Alexander Goudie (1933-2004) An Artist’s Life, Act 1

By James Knox, 05.07.2021

Alexander Goudie, Self Portrait with Red Scarf, c. 1985. Oil on canvas, 106 x 101 cm. © Goudie Estate.

I first met Sandy Goudie in February 1975 when my father was having his portrait painted by him. At the time, my life was becalmed after nine months of fruitless job hunting, which my art history degree from Cambridge did little to facilitate. To make myself look useful, I volunteered to chauffeur my father to his sittings in Sandy’s High Victorian palazzo-cum studio in Glasgow’s West End.

The portrait had been commissioned by employees of W&K Knox Ltd, the family textile mill in north Ayrshire founded in the 18th century, which thanks to my father had been saved from closure by a predatory asset stripper and still survives today (although not in family hands). My father, who had been an irrepressible dandy at Cambridge in the 1930s, chose to be painted in his glorious scarlet hunting coat with blue collar, shining Eglinton Hunt brass buttons, yellow waistcoat, fine knitted gloves, white breeches and with a horn-handled leather hunting crop in hand. No wonder when my parents asked the legendary Glasgow dealer, Ian MacNicol, for advice on choosing a suitable painter, he replied: ‘There’s only one candidate and he’s Sandy Goudie’. MacNicol rated Goudie, who was then aged 42, as the best of the up-and-coming painters working in the Glasgow tradition. His opinion counted as he was the last in the line of great Glaswegian dealers stretching back 100 years to Alexander Reid, the promoter of radical French and Scottish painting.

I have never forgotten standing on the doorstep of 4 Cleveden Road on my first visit to the studio. Sandy led us up the magnificent staircase into the galleried hall, alive to the cooing of caged doves, with glimpses off into a black dining room and vivid green drawing room. Maïnée with her exotic Scotto-French accent hovered in the wings with cups of fresh ground coffee (almost unheard of in the 1970s) and delicious bowls of moules, which in the Knox family only ever featured on foreign menus. And then there was the artist himself prepared for action in a simple smock with thin black cravat.

Entering Sandy’s carefully curated world, which some might liken (to put it mildly) to a stage set, was for me the discovery of a new reality, which I still inhabit. It is the world of the creative sensibility formed by taste, sensuality, visual intelligence and talent. Until then, I had been acutely aware of the power of art, but had never actually met a living artist of note. Since then I have spent much of my career, whether with a view to commissioning, buying, curating or writing about art, visiting artists’ studios. These have ranged from warehouses and dripping railway arches to church crypts worthy of Piranesi, to humble sheds and front rooms. But none have ever rivalled my first visit to Sandy’s magical space. Utterly seduced, I soon bought a work off his studio wall. It is a Breton study of two men and a bicycle. The small work of luminous tone and witty design is totally satisfying even though one of the men lacks a head. ‘Why’ I asked tentatively, ‘was he decapitated?’ ‘Och I just turned my back for a moment’ Sandy explained airily in his refined Paisley accent ‘only to find the man was gone – so I just left it’. Although this was not my first acquisition by a living artist (John Piper had been the first), it whetted my appetite for collecting contemporary art.

Recently, his son, Lachlan, discovered stuck at the back of a chest of drawers which came from his father’s studio, a letter from my father complaining that some of his friends thought he looked ‘old and ill’. What my father, aged 59, had blotted from his mind was that during the time of the sittings he did look strained and careworn due to the pressure of saving the Knox mill. Sandy politely staged another sitting, but let the essential truth of his portrait stand concentrating only on finessing my father’s hunting gloves with all the swagger and perfectionism of his hero, John Singer Sargent. My father, unaware of Sandy’s sleight of hand, was delighted with the result.

My friendship with Sandy proved to be one of the most pivotal in my life strengthening my resolve to pursue a path largely driven by art. A few weeks after the portrait was finished, I was offered a job out of the blue as feature writer on the Antique Collector magazine. Our friendship continued over the years often in London in the bravura setting of Sargent’s studio in Tite Street, where he held court for a month or so in the summer while working on portraits of southern clients. For Sandy, life itself was a work of art.

Alexander Goudie: An Artist's Life, Act 1 is on display at the Scottish Gallery until the 24^th July. James Knox's text presented here was first published as an introduction to the exhibition's accompanying catalogue.