Exhibitions

The Scottish Colourists: Radical Perspectives

Discover the groundbreaking exhibition in partnership with Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh, which for the first time showcases the Scottish Colourists in the context of their European contemporaries, interrogating how this international generation of radical painters forged a new language of colour in the early 20th century. 

The Scottish Colourists — SJ Peploe, JD Fergusson, GL Hunter, and FCB Cadell — are widely recognised as pioneers of early 20th-century Scottish art. Often exhibited as a quartet, their work will now be shown in the company of key figures such as Matisse and Derain, as well as the Bloomsbury Group’s Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. The exhibition also explores a possible ‘Celtic’ influence through the works of Welsh artists Augustus John and John Dickson Innes, and Ireland’s Roderic O’Connor.

Join us on a journey through the avant-garde movement as conventions are challenged around who should be considered the leading radical painters from 1905 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914. This exploration culminates in the formation of the Scottish Colourists as a distinct group in the 1920s and 30s, highlighting the influence of French colour and Scottish light on their work as painters of landscape, still life and interiors.

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Waters Rising

Waters Rising traces stories and objects connected to flooding from Scotland and abroad, from biblical accounts to Ancient Egypt to North America, and more recent events closer to home. Exploring the growing threat of the global climate emergency whilst examining the impact of flooding and extreme weather events on communities, businesses, and infrastructure in Perth and Kinross, the exhibition also includes photos, memories, and stories from local people.

Putting the local experience in a global context, Waters Rising features an Egyptian sarcophagus with Nile flood damage, a rare illuminated bible from the thirteenth century, ceremonial brass bowls commemorating the Hindu flood myth of Vasudeva and Krishna, eighteenth and nineteenth-century etchings and mezzotints of Noah’s Great Flood, and more contemporary works from renowned Indigenous Canadian artist Norval Morrisseau, and Scottish artists Will Maclean and Alan Kilpatrick. Visitors will be inspired to take action through stories and objects from the climate movement in Scotland today.

See The Fleming Collection's works "Redy Ley Marker" by Will Maclean, and Alan Kilpatrick's series "Where the Brahamaputra Meets the Clyde".

Exhibitions

Romance to Realities: The Northern Landscape and Shifting Identities

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.  

Exhibitions

This Fragile Earth: Pioneer Scottish Artists who anticipated the climate crisis

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 19^th 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. 

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An Irish Impressionist : Lavery on Location

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. 

Exhibitions

Anne Redpath and Her Circle

 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.

Exhibitions

Scottish Women Artists: 250 Years of Challenging Perceptions

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.

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The Shape of Things: Still Lifes in Britain- Elizabeth Blackadder

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.

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The Nicholson 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

Exhibitions

A Scottish Colourist at 150: John Duncan Fergusson

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.

LONDON

19 February - 01 March  
Mondays to Saturdays, 10:00 - 16.00

22 Connaught Street,   
London   
W2 2AF 

0207 930 9115  
london@lyonandturnbull.com

GLASGOW

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