This exhibition commemorates the 125th anniversary of the birth, and 50th of the death, of Sir William George Gillies CBE, RSA, RA, PPRSW who excelled at landscape, portraiture and still life. On his death, he bequeathed his entire estate of paintings, drawings, sketches, archive and library to the Royal Scottish Academy. As well as a prolific artist, he was also an influential tutor (latterly Principal), at Edinburgh College of Art for over forty years until he retired in 1966. ‘His idiom was very personal and unmistakably Scottish,’ – RSA Obituary, 1973, William MacTaggart.
This timely retrospective illustrates his deep connection with Scottish identity but also the broader picture within British and European Art. The accompanying monograph by Andrew McPherson gives a fascinating, scholarly account of how traumatic experiences (family life and military service) as well as cultural encounters inspired his creative expression.
Gillies studied at the ECA and after the First World War, a scholarship took him to France where he studied in Paris for a year, and introduced to the pioneering work of Gauguin, Matisse, Munch, Braque, Delauney, Kandinsky, et al. ‘He was a countryman at heart, a painter of lyrical landscapes, largely unrecognised in his part of the story of Modernism in Britain… a truly original, assiduous painter.’ – Andrew McPherson
Portrait of Emma is of Gillies’ younger sister, which captures her ‘gentle prettiness’ and through her glistening eyes, a soulful, sad vulnerability; lost in her own solitude, she clutches her necklace like a rosary. In adolescence she believed she was mentally ill, but in fact she suffered from a genetic thyroid disorder and tragically died aged just 36, which affected William enormously.
Emma also studied Art and was a talented potter, and so it’s pertinent to see a few of her ceramic pots and vases on display here, which William often featured in his paintings.
Gillies painted three portraits of Marjory Porter, (actually spelt Margery), the niece of Samuel J Peploe, which he kept for himself but never exhibited. She has an expressionless gaze and it’s all very feminine and pink – from the lipstick to her cardigan and carnation – pink can symbolise love, an engagement or marriage, so was there a secret intimate connection between sitter and artist? They enjoyed a close, sixteen-year friendship before Marjory sadly died of meningitis in 1948.
In still life studies, he carefully arranged a collection of personal and domestic objects on a table, lit with an oil lamp to create a shadow. Still life, Shells and Flowers has a flat, angular, two-dimensional perspective, with a chair against the table covered in lace cloth, sunflowers in a black vase and scatter of seashells. The fir tree pot was made by Emma and placed here as a symbolic memory of his beloved late sister – a hint of Cezanne and Braque in the colour, texture and design of this decorative composition.
The Society of Eight (1912 – 1939) was a small group of Scottish painters (including Duncan Grant, William MacTaggart, Samuel Peploe and Francis Cadell), which gave Gillies the opportunity to show experimental, daring work at the New Gallery, Shandwick Place, Glasgow. Winter Landscape was first exhibited in 1934 – an almost surreal composition in a swirl of brick-red, cream and blue brush strokes in horizontal linear form; it did not impress the critics at the time, with one describing the texture and tone as ‘thick, massed and seemingly unrelated and perverse’.
Also. perhaps mistakenly, entitled Storm over East Lothian – you can see a line of trees under a blustery, rain-cloud sky – but the location is unknown. As McPherson suggests, the explosive torrent of colour could illustrate a traumatic memory of a barren, war zone on the Western Front – ‘a cosmological vision of a world shaken out of normal experience’.
Each summer Gillies and friends would take painting trips around Scotland. In Wester Ross, he focuses on the craggy boulders and rocks leading to the splash of sea, and mountain peaks beyond: there’s a simplicity in the loose sketchy outline, yet capturing an atmospheric glimmer of light. A similarity here in the perspective of the iconic Iona seascapes by Peploe and Cadell, while lacking their bold colourist palette.
‘In 1950s and 60s, cultural nationalists found a Nation in [Gillies’] landscapes… a sense of place held to be uniquely Scottish,’ comments McPherson in his biographical study. However, due to his interest in Fauvism and Cubist abstraction, he was ‘intellectually adapting to Continental principles of design to the native impulse,’ developing his own Expressionist form independent of British and French artistic circles.
Gillies frequently visited Morar on the North-west Highlands where he found freedom in knowing a location well. In Rocks and Water, Morar, Gillies breaks down the geological structure to basic elemental shapes, shifting from realism to abstraction to focus on light, form and diffusion of colour.
There are numerous sketches in this exhibition depicting his travels from Morar beach to Florence, Nairn to North Berwick, such as a delicate line drawing of the Bass Rock – the squiggle of dark clouds is most effective.
Between the Wars, Edinburgh offered a Bohemian social scene of high culture due to Marc-Andre Sebastian Raffalovich who created a Bloomsbury-esque, Parisian-style Salon of artists and writers to exchange views on literary and visual Modernism. ‘I believe that I’m now achieving a simplicity I have striven for a long, long time. But nothing is static and I am free to change direction without notice. But this is part of the fascination of the job of painting.’ – William Gillies, 1970.
Trees on the Tyne, Haddington shows how he quickly responded to artistic trends through avant-garde ideas of abstraction, light and form which he first seen in Paris in 1923. Within the jigsaw pattern with Matisse’s manner of exaggerated colour, you can still observe the landscape of lush green leaves and blue curve of the River Tyne.
Gillies painted Untitled (Balanced) in 1934, when he was particularly interested in the work of Klee, Delaunay and Kandinsky: Klee was a great influence, (admiring his childlike technique and imaginative use of colour), who explained that a line can walk and wander outwith strict boundaries. Here he experiments with the relationship between shape and space to play around with geometric triangles, ovals and circles to create a flowing, floating lyrical rhythm.
This is a most enriching retrospective to illustrate how Gillies used emotional experiences of life and death to explore a diverse range of art genres with poetic insight and dramatic vision.
In parallel with the show in Edinburgh, the RSA is presenting an exhibition at the John Gray Centre, Haddington, until 26th April 2024.
The RSA exhibition will tour Scotland in 2024 and 2025 to Rozelle House in Ayr, Hawick Museum, Perth Art Gallery, Taigh Chearsabhagh in North Uist, Pier Arts Centre in Stromness, Inverness Art Gallery, Kirkcudbright Galleries and Gracefield Arts Centre. William Gillies, Modernism and Nation in British Art by Andrew McPherson is published by Edinburgh University Press in partnership with the Royal Scottish Academy (£25).
Unless otherwise indicated, all illustrations in this review are copyright of RSA/Bridgeman images.
With thanks to Vivien Devlin for this review.
