The Scottish Gallery opens 2023 with a special edition of Modern Masters, marking ten years since the series, which has done much to celebrate Scottish painting and highlight the history of the gallery, first launched. For this exciting anniversary edition, Ten Years of Modern Masters, the gallery will present an exceptional collection of Scottish paintings, tapestry, and furniture.
Ten Years of Modern Masters includes career highlights from some of the most recognised and celebrated Scottish artists. One of Joan Eardley’s finest seascapes from Catterline will be presented in a collection alongside an exceptional and curious double-sided portrait from her other most celebrated subject, Townhead, Glasgow. There are also significant landscape paintings by the late, great James Morrison, following the Gallery’s celebration of his life and work last year, an artist represented by The Scottish Gallery since 1959. The exhibition also allows visitors to explore the Gallery’s history and extensive back catalogue, providing academic notes and provenance information from their unique daybooks and archive, providing a real insight and contemporary dialogue into 20th Century Scottish art.
The exhibition series has a storied history, with Modern Masters Women having caused a national stir in 2020 by highlighting the women artists that the Gallery placed alongside their peers, at the centre of the art market, decades before the broader art establishment. Modern Masters Women demonstrated that a small independent gallery could generate local, national, and international recognition for spotlighting something extraordinary. The show highlights the work of women like Lilian Neilson, an underestimated as an artist during her lifetime whose contribution as an artist is
only beginning to be fully appreciated. Her significant works Sunrise Over a Seawall, Catterline, 1963 and A Beached Boat, 1964 are exceptional paintings, with the former presaging aspects of abstract expressionism in Scottish painting and the latter a love letter to Catterline painted in the immediate aftermath of her close friend Joan Eardley’s death.
The Gallery continually seeks creative collaboration, and to this end has teamed up with Georgian Antiques and Dovecot Studios, both based in Edinburgh. Georgian Antiques have loaned furniture by the historic makers Whytock & Reid, which will be displayed alongside Phoenix, an important tapestry designed by Humphrey Spender and woven in 1951 at Dovecot, juxtaposed with a contemporary gun-tufted rug designed by Linda Green.
The exhibition pays tribute to The Scottish Colourists, who were among the first artists to lead The Scottish Gallery’s programme of curated solo exhibitions. Ten Years of Modern Masters celebrates the instrumental relationship between The Scottish Gallery and post-Impressionist Samuel John Peploe from their first acquisition in 1898 until his death in 1935. The Edinburgh School and wider circle also feature heavily: Henderson Blyth, Johnstone, McClure, MacTaggart and Philipson are all represented, offering a reminder of the importance of the painting schools of Scotland.
This timely and timeless exhibition will illuminate The Scottish Gallery as a cornerstone of Scottish
Art’s past and future.
The Scottish Gallery
16 Dundas St, Edinburgh EH3 6HZ, United Kingdom
