At the end of the 1940s Cumming used his travelling scholarship from Edinburgh College of Art to spend over a year on the Isle of Lewis: he deliberately chose a remote place, free from conventional artistic influences, to help clarify his thoughts. His experiences in the Hebrides shaped his art for nearly two decades and he evolved a highly individual style that integrated his feelings about the islands with the expressive distortions of European art of the postwar era. In this work the timeless quality of life on Lewis is conveyed by the poacher’s archaic costume while the rigours of his occupation and closeness to the land are indicated by his massive hands, weatherbeaten quizzical face and stone-coloured attire.

James Cumming RSA RSW, 1922-1991

Born in Dunfermline, Cumming won an Andrew Grant Scholarship to study at Edinburgh College of Art in 1941 but his studies were interrupted by the war. After graduating in 1949, he won a travelling scholarship which he used to live and work in the remote community of Callanish on the Isle of Lewis, and the island and its standing stones informed his early work which combined abstract and figurative qualities. From the 1970s onwards, he worked in a purer, more geometric form of abstraction, and a body of later work was inspired by electron microscopy. A member of the Edinburgh School and contemporary of Robin Philipson and William Gillies, he taught at ECA from 1950 until 1982.