The development of British landscape painting in water-coloursFinberg, A. J. (Alexander Joseph)
History
The development of British landscape painting in water-colours
Finberg, A. J. (Alexander Joseph)
Landscape painting, British; Watercolor painting, British
Two years later than R. W. Allan, James Paterson (Plate XXI) was born in
Glasgow, and is noted there as one of the first artists energetically
active, with W. Y. MacGregor, in forming a bolder style of painting than
had been previously fashionable, and who, with the grouping of a few
other enthusiasts later, became known to the art world as the Glasgow
School of Painters. Their revolutionary aims and ideals influenced to a
remarkable extent artists and painting in general throughout Scotland.
Though equally well known as a painter of the figure and occasional
portraits, it is as a landscapist that Paterson’s reputation has been
most uniquely established, his present Dumfriesshire home providing him
extensively with subjects in harmony with his earlier technically broad
sympathies.
Not so closely connected with the Glasgow School movement as James
Paterson, James Cadenhead, born in Aberdeen in 1858 (Plate XVII), became
somewhat imbued with its views. Like the majority of now celebrated
water-colourists, oil painting claimed his first attention. Less
realistic in outlook than his brother artists, his work assumed a more
conceptionally decorative tendency and displayed a flat treatment,
technically similar to that which one associates with the landscape
artists of Japan. It was by such individual features that attention was
drawn to his work, and in 1893 he was elected a member of the Royal
Scottish Society of Painters in Water-Colours, and nine years later an
associate of the Royal Scottish Academy, where, in both exhibitions, his
work shares with that of other leading artists a distinctive admiration.
Turning to the illustration _Suffolk Pastures_, by E. A. Walton (Plate
XXIV), one finds the work of an artist whose ability as a painter is
unanimously respected amongst his fellows. Born in Renfrewshire in 1860,
he is also one who has been historically associated with the
revolutionary Glasgow School; originally a landscape artist, he is
nevertheless one of the leading Scottish portrait painters. But to
confine my appreciation to his landscape work, it is with a lingering
doubt whether it be his examples in oils or water-colours which are the
more enticing if a choice were demanded. It is probably to his work in
the gentler medium I would assign the talent of the man and the artist
as being most completely revealed, especially favouring those drawings
executed on a grey-brown millboard, or some other similarly tinted
paper, with which his skilful use of body-colour mingles and expresses
his prenurtured vision of design and colour harmonies for which he is so
greatly esteemed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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