The Glasgow Boys audio tour

The Royal Academy is really doing a good audio tour these days and this one was no exception, making much use of Scottish artist Barbara Rae, essentially ensuring one Scottish voice at least to disquiet the London gallery goers. What really sets a good audio tour apart is the use of music and sound effects. Music, I think, would be a particularly good way to make that other reason to visit galleries - cruising for potential new boyfriend/girlfriend material - a lot easier, if one were to key in the appropriate number for the painting and then dance to the music that precedes the commentary. Like birds or badgers, nothing gives a signal about the suitability of a mate more than how you throw some shapes.

As good as music is, sound effects are the new must have for audio tours, to make it a completely immersive experience. The tennis paintings was glorious opportunity to exploit this. It could really have benefited not from the grunts and whooshes that one associates with the modern day game but with the 'pock', 'pock' of a genteel rally and the gurgle gurgle of Pimms splashing into a glass full of ice and hedgerow, not to mention the swish of crinoline and crease of linen

There should, though, be something on the audio tour for every painting, although I realise that this might result in a long tour. It would be good if the owners of the paintings on loan from a private collection had sixty seconds to explain why they bought the painting in question. With luck it would be a little more interesting than 'an investment' or 'the shade of blue really goes with an armchair I have'.

These small deficiencies, especially the idea of composing a score to visit the gallery to, or even something I experienced in the Whitney in New York City, where a composer had produced a 'sound response' to a painting, makes me wonder if it is not time that the audio guide market was opened up. With the ubiquity of the iPod and iTunes podcasts, might it not be simple enough for early visitors to the exhibition to go, get the catalog and put together a podcast, each chapter either an explanation of the painting (resisting the temptation to just make everything up and also resisting the temptation to pretend to be the owner of a piece on private loan who explains that he bought the piece because he likes to 'self pollute' when looking at it, not just when at home but especially when he visits it on public display and he sees somebody listening to a bootleg audio tour on their iPod turning round with a growing sense of suspicion and alarm) or, better yet, a soundtrack to the thing. Oh, and some banging tunes to groove to.

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.

Haunted household objects

Unless you’re a collector, an enthusiast or a nutter, it’s more than likely that the things that fill your home are a mixture of the essential, the useful and the occasional luxury. If you have extra soft quilted loo paper then you’re covering all three categories there.

If you have a chest of draws full of Barbie dolls still in their boxes then you are collector. If you have a chest of draws full of Barbie doll heads that have been wrenched off their bodies, then you are nutter.

For most folk though ordinary, everyday households are, by and large, filled with ordinary, everyday objects that are, on the whole, fairly innocuous. Occasionally something has the capacity to be odd, creepy or sinister, if you have something that’s antique, or stuffed, or both, then this can often be the case. Folk had a different aesthetic and the Victorians in particular thought that no home was complete without a stuffed raven or a hunting scene diorama. Such items look a little incongruous today when placed on Ikea furniture.

Then there are things that are just too jolly to ever be creepy, like clockwork chickens! What’s not to love?


Paintings though, can be odd, in any number of ways. There’s the portrait where there’s something just not quite right; on the plus side, it may hold the key to a puzzle that will point the way to lost treasure (if you’re lucky it’s a figure pointing to the base of a familiar tree while holding a spade, if you’re unlucky it’s a figure sitting at a chess table which has been set up with a problem, in an unfamiliar landscape, with notes in mirror writing in a foreign language and you just have to hope beyond hope that the painter wasn’t a practical joker). Occasionally of course paintings provide useful places with assassins – with exactly the same eyes as the person in the painting – to lurk behind, peeping and awaiting their pouncing opportunity.

Or the painting of somewhere that turns out to have something of a gruesome history, which you only find out about after you’ve bought it. Or, always my favourite, the painting that actually changes appearance when you’re not looking.






M.R. James combined these to great effect in his short story ‘The mezziotint’. If you thought the scariest thing about buying art was the price tag, think again.

Art, of course, is all about provenance. That creepy washed out sketch on the wall, the one that’s signed ‘Vincent’, that’s worth something. But giving an object an interesting back story can also boost value, and nobody wants any romantic crap – it’s got to be action, adventure or, best of all, horror.

Clocks are another good example of an ordinary object that can, with the twist of a pen, become far more interesting as you note that it has, on more than one occasion, struck thirteen. Grease in the mechanism or something more sinister?

The oddest object I know of? A mass produced camera from the 1930s.


Why? Well, it’s all because of a comic. ‘The Collector’ was a British horror anthology comic that ran for precisely one issue in 1977. The story goes that it was beset with misfortune from the outset. Competing with an already crowded comics scene, not only did a distribution cock up mean that only a few copies made it into the shops (the remainder somehow being delivered to a chicken rendering plant where they were put to a use that is as baffling as it is unappetising), but it was released in the summer of Star Wars, and if your comic didn’t have wookies, robots, glowing swords and space ships, you were toast.

Frankly, an old fart who owned a junk shop making Hitchcock-like appearances in comic strips about haunted, cursed or otherwise macabre objects wasn’t cutting it, and The Collector sank after just one issue.

But not without a trace. The comic came with a free gift – allegedly the very same cursed poker chip that featured in the lead story.

Not long after, gruesome tales started circulating the playgrounds that kids who had been lucky, or unlucky, to get hold of the issue had come to bad ends, just like the owners of the chip in the story. The only thing that kids like doing more than teasing other kids is delivering tales of misfortune about their peers with more relish than you’d find in McTavishe’s House of Condiments.

Not many people remember ‘The Collector’ these days, (it’s unlikely you’ll even find a reference to it on the web) and the only time you’re likely to see an issue is bagged at some comics fair. The copies with the free gift still attached don’t sell well.

As for why this makes the camera creepy? One of the other stories was about an investigator of the paranormal brought in to investigate a mysterious death at a church, where the warden has apparently been scared to death. The investigator, armed with a camera to collect evidence, spends a night in the crypt and is found, the next morning, stone dead, a look of terror on his face. The camera has taken one shot; could it be that a photograph exists of something with the power to kill men with sheer terror. Is there a photograph of the devil himself? The collector isn’t saying.

Spooky enough? Well, the thing is, the story itself is based on a local myth from the area where I grew up. Okay, so I’m sure that just about every postcode with an old building of some sort has a story like that issued by the Department of Tourism. Heritage ghost stories are probably handed out to churches just like anyone with an interest in promoting tourism near a body of water bigger than a puddle can whip up a story about the creature in the lake. If you have a hotel on a moor or heath, it’s a difficult balancing act between making sure there are regular blurred photographs of ‘The Beast’ to intrigue visitors and hoping that nobody recognises that for the last one, you forgot to take Mr Tibbles’s collar off.

Thing is, and a friend of mine picked up a camera, just like the one in the story, at a church fete many years ago.

He’s never opened it but apparently it’s taken one exposure.

So the question I like to tease him with is this: did he buy a camera or did he buy the camera?

Does he have a camera, sitting on a shelf in his shed, that has a photograph of whatever was in that crypt?

He’s fairly pragmatic about it. Apparently he was expecting to pick up an antique, collectable, camera at the fete and flog it on Ebay, netting a tidy profit. Unfortunately the cameras were mass produced, are incredibly hard wearing and, as a result, they go for peanuts on auction sites. What he needs, he assures me, is a rumour that it’s not just a camera, it’s a camera with a story, a camera with a secret.

I asked him: do you really think I’ve got nothing better to do with my time than make up some tosh about a haunted camera and post it on my blog?

Tut.