A new exhibition at the Laing Art Gallery, comprising of the Fleming Collection and Laing's holdings explores over 200 years of landscape painting in the North of England and Scotland, focusing on the diverse and dramatic landscapes of the regions and how artists have depicted not only the world around us, but also our place within it.
For centuries, the landscapes of the North have fascinated artists and this exhibition will focus on how these landscapes —urban, rural, land, sea, and sky— have changed. From the Romanticised visions of early artists to the more complex and sometimes harsh realities captured in later works, the paintings reveal not just the physical changes in the land, but also shifts in societal values and human experience.
This exhibition focusses on a group of pioneering Scottish artists who as early as the 1970s and 1980s were responding to the threat of climate change. They are painters Frances Walker (born 1930) and James Morrison (1932-2020); visual artists and constructivists, Will MacLean (born 1941) and Glen Onwin (born 1947); artist/filmmaker Elizabeth Ogilvie (born 1946); and expeditionary artist and photographer Thomas Joshua Cooper (born 1946).
What are the threads that bind them? First, a common instinct, driven by geography, to engage with the topography, ecology and wildernesses of the North, which they see as stretching from the Scotland’s north-western coastland and archipelago to Canada’s High Arctic and in one case, to the North Pole itself. History also plays its part, notably the economic disruption known as the Highland Clearances, which in the 19th Century saw the forced emigration of highland communities due to industrial scale sheep farming, a monoculture which also led to widespread deforestation. This scar has attuned these artists to the plight of today’s indigenous peoples of the Arctic Circle and those in other precarious environments.
Lavery was primarily a painter of society portraits and contemporary scenes. He studied in Glasgow, in London, and then in the early 1880s in Paris. Between 1885 and 1896 he lived mainly in Glasgow, befriending the artists known as the Glasgow Boys, sharing an interest in their subjects of modern life. He is sometimes referred to as the ‘Belfast-born Glasgow Boy'. Lavery’s later career was spent between London and Morocco, where he acquired a villa, surrounded by beautiful gardens. He travelled a great deal, always with his easel, and recorded everything – from daylight raids on London during the First World War to tennis parties in the South of France.
The Fleming Collection's "The Blue Hungarians", is on display in the exhibtiion.
The Shape of Things questions the idea that still life is a lesser genre, showing how important it is to artists and society. Featuring a ‘Who’s Who’ of Modern and Contemporary British artists, the exhibition digs into still life’s rich symbolism and how it’s pushed boundaries and new ideas.
The Fleming Collection's Elizabeth Blackadder "Cat and Flowers" is on display in the exhibition.
In this new exhibition in partnership with the Inverness Art Museum and Gallery, works by Anne Repath, one of Scotland's finest mid-20th century artists, will hang alongside fellow 'Edinburgh School' artists to revive the achievements of the now largely forgotten group.
The Fleming Wyfold Art Foundation and the F.E. McWilliam Gallery and Armagh City, Banbridge and Craigavon Borough Council are delighted to present Scottish Women Artists: 250 Years of Challenging Perceptions. Bringing together the work of over 40 artists from The Fleming Collection, with additional loans from National Museums Northern Ireland and the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust, this exhibition highlights key women artists who have changed society’s view of what women should and could do, and the significance of work by women artists in Scotland’s cultural history.
Women have been shaping artistic communities in Scotland for well over 250 years. However, the deep-rooted legal, political and financial constraints of a male dominated society, denied countless women the opportunity to seek or develop an artistic career. Scottish Women Artists foregrounds those women who successfully challenged contemporary expectations and artistic norms to shape the story of Scottish art from the eighteenth century to the present day.
Today, Scottish art covers a huge variety of creativity and approaches towards what art is, and women play a crucial role in this network. For this reason, some may argue that all women exhibitions are no longer needed, and yet the legacy of neglect in museums, academies and publications experienced by women, still has a knock-on effect today. Seen in another light, this is an exhibition that tells the story of Scottish art through artworks that just happen to have been created by women.
he Nicholson Women exhibition brings together the work of nine female artists from the exceptionally talented Nicholson family, varying in their techniques from painters and illustrators to designers and printmakers. With works spanning from the late 1800’s to the present day the show reflects on the historical significance of the female artists in the family who have helped define the movements and styles that they explored.
Often overlooked until the recent attention given to redress the balance for female artists in British art history, the exhibition explores the work of Mabel Pryde Nicholson (1871-1918), Edith Nicholson (1890-1958), Winifred Nicholson (1893-1981), Nancy Nicholson (1899-1977), EQ Nicholson (1908-1992), Kate Nicholson (1929-2019), Rachel Nicholson (b. 1934) as well as the future generation of Nicholson women Rafaele Appleby and Ophelia Appleby.
Surveying the stories of the artist’s lives, work and cultural impact - through wars, social crises and political as well as artistic movements - we discover artists who were often ahead of their time, and each of whom held their own unique style.
The Fleming Collection's Mabel PRyde "The Artist's Daugther, Nancy, As a Harlequin", c. 1910 is on display until the week of May 20th
Born in 1874 in Leith, near Edinburgh, Fergusson is one of the four artists, along with fellow Colourists F. C. B. Cadell, G. L. Hunter and S. J. Peploe, who are revered as the masters of modern Scottish art. Fergusson has the most international reputation of the group, not least due to key periods spent living in Paris before World War One and during the 1930s. As the longest-lived of the Colourists, Fergusson also played an important role in the Scottish art world after World War Two, from a base in Glasgow.
The works on display follow Fergusson’s emergence as an artist of sophistication in Edwardian Edinburgh, to his role in the development of modern art in Paris, to the inspiration he found in the Scottish Highlands and the joy of portraying the pupils of the Summer Schools held in France by his wife, the dance pioneer Margaret Morris (1891-1980). A selection of sculptures reveal his lesser-known talents as the only sculptor amongst the Colourists, led by the celebrated Eástre (Hymn to the Sun) of 1924 (illustrated left). All the works have been lent from private collections and from our exhibition partners, the Fleming Collection.
An exhibition organised by Lyon & Turnbull Fine Art Auctioneers in partnership with The Fleming Collection.
19 February - 01 March
Mondays to Saturdays, 10:00 - 16.00
22 Connaught Street,
London
W2 2AF
0207 930 9115
london@lyonandturnbull.com
11 March - 22 March
Mondays to Saturdays, 10:00 - 16.00
(by appointment)
182 Bath Street
Glasgow
G2 4HG
To book your appointment please contact us as below:
0141 333 1992
glasgow@lyonandturnbull.com
Illustrated left:
John Duncan Fergusson (1874-1961)
Eástre (Hymn to the Sun), 1924 (cast 1991)
Bronze, 42cm high
Private Collection
Courtesy of Culture Perth & Kinross Museums & Galleries
visit at: www.culturepk.org.uk
Millie Frood is a name rarely mentioned when we talk about Scottish master painters. Nevertheless, her style and passion for painting should earn her a place among the greats. This exhibition brings together a collection of her work as well as oral history and objects from her life as an artist in Motherwell and beyond.
The Fleming Collection's "Workers In a Field, 1900" is on display in the exhibition.
This important exhibition Scottish Women Artists - 250 Years of Challenging Perception celebrates the work of women artists who have challenged and shaped the contemporary art scene in Scotland. In an era when women lead Scotland’s government, galleries and art schools, it is easy to forget the prejudices and barriers their predecessors have faced.
Embracing key artistic movements and developments, the exhibition is organised with The Fleming Collection, one of the finest private collections of Scottish art in the world. It features significant ‘firsts’: Catherine Read (1723–78), who was the first formally trained Scottish woman artist in the 18th century; The Glasgow Girls, the first generation of Scottish women to be formally and professionally trained in the arts and Dame Elizabeth Blackadder (1931 –2021), the first woman elected to both the Royal Academy and the Royal Scottish Academy.
20th century highlights include the radical post-war artist Joan Eardley (1921–63); Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912–2004); and Anne Redpath (1895–1965). These outstanding painters are widely recognised today. Yet, the story of Scottish art is incomplete without the innovative and experimental art of women working in design, illustration, applied and decorative arts. Dovecot’s ground-breaking artworks with 21st century artists Christine Borland (b.1965), Victoria Crowe (b. 1945), Rachel Maclean (b.1987), Alison Watt (b.1965) and Alberta Whittle (b.1980) are the subject of a specially commissioned film. The exhibition also features a new Dovecot tapestry with award-winning Glasgow-based artist Sekai Machache (b.1989) on display for the first time.
The Colourist paintings have been at the heart of the Fleming Collection since its inception. Thanks to the depth and range of the collection, the Colourists’ careers are charted from their early experimentalism under the sway of Whistler and Manet to the breakthrough moment of their exposure to the Fauves – the ‘wild beasts’ of contemporary French art - in Paris in 1905 to the mature works of the 1920s which saw a prodigious stream of Colourist painting fusing a Scots sensibility with a Continental palette.
In this new exhibition in partnership with Berwick Visual Arts, works by Anne Repath, one of Scotland's finest mid-20th century artists, will hang alongside fellow 'Edinburgh School' artists to revive the achievements of the now largely forgotten group.
The Glasgow Girls and Boys were a group of radical young artists, who rebelled against the jaded Victorian passion for highland scenes and story-telling pictures. With thanks to additional loans from private lenders, this display of the pivotal, late 19th century group of artists will highlight their talent and breadth of work.
This breakthrough exhibition by the Fleming Collection of Scottish art, staged in the sublime Coventry Cathedral, focusses on a group of veteran artists who were ahead of their time in responding to the threat of climate change. Until now, these artists, although well known to one another, have never been perceived as a group with common artistic goals. Only when reviewing their distinctive individual careers does a common thread appear, which is their shared response to the beauty and fragility of the planet, often expressed as early as the 1970s and 1980s. For some this response was triggered by finding artistic inspiration in the High Arctic; for others it was in response to the threats to Scotland’s own ecology and the destruction of traditional working communities that that has entailed. The resulting work, often on a monumental scale, provides both a precious record of icescapes now irretrievably lost, as well as symbolic and figurative expressions of anger at the urgency of their cause.