L12133

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Lot 120
  • 120

Sir James Guthrie, P.R.S.A.

Estimate
600,000 - 800,000 GBP
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Description

  • Sir James Guthrie, P.R.S.A.
  • In the Orchard
  • signed and dated l.l.: JAMES GUTHRIE 1885-6
  • oil on canvas
  • 152.5 by 178cm., 60 by 70in.

Provenance

Bought by Mr T.G. Bishop of Helensburgh in 1887 from the Royal Glasgow Institute for £210;
Mrs W.H. McAlpine of Holmsdale, Surrey by 1932 and thence by descent

Exhibited

Glasgow, Royal Institute, 1887, no. 246 as Apple Gatherers;
Edinburgh, Royal Scottish Academy, 1888, no.453;
Paris, Salon des Artistes Français, 1889, no 1272 as Un Verger, en Ecosse (Mention Honorable);
London, Grosvenor Gallery, 1890, no.195;
Munich, Glaspalast, Münchener Jahresausstellung von kunstwerken aller Nationen, 1890, no. 453b;
Berlin, 1893;
Bath, 1908;
London, Franco-British Exhibition, 1908, no.145;
Glasgow and London, The Fine Art Society, Guthrie and the Scottish Realists, 1981, no. 19;
Glasgow, Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum and London, Royal Academy, Pioneering Painters The Glasgow Boys, 2010, no.32 (Kelvingrove only)

Literature

‘The Glasgow Institute’, The Academy, 5 February 1887, p.99;
‘The Chronicle of Art’, The Magazine of Art, 1887, p.xviii;
Published as a Heliogravure by Hanfstaengal in 1890;
‘Fine Art – The Grosvenor Gallery’, The Academy, 31 May 1890, p.377;
‘The Grosvenor Gallery – Concluding Notice’, The Daily News, 14 May 1890, p.2;
‘The Grosvenor Gallery’, The Manchester Guardian, 2 May 1890, p.8;
Walter Armstrong, ‘The Grosvenor Gallery’, The Magazine of Art, 1890, p.326;
‘The Grosvenor Gallery, First Notice’, The Saturday Review, 10 May 1890, pp.565-6;
The Scots Observer, 24 May 1890;
Tablet, 7 June 1890;
‘The Grosvenor Gallery’, The Times, 5 May 1890, p. 10;
Fritz von Ostini [trans], ‘Scottish Pictures – What the Germans think of them’, The Weekly News , 20 September 1890;
Cornelius Gurlitt, Die Malerei in Schottland, 1893, p.452;
Richard Muther, The History of Modern Painting, vol. III, 1896,, pp. 692, illus. p.693;
David Martin, The Glasgow School of Painting, 1897, p.19;
G. Baldwin Brown, The Glasgow School of Painters, 1908, p.30;
James L Caw, Scottish Painting, 1620-1908, 1908, pp.367-8;
Frank Rinder, ‘Sir James Guthrie PRSA’, The Art Journal, 1911, p.143;
Sir James L Caw, Sir James Guthrie, PRSA, LLD, A Biography, 1932, pp.24, 26-7, 215, illus. opp. p.16;
Roger Billcliffe, The Glasgow Boys, 1985, pp.122-3,149, illus. fig.120;
Roger Billcliffe, The Glasgow Boys, 2008, pp.108-112, illus. fig.118

Condition

The following condition report has been prepared by Hamish Dewar Ltd, 13 & 14 Mason's Yard, Duke Street, St James', London, SW1Y 6BU STRUCTURAL CONDITION The canvas is unlined with the original keyed wooden stretcher which has one vertical cross-bar. This is ensuring an even and secure and structural support. PAINT SURFACE The paint surface has an even varnish layer. Inspection under ultra-violet light shows a number of retouchings which are inpainting within lines of craquelure caused by the natural drying processes of the artist's materials. SUMMARY The painting is therefore in good and stable condtion and while the lines of inpainting are numerous it should be noted that they are restricted to infilling and inpainting of drying craquelure and paint separation rather than any paint loss caused by damage.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

Catalogue Note

As he struggled to complete Schoolmates (Musée des Beaux Arts, Ghent) in the winter of 1884-5, James Guthrie also faced the task of resolving at least one of the large canvases that remained unfinished in his studio. He had started two big pictures of fieldworkers – one known as Pitting Potatoes, based on studies made at Thorntonloch and the other showing fieldworkers sheltering from a shower of rain. But as winter darkness fell around Cockburnspath, the cluster of cottages a few miles from the bleak Berwickshire coast, and his friends all left for their studios in town, the painter became despondent. The light and shade around his sheltering fieldworkers would never look right and in a moment’s frustration, he destroyed the canvas. ‘In disgust’, according to Caw, ‘he put his foot through it’. He then wrote to his cousin, the shipowner, James Gardiner, asking for a University Calendar. Gardiner was alarmed and went immediately to the village where he discovered that Guthrie had come to a decision. He would ‘… give up painting and, returning to the University … [would] take up law or medicine’. There was a stiff conversation; the shipowner prevailed; and he persuaded the painter to return to Glasgow and paint a portrait of his uncle.

While Schoolmates would be finished later in the year, it was not ready for the annual Glasgow Institute exhibition which opened in February 1885 and Guthrie had to send his earlier picture, To Pastures New, (Aberdeen Art Gallery) to the show. Nevertheless, the ambition to paint a large canvas remained as he embarked on an orchard scene in which a woman and child were gathering windfalls, but this too was fraught with problems. The radical plein air Naturalism so admired by his Scottish colleagues was difficult to apply on a large scale.

Like many art students from Britain and North America, the Scots had joined the exodus to Paris in the previous ten years. While Guthrie appears to have stood aside from the general flow, he was nevertheless au fait with the new ideas about Naturalism and Impressionism that were being developed. The hero of the hour, Jules Bastien-Lepage, had successfully adapted a wide range of on-the-spot sketching techniques in successive Salon exhibits that powerfully conveyed the sense of real life encounters with country folk. He taught that a painter must think about viewpoint, about spatial layering, about the solidity of figures; he should learn when to work in detail and when a summary treatment will suffice; to see colour in shadows and movement in form. Bastien-Lepage encouraged his followers to become intimately familiar with ‘a corner of the world’ and document its daily life, eschewing both grandeur and the picturesque in landscape and prettiness in his peasant folk. Anything that the eye did not witness was problematic.

Guthrie had signed up to these principles with To Pastures New, and Schoolmates accentuated the honesty of the reporter observing country children, following the Education Acts of the 1870s, making their way to school. This sense of present actuality was, in his favourite expression, ‘central’. But it also posed questions for those traditionally-minded critics and members of the art establishment who believed that painters were story-tellers involved in history and myth. For Guthrie the challenge of scaling up his simple scenes lay not just in the claim that they were intrinsically worthy, but in the range of technical challenges they posed. When something did not look right, or sit properly in space, it must be changed; when all the shadows or highlights were wrong, it was disastrous. Some of this working out is clear as we turn the pages of his sketchbook, now in the National Gallery of Scotland; he must change the figures in the orchard picture. The kneeling girl was moved to the right and the standing woman, replaced by a second child.

The larger scale of the picture meant working more broadly, and instinctively Guthrie began to pull away from Bastien-Lepage whose Joan of Arc listening to the Voices was criticized as a failed history painting in which the detail of apple trees in the kitchen garden at Domrémy almost swamped the figure.

Throughout the year Guthrie’s friendship developed with Arthur Melville, also struggling with his major oil painting, Audrey and her Goats (Tate). Partly as a result of his experience as a watercolorist, Melville would mass his composition with great confidence, neglecting detail. The two visited John Lavery at Cartbank to review his even more ambitious enterprise, to paint a game of tennis; they checked out the other Glasgow studios, possibly even taking a brief trip to Kirkcudbright, where they encountered other like-minded young artists, and went on holiday to Orkney together.

These encounters renewed Guthrie’s confidence as he returned once more to Cockburnspath to work on his orchard picture. Too late for the Institute exhibition of 1886, In the Orchard remained unfinished and unseen until the beginning of the following year, while he struggled unsuccessfully to resolve the stonebreaker canvas. George Henry and Edward Arthur Walton came to visit him in the early months of that year and he decided to work at the Kirkcudbright colony during the summer where Edward Atkinson Hornel, the leading Galloway painter, five years his junior, was also grappling with the same problems of naturalistic representation. He would start an even larger canvas depicting a wayside conversation between a stonebreaker and a farmhand on horseback around this time, but it too was abandoned and the orchard scene was the only large work to remain.

When it was finally unveiled alongside Lavery’s Tennis Party (Aberdeen Art Gallery) and Walton’s Day Dream (National Gallery of Scotland), In the Orchard – then known as Apple Gatherers - was hailed as ‘one of the most important works by Glasgow artists’. Its handling, variously described as ‘vigorous’ and ‘powerful’, was regarded as ‘strongly influenced by the method of Bastien-Lepage’. Guthrie was now firmly placed in the vanguard and the Glasgow painters with whom he consorted looked to him for leadership. When they were in danger of being ignored by the organizers of the International Exhibition scheduled for Kelvingrove Park in 1888, he wrote to The Glasgow Herald reminding them of the impressive group of ‘sincere art workers’ emerging in the city, and as a result, found himself invited on to its selection committee. Thereafter, the picture was shown at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh where it helped Guthrie achieve associate membership, and the Paris Salon, where, as runner-up to a medal, it received an ‘honourable mention’ from the jury.   

However, the picture’s crucial significance in the development of the Glasgow School was only truly confirmed in 1890 when it went on display at the Grosvenor Gallery in London. Renowned for its controversial shows – it had hosted Whistler and Burne-Jones – the proprietor, Sir Coutts Lindsay was keen on new ideas and in what was to be its last year, the influential George Clausen, persuaded him to feature the best of the Glasgow School pictures. Once again Guthrie’s verdant alfresco orchard scene was given pride of place and, in contrast to Audrey and her Goats, was praised by The Times for its ‘mastery over the grammar of art’. He may have been in awe of Bastien-Lepage, but it was now clear to The Scots Observer that ‘… Mr Guthrie has caught the feeling of Bastien-Lepage without surrendering the right to observe Nature for himself’. It would be difficult for London critics to sneer at a painting that had found such favour in Paris, and venom was on the whole, reserved for Melville and for that curious joint production of Henry and Hornel, The Druids, Bringing in the Mistletoe (Glasgow Museums).   

Nevertheless the Glasgow pictures stood out; they were avant-garde; they revealed that young British artists were not entrapped in Rossetti’s rose bower or Alma-Tadema’s Tanagra, and as such they were invited en masse to exhibit at the forthcoming Munich International exhibition. Again, In the Orchard won approval and German critics were ecstatic. One, translated for The Weekly News, could barely contain his delight. Describing the picture as ‘perhaps the most perfect work Guthrie has sent to Munich’ he continued, ‘Two children on the grass in an orchard …Nothing else? Yet so much! With what intensity the painter has limned the forms of those children and harmonized them with the landscape. Two children in an orchard – and a piece of domestic poetry and joy in nature – in humanity – that cannot easily be found again. Of the charm of the indescribably perfect technique there is nothing to be said …’

Thereafter, the place of In the Orchard was assured. Like Lavery’s Tennis Party it was written up in the history of modern painting and by the turn of the new century, it had become a modern classic – a reference point for all who followed. The later decorative woodland scenes by Henry and Hornel would be unthinkable without it. For his part, Guthrie, after showing an extraordinary group of pastels in 1890, developed a successful career as a portrait painter and in 1902, took up the presidency of the Royal Scottish Academy. The struggles over his early work were almost forgotten - but not quite, for in 1923 he salvaged the figure of the stonebreaker from that early abandoned canvas and reworked it. The one success among those early failures, the picture that survived intact and on which his later reputation rested was nevertheless, In the Orchard.  

We are grateful to Kenneth McConkey for preparing this catalogue note.