William McTaggart, R.S.A., R.S.W.

John Simpson Esq., Tayport;
Sale: Dowell's, Edinburgh, 14 March 1885;
William Ritchie Esq.;
Bourne Fine Art, Edinburgh
Private Collection 

James L. Caw, William McTaggart, A biography and an appreciation, James Maclehose & Sons, Glasgow 1917,  pp.44,46 & 230;
Lindsay Errington, William McTaggart exhibition catalogue 11th August to 29th October 1989, p. 40 and illus. pl. 4;
Per Kvaerne, Singing songs of the Scottish Heart  William McTaggart, Edinburgh 2007, p. 76 and pl. 67

McTaggart is probably the most outstanding and innovative landscape painter Scotland has produced, and has been an important influence on successive generations of Scottish painters. In a career spanning over half a century he displayed an exceptional pattern of consistent development. He became one of Scotland's most innovative landscape painters, painting with a technique quite unlike anyone else at that time, with a wonderful loose brushstroke and bright colour. He loved to paint out doors where he would paint small oil studies en plein-air, which would later be worked be worked up as larger compositions in the studio. His early work was influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, but gradually his technique became looser and he developed his own version of Impressionism. Unlike most of his contemporaries McTaggart did not move to London but spent his entire working life painting in Scotland. He lived and worked in Edinburgh until 1889, when he moved to Broomielaw, then in the countryside to the south of the city.

He was born in Aros, Kintyre, the son of an impoverished crofter, when he was twelve he was apprenticed to a Campbeltown apothecary, who recognised his natural talent for drawing and introduced him to the Glasgow painter Daniel MaCnee. The latter advised McTaggart to enrol at the Trustees' Academy in Edinburgh, which had just been appointed Robert Scott Lauder as its co-director, where his fellow students included Hugh Cameron, George chalmers, Tom Graham and John Pettie. At the academy McTaggart won several prizes for drawing . Although classes were free he supported himself by accepting portrait commissions, both while a student and later when he married and had a large family. However, as soon as he felt financially secure he concentrated on landscape and seascape, limiting portraiture as much as he could to family and friends.

In the 1860s McTaggart was engaged with painting children in landscape and The Murmur of the Shell painted in 1867 is a beautiful silvery toned picture in which the pyramidal form of the group of three children is set in strong relief against an almost limitless expanse of pale sea. This painting along with Dora, Spring, The Past and The Present, have a common thematic link in their concern with childish innocence, contrasted explicitly or implicity with the saddness of adult experience. The children in these paintings of the 1860s have a direct and immediate contact with the natural environment. They roll on the grass barefooted, experiencing nature by touch, by handling the sand, of flowers or shells, or equally directly by sight and hearing, and they construct things, make believe forts, sand castles, emblems of the future.The Murmur of the Shell and The Past and The Present are hopeful expectant pictures. However, McTaggart during this period was inspired by the few Pre-Raphaelite paintings which he had first seen in Manchester and later on the walls in the Royal Scottish Academy particularly John Everett Millais's Autumn Leaves and The Blind Girl. It is not too much to say that these paintings haunted his imagination for a whole decade. In the present work, McTaggart does not manufacture detailed pre-Raphaelite pastiches but he explores Millais' layout, image and design as if to elicit the secret of combining the human figure and a landscape setting so that the poetry of the subject arises from the spectators's impression of disjunction, as well as unity.

James Caw the artist biographer records that 'during the late autumn in Edinburgh he was working on a larger version of The Murmur of the Shell for Mr Simpson'.(James Caw, William McTaggart, Glasgow 1917, p 46) It is likely that the subject was sketched when he was away in the summer at Loch-ranza, ' the bay is at times a great rendezvous for the Loch Fyne herring fleet, and he spent his holiday sketching not only the landscape but incidents of fisher life- boats at anchor or under sail, net mending or drying, children at play amongst the boats and fishing gear.' (Ibid Caw, p46)