Fine Art

Sir James Guthrie | A Guiding Spirit Among the Glasgow Boys

16 September 2024

On 8 October 1931 Sir John Lavery rose to his feet at the opening of the Sir James Guthrie Memorial Exhibition in Kelvingrove Art Gallery to pay tribute to his old friend who had died in the previous Autumn. Casting his mind back to the days when Guthrie was one of the guiding spirits among the Glasgow Boys, Lavery ‘doubted if there existed half-a-dozen of Sir James’s pictures that he didn’t struggle over to the extent of re-painting again and again after they were adjudged to be complete’.[1] Guthrie, wracked with self-doubt in his early years, was a perfectionist who failed to recognize perfection.

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When he, Lavery, Melville, Walton and Macaulay Stevenson were together like ‘a brotherhood of the early Christians’, Guthrie would embark on a large canvas – Fieldworkers Sheltering from a Shower, for instance, begun at Cockburnspath in 1884 - only to abandon it. Then, having managed to complete In the Orchard 1885-86 (Glasgow Museums/National Gallery of Scotland) he would embark upon the equally ambitious depiction of a wayside conversation between a stonebreaker and a farmhand riding a white horse. Begun at Kirkcudbright in 1886, this was also never resolved at the time. In 1923, in his mid-sixties, he removed the section containing the horse and completed the present monumental Stonebreaker standing at rest, straightening his back and flexing his neck muscles.[2]

For many years this work has puzzled historians in its apparent references to contemporary French Realism and Naturalism. A specific relationship has been proposed to Gustave Courbet’s iconic Stone Breakers of 1849.[3]

Although evidence for a possible visit to Paris in 1882 during the posthumous Courbet Retrospective Exhibition at the Ecole des Beaux Arts may never be completely confirmed, it is clear that Guthrie and his Glasgow contemporaries were profoundly influenced by recent developments that brought peasant subject matter back into focus in France and Britain in the 1880s, and for this they looked to contemporaries such as Jules Bastien-Lepage and George Clausen.[4] Breadth of handling and square brushwork, modified in the present canvas, is obvious in the small version of The Stonebreaker, also painted at this time, while it is possible that both were painted in the vicinity of Kirkcudbright, on St Mary’s Isle, the long peninsula that stretches due south of the town towards the Solway Firth.[5]

However, of the works of this year, there can be no doubt that the present monumental Stonebreaker is the most formidable. It carries a message that, to some limited extent, equates to Courbet’s programme. The motto adopted for the new Glasgow School by Macaulay Stevenson – ‘Progress and Poverty’ – seems embedded in this iconic image.

LOT 43

THE STONEBREAKER

Signed and dated '95, oil on canvas

160cm x 106cm (63in x 41.75in)

£70,000 - £100,000 + fees

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With the return of British students from Paris in the mid-1880s, the debates about Impressionism intensified. Young artists had observed the popularity of old media such as coloured chalks and soft pastels in the hinterland between drawing and painting. Fixed and layered, the drawing medium could be worked to an intensity that almost rivalled oil paint on canvas. Painters such as Jean-François Millet, Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Jacques-Emile Blanche, Jean-François Raffaelli, and Léon Lhermitte and many others were enamoured of the effects to be achieved by their use and such was the enthusiasm in Britain that Sir Coutts Lindsay, listening to young painters like George Clausen, established an annual pastel exhibition at his cherished Grosvenor Gallery in Bond Street in 1888.[6] In Scotland, by this date, Arthur Melville, John Lavery, Joseph Crawhall, Thomas Millie Dow and Edward Arthur Walton had all begun to experiment with the ‘new’ medium and so too did Guthrie. Indeed, in the latter’s case it became a principal means of expression, outside the portrait practice he was currently establishing. Writing at this time, Robert Macaulay Stevenson noted that,

…especially of late, some of his [Guthrie’s] happiest efforts have been in pastel … a material in which he worked with every evidence of natural aptitude … long before the recent pastel fad became fashionable in the art world.[7]

James L Caw, the artist’s biographer places Guthrie’s pastels into two distinct groups – those of 1888, produced at Cambuskenneth, generally depicting landscapes, with two interiors of a ‘rope walk’, and those of 1890, devoted to fieldworkers, railway navvies and to the pursuits of the Helensburgh well-to-do. The most daring of these were interiors, worked in soft pastel rather than hard chalk, and of these, the present example was shown at the third Grosvenor Gallery Pastel Exhibition in October 1890, an exhibition notable for fine displays of the work of Blanche and that of the Belgian painter Fernand Khnopff.[8] Caw distinguished between the two groups by hinting at Guthrie’s growing confidence, stating that the second group was ‘more abstract in conception’, but ‘no less direct’.[9] He informs us that Guthrie’s interiors were all done at Eastwood, the house of John G Whyte, a Helensburgh dentist and amateur watercolourist, who was a close friend of Guthrie and his mother.[10] Indications of the Whytes’ advanced taste are confirmed in the fan held by one of the figures and the octagonal oriental ‘Kursee’ side-table on the left of the composition. The dentist’s daughter Christine is likely to be one of the models for Firelight.[11]

Lot 42

FIRELIGHT REFLECTIONS

Signed and dated 1889, pastel on brown paper

61cm x 72cm (24in x 28.25in)

£10,000 - £15,000 + fees

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The Glasgow Herald and The Scotsman praised Firelight for the ‘excellent placing of the figures’ and as a ‘beautiful and harmonious piece of tone’ when reviewing the exhibition, while The Illustrated London News, describing its author as a ‘distinguished leader of the Scotch Impressionists’, placed this ‘striking bit of work’ above that of Guthrie’s friend, Arthur Melville. Following the closure of the Grosvenor Gallery show Firelight joined Guthrie’s solo exhibition of pastels, and works such as Candlelight, unsold in Dowdeswell’s gallery in December 1890 when it transferred to Thomas Lawrie & Son’s gallery in Glasgow, the following March.

Although supporters of the avant-garde, the so-called, ‘new critics’, George Moore, DS MacColl and RAM Stevenson, had supported Guthrie’s pastel enterprise in London, it had been a commercial failure. Hampered by being staged in ‘part of a passage partitioned off to make a room’, the works were displayed in cramped conditions alongside a Newlyn School exhibition.[12] There was no catalogue, no titles given to individual pieces, and to the artist’s dismay, no works were sold.[13] Dowdeswell confessed to Caw that Guthrie had been in too much of a hurry and ‘… we can’t afford to go on having artistic successes like that’.[14] The situation was reversed in March when everything was sold in Glasgow. Christine Whyte, who had promised to buy an unsold work, was left with nothing.[15]

Although Guthrie produced a few pastels after the Glasgow show, the demands of his portrait practice were calling.[16] The impact of the medium is however evident in the vivid coloration of Midsummer, 1892, his Royal Scottish Academy Diploma painting, while the intimisme of works like Firelight anticipates that of Edouard Vuillard. However, of all the approval of his peers, Guthrie is likely to have appreciated that of Sidney Starr, one of the most advanced Whistler followers, showing at the New English Art Club. Writing in The Whirlwind, Starr commented on some of Lindsay’s ‘hopelessly vulgar’ selections for the Grosvenor Gallery, before turning to Guthrie’s keen sensitivity to ‘the right use of his material’, concluding with the assessment,

That he is an artist, in an age of much incompetent manufacture, is evident from his delight in drawing, his sensitiveness to colour, his perfect pleasure in recording that which seems to him beautiful, without thought for those who should or should not be of like conviction.[17]

We are grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for writing this catalogue entry.

[1] ‘A Wonderful Artist …’, The Scotsman, 9 October 1931, p. 6. The full text of Lavery’s speech is contained in the Caw Papers, National Gallery of Scotland Library.

[2] Guthrie’s model wearing a shabby felt hat and jerkin may well be the fieldhand who appears in contemporary work by George Henry and Edward Atkinson Hornel.

[3] Guthrie’s visit to Paris in 1882, (Caw 1932, p. 49), is confirmed in Macaulay Stevenson’s notes on the artist, (c. 1891, unpublished ms; private collection). Guthrie would for instance, have known of future members of the Glasgow School – Lavery, William Kennedy and Thomas Millie Dow – who had decamped to Paris in November 1881.

[4] Both Lepage and Clausen had exhibited at the Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts.

[5] The smeared blues in the background of The Stonebreaker can be read as an estuary.

[6] George Clausen, an artist much admired in Scotland, had been practicing in pastel since the early 1880s.

[7] Stevenson, c. 1891, as in note 12.

[8] When the exhibition opened Lindsay, now loaded with debt, indicated that he was unable to continue supporting his gallery and it would close at the end of the year. A group of exhibitors quickly formed a Pastel Society, but although revived at the end of the decade, this too failed initially to secure backing from the art trade. My distinction between hard and soft pastels can also be applied to the Guthrie oeuvre, where some, generally earlier examples, are essentially coloured, hatched drawings, while in the present example, blocks of tone are smoothed into the surface using pastels of a softer kind. As in Crawhall’s work, Guthrie is likely to have initially placed such areas using the shaft of the pastel, rather than its point. The largest group of pastels assembled by Roger Billcliffe in the last fifty years (23 in all), enabled the flexibility of Guthrie’s application of the medium to be demonstrated. It showed not only changes of handling and material, but the use of different supports (papers) and hard and soft pastels.

[9] Caw 1932, pp. 233-35, lists 15 in the first group and 45 in the second; finding only six thereafter.

[10] For Whyte, see Ailsa Tanner, Helensburgh and The Glasgow Boys, 1972 (exhibition catalogue, Helensburgh and District Art Club), pp. 6 & 24.

[11] Caw 1932, p. 56.

[12] Sidney Starr, ‘Mr Guthrie’s Pastels’, The Whirlwind, 20 December 1890, p. 180.

[13] These were a bugbear for The Illustrated London News, but not for the ‘new critics.’

[14] Caw 1932, p. 57.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Caw 1932, p. 235 lists four between 1892 and 1894, and two in 1927.

[17] Starr 1890, as note 21.

26 September 2024 From 18:00 BST

A Taste for Art : Selected Works from the Paisley Art Institute Collection

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