James Cowie RSA, 1886-1956

Cowie was born on a farm near Cuminestown, Aberdeenshire. In 1906, while studying English literature at Aberdeen University, he became increasingly attracted to the visual arts, eventually studying at Glasgow School of Art from 1912 to 1914. During the 1920s he showed paintings regularly at the annual exhibitions in Glasgow and Edinburgh, but it was not until 1935 that he held his first one-man show, at the McLellan Galleries in Glasgow. That same year he was appointed Head of Painting at Gray's School of Art in Aberdeen before going, in 1937, to work at Hospitalfield in Arbroath. He retired from a lifetime's teaching in 1948. An exquisite line-drawing technique, coupled with a meticulous approach to detail and composition, marked Cowie out from the majority of his Scottish contemporaries, with their preference for more painterly qualities, but he was also a painter of considerable individuality.