Fine Art

The Mystery Paintings of Arthur Melville

11 May 2026

Professor Kenneth McConkey

When he died unexpectedly in August 1904, the studio of Arthur Melville contained a number of puzzles. These were undated, unsigned and unidentified canvases – often relating to projects that had never been realised during the last years of his life.

They remained unseen for eighteen years until Dowell’s of Edinburgh was instructed to hold a studio sale on 11 March 1922.¹ There, the hapless auctioneer was faced with the present work and reached for simple prose to describe it and a companion picture as Spanish Buildings with Figures, followed with Another Version of the same picture, slightly different.²

The present, larger painting of the two, then passed to WB Simpson’s dealership in Glasgow where, with an eye to the market, it acquired On the way to the Masqued Ball (sic) as its title.³ Neither the literal title, nor the more fanciful one, could nevertheless answer the questions surrounding either of these works, and their ‘where’, ‘when’ and ‘why’, will perhaps remain forever unanswered.

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Melville travelled through Spain on many occasions from 1890 onwards. A notable barge trip on the Ebro river with Frank Brangwyn in 1892, for instance, led to sketches in the hillside towns on its banks, while other trips delivered paintings of bullfights, dancers and street scenes in Ronda, Seville, Córdoba, Granada and Toledo.⁴

While further research may reveal a precise location for the present work and its companion, it is also entirely possible that the theatrical ensemble, hinted in the Simpson title, was intended.⁵ We could almost be looking at a stage set involving figures in capes and bicorne hats beckoned by the man with a lantern at a door on the flight of steps. Other figures are smudged in behind the Maja in the right foreground bearing a lighted lantern, and, glowing in the sky, an orange tower at the top of the steps has caught the firey evening sun. Melville states these details with impressive economy. He grasps and simplifies their essential shapes.⁶

There is flourish, without brazenness. A golden gloom envelops all. Here, as elsewhere, as his friend, Robert Macaulay Stevenson observed,

In a word, though he paints like a painter, and well at that, he seems never to lose sight that his art is the grave and serious expression of the mind of a man, not a mere material display of technical ability.⁷

Melville lived at a time when ‘Hispagnolism’ was a vibrant strand in British visual culture with its own extensive literature.⁸ While Thomas Cook was boasting new extensions to Spain’s rail network, supplied from Scottish engine works, the country itself was largely unscathed by modernity.⁹ Hence its romance for the artist-traveller. And while some were satisfied with a single visit to the Prado and a trip to a bullfight, Melville engaged in depth with Spanish culture recording its landscapes and regional types. If colourful folk were arriving in the local square to attend a carnival masquerade, he would wish to be there.

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

Artists

Arthur Melville

Scottish 1855 - 1904

^{Melville’s wife, Ethel née Croall, later Mrs Theodore Roussel (1872-1917), left the Melville estate to their daughter, Marion (1903-1996).}
^{The smaller version (75 x 92 cm) was sold in June 1999, before reappearing at Bonhams in October 2018.}
^{See label on the reverse. William Brebner Simpson (1867-1949) first worked as an assistant to George Davidson Ltd, the Glasgow framer and colour merchant who supplied the Glasgow Boys. He founded his own company in 1919, taking on David Muir Jackson as a partner in 1921.}
^{From his final tour in 1904, Melville returned suffering from the typhoid fever that took his life.}
^{As with many of Melville’s more finished works, the subject is likely to have been swiftly noted in a pocket sketchbook before the present canvas was blocked in.}
^{Given its surface texture, oil paint thinned to the consistency of watercolour and blotted, it is likely that Melville worked on loose canvas tacked to a board.}
^{Unpublished manuscript notes by fellow Glasgow Boy Robert Macaulay Stevenson on his friend Arthur Melville, Private Collection; see also Ronald Pickvance and Kenneth McConkey, “A Friendship Rediscovered: Arthur Melville and the Macaulay Stevensons”,}^{British Art Journal}^{, Winter 2015-16, pp. 44-53.}
^{Kenneth McConkey,}^{Towards the Sun: The Artist-Traveller at the Turn of the Twentieth Century}^{(Paul Holberton Publishing, 2021), pp. 133-151.}
^{Cook’s Travellers Gazette}^{, October 1905, p. 20. For a perceptive contemporary account of Spanish culture, see Havelock Ellis,}^{The Soul of Spain}^{(Constable & Co., 1908).}

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