First impressions

Chocolate-box art today, perhaps, but in the beginning many thought the Impressionists were 'flinging paint in the public's face'. Tim Cornwell previews a show that recreates a movement in which Scotland played a major role

IT MIGHT BE HARD TO BELIEVE, but impressionism, so popular in prints and galleries that it gets derided as chocolate-box painting even as it pulls the crowds, once carried the same shock value as the work of Tracey Emin or Damien Hirst.

The first Impressionist show was staged in London in 1883, the year of Manet's death, with about 50 works at Dowdeswell's Gallery. Establishment critics were outraged. "It would seem as if they suppress all drawing, because they don't know how to draw; put composition away because they are too lazy to compose," the Magazine of Art concluded. "Throw colour to the dogs, because they do not care to learn the proper use of it; practise a new theory of art because they will not be at the pains of mastering the old; and report facts instead of painting pictures because they have no remarks to offer on the subjects they elect to record."

Degas's Le Foyer de la Dance à l'Opéra de la rue Le Peletier was the first Impressionist picture to be exhibited in Scotland, in 1888 – lent to the Glasgow International Exhibition. The work was completely overlooked by Scottish critics, though to be fair there were 2,700 works on display in ten galleries.

Yet, it was Scottish collectors – and Scottish painters, paralleling the French movement – who led Britain in embracing a new style of art that challenged the establishment by, among other things, painting subjects of everyday life.

Impressionism and Scotland, an exhibition opening this weekend at the National Gallery Complex in Edinburgh, aims to recreate that period, and with it some of the greatest art collections Scotland has seen – and lost.

In the 1890s, thanks to the famous Glasgow dealer Alexander Reid, works by Degas, Monet, Manet, Sisley and Pissarro were regularly shown in this country, and their output was lapped up by the Scottish "merchant princes" of the late 19th and early 20th century.

Take, for example, the 19th-century sugar baron James Duncan. His art collection was one of the greatest in Scottish history. With the cash pouring in from his three refineries, the bookseller's son from Glasgow paid up to £3,000 for the choicest pictures, building up a personal gallery on his Benmore estate big enough to house 300 works of art.

As new research by art historian Andrew Watson has revealed, in 1883 Duncan became the first Scottish collector to buy an Impressionist painting: Pierre-Auguste Renoir's The Bay of Naples. Watson matched Duncan's Renoir to the picture that is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art – and now, more than a century later, the 1881 painting is returning to Scotland as one of the star attractions of the NGC show.



Unlike fellow sugar king Henry Tate, or the millionaire shipowner Sir William Burrell, however, Duncan never gifted his works to a public gallery. In the mid-1880s, with the ruin of the British sugar trade – blamed on foreign subsidies – his business imploded; Benmore House and its 11,000-acre estate were sold off, along with all but one of his artworks.

"Just at the point where his collection was complete, almost the same year, he had to start selling it," says Watson, a senior art teacher at George Watson's College. "It was one of the great tragedies for the nation, as Duncan had talked about leaving his gallery to the nation. The purchase of the Renoir is unusual. It was bought by Duncan in the face of fierce criticism at the time. Even the great champions of Impressionism in France weren't too sure about the Naples painting. One critic, after seeing the picture, said Renoir had failed as a landscape painter."

Another work in the show, also once in a private Scottish collection, gives the full sense of how scandalised polite society could be by the new style. Degas's L'Absinthe, from the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, was bought in 1892 by Arthur Kay, a drapery merchant and an early Scottish Impressionist collector. Today it's an iconic crowd-pleaser, but at the time its depiction of a woman – possibly a prostitute – drinking beside a dissolute-looking man was shocking.

"When this was sold, it was a time when, in Scotland, alcoholism was quite a problem," says Frances Fowle, the exhibition's curator. "In Punch magazine at that period, Scots are always caricatured as drunks. The Temperance movement was very strong in Scotland, and a lot of collectors were members. I think it's one reason why the painting was quite a scandal at the time. It was in London that it was hissed. It was too shocking for Britain, and it was pretty extraordinary that he bought it."

The stunning À la Mie, by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec comes from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Again, the work was part of an extraordinary Scottish collection, this time amassed by David Cargill, heir to an oil fortune, who bought works by Manet, Renoir, Monet, Sisley and others in the 1920s, later adding works by Gauguin as well as Cézanne's famous Portrait of Henri Gasquet.

Most of Cargill's paintings were sold in the late 1940s to set up a charitable trust; his half-brother William's equally stunning collection was auctioned off in 1963. "The two Cargill collections were a great loss to Scotland," Fowle says. "But we have fantastic collections, despite that. It's extraordinary. In Glasgow the McInnes collection is probably the most important collection of Impressionist art. There are a number of works in the exhibition from that."

In Aberdeen, meanwhile, meat magnate Sir James Murray was also a collector. Fortunately, says Fowle, some of his works stayed in Scotland – and a Pisarro that was once in his collection is coming from Australia.

FOR MANY, IMPRESSIONISM means French painters, above all Monet, with Pisarro, Renoir or Sisley. But like other "isms" in art, it's a struggle to define it precisely. What Fowle has set out to show is that Impressionism had a much broader meaning when it first emerged. "The term was used very loosely to describe artists who painted in this more sketch-like manner," she says. "It has to do with painting out of doors, painting on the spot and also to do with the analysis of colour and light.

"The idea of Impressionists is that they are trying to capture a specific moment in nature. Very often, Impressionist art is landscape art. It's a break away from the traditional academic painting, of the historical subject matter, attention to detail, very carefully balanced composition."

Under this broad canopy fell Scottish painters such as the Glasgow Boys – called "Impressionists" in their day – whom Fowle will feature alongside their French counterparts. "These (French] artists were revolutionary at the time; so were the Scottish artists, because they were doing exactly the same thing," she says.

"In Scotland the prevailing taste was for romantic images of mountains, the massacre of Glencoe, that kind of historic matter, and they wanted to paint peasants working in the fields, and eventually more modern life subjects like a game of tennis, painting a much more contemporary image of Scotland, an honest image rather than the very romanticised image."

Conservative tastes were no less outraged by the home-grown innovators than by the continentals. In 1891, Glasgow Boys John Henry, Sir John Lavery, James Guthrie and others were given their own "Impressionist" room at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh (Lavery's The Tennis Party, which Sir James Murray gifted to the Aberdeen Art Gallery, is another attraction in the exhibition). Reaction: a flurry of letters to The Scotsman, and an angry response from Sir George Reid, the RSA president.

"The so-called Impressionists have, unfortunately, some followers in Scotland," he wrote. "There is quite a school of them in Glasgow. It is the influence of the modern French school of painting. I greatly dislike young artists going in for this kind of thing. It is simply an impertinence."

The exhibition also features James McNeill Whistler, a major influence on the Glasgow Boys. Whistler's Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge, which has come from the Tate Gallery, was the painting that launched the famous Whistler-Ruskin trial of 1879. The writer and critic John Ruskin, after viewing it, denounced the "ill-educated conceit of the artist".

"I have seen, and heard much of Cockney impudence before now: but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask 200 guineas for flinging a pot of paint into the public's face," Ruskin wrote. Whistler sued for libel; he won one farthing in damages, and was bankrupted.

In the section on Post-Impressionism in Scotland, Fowle has hung remarkably similar compositions by French and Scottish painters side by side. The trees in SJ Peploe's Landscape, Cassis from 1924 follow strikingly similar angles to Paul Cézanne's The Big Trees from 1890. There are also several works in the exhibition by William McTaggart, the 19th-century painter called "the Scottish Impressionist", though today his works sell for a fraction of the French works.

In 1894 Sir James Caw, later director of the National Gallery of Scotland, rated McTaggart far above Monet: "His pictures are usually pitched in a very high key, but, unlike Monet and his followers, he attains his end without crude colour, chalky light or disagreeable and repellent handling."

Of McTaggart, Fowle says: "You wouldn't call him an impressionist today, but he was called an impressionist at the time, and that's the point I am trying to make. But people find it a bit perplexing."

Judging by the popularity of Impressionism, however defined, in Scotland – record-breaking numbers went to the Monet exhibition at the National Galleries a few years ago – Fowle at least doesn't have to worry about one thing: that such issues will keep the public away.

• Impressionism and Scotland is at the National Gallery of Scotland, today until 12 October.

In your spam basket this summer (don't delete)

WHILE there has long been a strong visual art programme in Edinburgh during the Festival, the capital's summer shows are now grouped together in a user-friendly programme, the Edinburgh Art Festival.

Like Glasgow International, this is very much an equal opportunities affair, with experimental work in small galleries getting the same space in the programme as its star star, Tracey Emin (pictured).

So, while you'll want to catch Vanity Fair Portraits, Foto, and China: A Photographic Portrait, make time to see intriguing festival offerings such as The Golden Record: Sounds of Earth, the Collective Gallery's attempt to make a contemporary version of Nasa's recording of Earth sounds, sent into space in 1977 as a message to aliens. Other off-the-wall shows include Spam the Musical, which sounds like a Fringe show but is in fact a city-wide art project, in which works will appear unexpectedly – uninvited, like spam – at undisclosed locations across town. Keep your eyes open. AE

The Edinburgh Art Festival runs from 31 July until 31 August, www.edinburghartfestival.com