The oil painting titled Self Portrait with Artist's First Wife, Nancy by Scottish artist James Cowie (1886-1956) shows himself cast partly in shadow and looking over his shoulder at the viewer in the foreground. His first wife, Nancy Buchanan whom he met at the Glasgow School of Art and married later in 1918, is depicted with her face entirely in the light, with a contemplative expression as she looks either at the canvas in front of her or just beyond it. The rich colour in the subject's faces and the textured layering of oil paint reflects Cowie's developing inspiration of the Old Masters in his work. These details paired with the dark shadows creates an intense mood within the painting, which reflects the history behind it. At the time of this painting, Nancy was pregnant with their first child Ruth, who is born in 1923, and ten months after the birth Nancy died of tuberculosis. An earlier portrait by Cowie of Nancy in 1919 had shown her full of life, whereas here there is now a darker intensity to her that possibly suggests Cowie was attempting to show the severity of her illness.

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.