The Glasgow Boys

You may have assumed, quite reasonably, that the Glasgow Boys, capitalised, is a reference to a collection of Scottish blokes who hang about in pubs drinking pints of heavy and subsist mostly on a diet of scotch pies, Irn Bru and chips. Not so.

The Glasgow Boys were instead a school of painters that worked around the turn of the century, who shared a couple of characteristics. The first was that the art establishment of the time would not accept them, leading them to establish their own school, the second was that they congregated in a city in Scotland that, without wishing to give too much away, wasn't Edinburgh.


Looking round the recent exhibition at the Royal Academy, there's precious little to suggest that they actually spent much time in Glasgow. This is fair enough, it's not a city known for it's rolling vistas and dazzling available light. This is why many of the paintings were done in the highlands or, that favourite location of many a Scotsman, abroad.

The audio guide was at great pains to point out that the Glasgow Boys were not impressionists (impressionists in this context meaning a school of painters working at the turn of the last century rather than folk who can do a passable Cary Grant impersonation). Right. So. Just to check, they are painting at the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century, were influenced by the Japanese woodcuts that were available in Europe for the first time, romanticising the rural poor, doing portraits of ordinary people rather than commissions of wealthy worthies and capturing the emergence of the middle class. But they are not impressionists, despite producing more images of gardens than you find in a lawnmower catalog? Sorry, but they were clearly impressionists, or at least shared 99% of their DNA with impressionists. You don't have to be French to be an impressionist, although it plainly helps.


There were some extraordinary works on show. 'A Highland funeral' depicts a collection of dour looking Scottish agricultural labourers huddled round the front door of a cottage in the gloaming, the only daylight a brilliant slash of golden sunset high in the sky. Then you notice the wee coffin supported by a couple of kitchen chairs and your next breath catches in your throat. Of all the works on display this was the one that seemed to provoke the strongest reaction, the little crowd that was always in front of it a reflection of the grim little gathering depicted. Intrusion into private grief is something that newspapers have made commonplace, long lens shots of funerals of celebrities or the victims of tragedy or malice being the sad staple of the tabloids, but this is not an image to be glanced at before you turn over to be confronted by an ad for sat navs, the painting was huge and daunting and, like grief, filled the room.

Although hugely impressive, the exhibition was about an awful lot more than dead bairns and weeping celts. There was a fabulous wee portrait called 'Hard at it' depicting the artist on the beach, shaded by an umbrella and labouring at his easel. There were also many pictures of Scottish landscapes, sharing the common characteristic of sporting a coo somewhere in the landscape. Scottish folk love a coo in their landscapes and if you were to have even a chance of selling your depiction of hills or fields or streams or trees, it better have a coo somewhere in it.

Like every successful Scot, the key decision in attaining that success was to get the hell out of Scotland. Hence there are dazzling pictures of Europe and of the Mediterranean. These excursions must have had the Boys sending out for fresh paint, light blue not previously having been a colour they had any call to use.

The boys tackled what are now traditional subjects on the familiar curve of moving from challenging the establishment to become the establishment. Influenced by French painters, they painted farm labourers. Now of course galleries are full of folk in smocks passing round the scrumpy, pulling up sprouts and shaking the sod from their boots, but back then it was avaunt guard to paint a portrait of anyone that wasn't paying you good money to do so.

As well as folk toiling in fields, the Boys painted folk toiling in their gardens, both sweating over shovels and, more importantly, sweating over a service as they played tennis matches. The painting of the tennis match is astonishing, and not just because watching a woman play tennis in what is, essentially, a ball gown is fascinating. Suffused with light (it depicts a garden in France, not Govan), it shows a young woman and a bloke having a knock up while the rest of the gather party sit idly by and watch. You can almost smell the wine and cheese. Best of all the ball boy, dressed in a suit and sporting some rather fetching knickerbockers, is smoking. Now that I'd like to see at Wimbledon.

One minor annoyance was that the catalog had sold out. Luckily, the Kelvinhall Galleries in Scotland, where the exhibition had originated, still had some of theirs left so thanks to the wonders of mail order, I have my catalog. In this case, it was more important than usual to get one, as it is about the only way that you'll get time to enjoy an uninstructed view of the paintings. The gallery was packed to the rafters, it made the Summer Exhibition look depopulated. There were no incidents of gallery rage that I could see (gallery rage being when somebody is so upset that they tut audibly), but I was affected by that precursor to a tut; unkind thoughts about the raincoat of the chap who had just obscured my view.

Finally, the last gallery is worth a mention. The entire room was painted gold. I'm not sure whose idea it was to decorate a gallery like a hip hop superstar's toilet, but the effect was amazing, the whole room looked like one enormous gilded frame. Fantastic idea.