David Gauld, R.S.A.

Private Collection, Millbrook, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner, in 1984

Medieval mysticism was a covert fascination for many young painters emerging in the 1880s. In the era of plein air naturalism, submersion in dreams of the past not only set an artist in opposition to the dominant trend, it contradicted the Positivism of the age. Yet this was the position taken by David Gauld, one of the new West of Scotland painters of the period.

At the age of seventeen, the precocious Gauld registered as an evening class student at Glasgow School of Art (Roger Billcliffe, The Glasgow Boys, London, 1985, pp. 265-68). He continued at the school for three years eventually securing employment as an illustrator for the Glasgow Weekly Citizen. His earliest surviving works of 1889 - the extraordinary Music fig 1, Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow  and St Agnes, (fig 2, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh) - often regarded as forerunners of l’art nouveau, have puzzled historians. Where younger members of the school were in the mainstream of naturalistic ‘modern life’ subject matter, Gauld adopted themes more suited to the Pre-Raphaelites. Commissions for designs for stained glass led him immediately to bright colour and decorative simplification of a type that appeared extremely radical. Uncorroborated reports suggest that he went to France during these years and indeed, the calligraphy of shadows from unseen foliage, falling across the flat shapes of drapery is strikingly reminiscent of the early work of Pierre Bonnard (David Martin, The Glasgow School of Painting, London, 1976 ed., p. 15).

Gauld was not alone in these experiments around 1890. In that year George Henry and Edward Atkinson Hornel exhibited The Druids: Bringing Home the Mistletoe, (Glasgow Art Gallery), a collaborative work which also set new goals for painting in Scotland. Again, the decorative flattening of space, heraldic colour emblazoned on the canvas, with the flourish of rich medieval costume, were the new enthusiasm. Henry, like Gauld, was thought to have been influenced by the Pont Aven School painters (Francis Fowle, "The Franco-Scottish Alliance: Artistic Links bewteen Scotland and France in the 1880s and 1890s," in Francis Fowle and Belinda Thomson eds, Patrick Geddes: The French Connection, Glasgow, 2004  p. 31). When he exhibited at the Glasgow School retrospective at the Munich Glaspalast exhibition in 1890, Gauld’s work was praised by German critics for the ‘extraordinary intensity and poetic inspiration’ of his idylls (‘Marie’, ‘Scottish Pictures: What the Germans think of them, [Translation of an article by Herr Fritz von Ostini]’, Glasgow Weekly News, 20 September 1890). Along with other second generation ‘Glasgow Boys’ like Stuart Park and Thomas Austen Brown, and the Edinburgh-based, William James Yule and Robert Brough, he continued to develop the concept of decorative painting. The Procession of St Agnes exemplifies this tendency and it acted as inspiration for the young Charles Rennie Mackintosh who met Gauld at this time and designed bedroom furniture for his house.

Dating from around the time of his marriage in 1893, when he was also painting head studies of women in woodland settings, Gauld consistently returned to the theme and frieze-like composition of his two earliest subjects. A Woodland Dance c. 1890-3 (fig 3, unlocated), which further develops the theme of St Agnes’ Eve, confirms his move away from the strict marquetry of Music and St Agnes. Like transitional paintings  such as the unfinished Colour Sketch (St Agnes) c. 1890-3 (fig 4, Fleming Collection) it demonstrates his continuing interest in friezes of figures derived in part from the Pre-Raphaelites, moving parallel to the picture plane (Bill Smith and Selina Skipwith, A History of Scottish Art, The Fleming Collection, London, 2003 p. 144).  The format here is strikingly similar to The Procession of St Agnes, and linear elements – light sable brush sketching of the figures – are seen to give way to the sensual use of pigment (fig 5).

By 1893, music, dance and the rites of St Agnes are still retained, although by this stage the women move through the woodland, parallel to the plane of the picture, carrying ancient instruments, but wearing contemporary dresses. Despite being more restrained than A Woodland Dance, The Procession of St Agnes indicates great freedom of handling and a deeper fascination for the effects of dappled sunlight. It could indeed be the work that David Martin was considering when he wrote,

"He has developed an exceedingly fine sense of decorative effect, both of line and in colour, and his pictures … treat of maidens quaintly clad, with musical instruments, and forming processions through woodland landscapes, or set before the leafy background of trees …" (Martin, 1976 ed., p. 15)

After 1895, Gauld abandoned the quasi-Symbolist poetry of The Procession of St Agnes and after a visit to the artists’ colony at Grez-sur-Loing near Fontainebleau, he restricted himself to landscape painting and to marketable cowshed scenes. Works from his more experimental, avant-garde period in the early 1890s are comparatively rare, and a number of those which have survived are unresolved – clearly not the case with the present example.

St Agnes, an early Christian martyr who at the age of thirteen refused an arranged marriage, was executed in 304 AD. She became the patron saint of young girls and the subject of a famous poem by John Keats. St Agnes Eve, 20-21 January, was a time of celebration when young women could, according to legend, foretell their future husbands. There is a slight incongruity in that the trees are fully in leaf in Gauld’s picture – an impossibility in Scotland, in January. Nevertheless, the rich foliage, coupled with the vivid reds of the central figure’s tunic, fully justify Martin’s assessment of the painter’s fine intuitive sense of decorative effect.