year. Furthermore, the National Gallery of Scotland were also impressed and wished to acquire McFayden’s Calton Hill for the National Collection, where it now resides. With the cooperation of the artist, another version replaced it and is the one now in The Collection.

The Collection undoubtedly offers a rare; but unfortunately, soon to be a last, opportunity to see and admire a group of singularly high quality works of modern and contemporary art from a very distinguished era in Scottish art history. For this we have to thank its exceptionally well informed and dedicated Collector

Specialist

Carly Shearer

Head of Contemporary Art | Edinburgh