The Glasgow Boys

The Glasgow Boys were a loose band of some twenty young painters who, in the 1880s and 1890s, set Glasgow briefly at the very forefront of European art. In revolt against the dark, sentimental studio painting of the Scottish establishment — which they mocked as the work of ‘gluepots’ — they carried their easels out of doors, painted the plain realities of country life, and, with a triumphant showing in Munich in 1890, made the name of Glasgow ring across the Continent. For a glorious decade or so, this northern industrial city was one of the most exciting words in painting.

This page tells their story: the revolt that brought them together, the new art they made in the open air, the leading figures of the group, the studios and colonies where they gathered, their turn to colour and decoration, their great triumph abroad, and the legacy they left.

A revolt against the ‘gluepots’

In the early 1880s a group of young Scottish artists found themselves united by a shared contempt for the state of their national art. The painting favoured by the establishment — and by the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh — seemed to them dark, over-varnished and hopelessly sentimental: endless romantic Highland scenes and flattering portraits of the gentry, executed in the brown studio manner they derided as the work of ‘gluepots’. Never a formal society, and drawn together more by friendship and conviction than by any manifesto, these rebels came to be known simply as ‘the boys’ — the Glasgow Boys, or, collectively, the Glasgow School of painting. What bound them was a determination to sweep all that staleness away, and to paint the modern world as they actually saw it.

Painting in the open air

Their new art looked outward, to the Continent. The Boys were fired above all by French naturalism, and in particular by Jules Bastien-Lepage, whose unsentimental scenes of peasant life showed them a way forward; they learned, too, from the realism of Courbet and Millet, from Dutch painting, and from the subtle tonal art of the American James McNeill Whistler, who took a friendly interest in them. Following their heroes, they took to painting out of doors, directly before their subjects, capturing the true light and colour of the countryside. In place of the gentry and the glens they painted farm workers, byres, orchards and cabbage gardens — the ordinary life of rural Scotland, rendered plainly and without sentiment. James Guthrie’s A Hind’s Daughter, a young girl in a winter cabbage field, became one of the defining images of the movement.

The leaders of the group

The Boys were a circle of real talents rather than followers of a single master. Foremost among them stood James Guthrie, largely self-taught, whose grave and dignified rural scenes are among the group’s finest achievements, and the Irish-born John Lavery, Paris-trained and effortlessly brilliant, whose The Tennis Party is among the group’s best-loved works and who became the most fashionable portrait painter of his day. Around them gathered a remarkable company: George Henry and Edward Atkinson Hornel, the great colourists; Joseph Crawhall, an incomparable painter of birds and animals in watercolour; Edward Arthur Walton and Arthur Melville, the latter a virtuoso of the wet, glowing watercolour; and James Paterson, William Kennedy, Alexander Roche and others. Presiding over their early gatherings was the older William York Macgregor, sometimes called the father of the group, in whose studio much of it began.

Studios & colonies

The Boys were as much a network of friendships as a school, and they came together in particular places. In winter they met and argued in Macgregor’s studio in Bath Street in Glasgow; in the painting season they gathered in the countryside, working side by side at rural colonies — at Cockburnspath in Berwickshire, where Guthrie and his circle spent long productive summers, and at Kirkcudbright in Galloway, which became especially associated with Hornel. Several had also worked at the French artists’ colony of Grez-sur-Loing, absorbing the plein-air methods they brought home. It was in this constant exchange of ideas, in studio and field, that the distinctive character of their painting was forged.

Colour, Japan & the decorative

As the 1880s gave way to the 1890s, the art of the Boys changed. Several grew less interested in sober naturalism and more in bold colour, flat pattern and decorative effect, drawn to the brilliant hues and flattened forms of Japanese prints and to the swirling motifs of the Celtic Revival. The great monument of this new manner was The Druids — Bringing in the Mistletoe, an ambitious canvas painted jointly by George Henry and E. A. Hornel in 1890, richly coloured, intensely patterned and almost two-dimensional. So deep did this fascination run that in 1893 Henry and Hornel travelled together to Japan, staying for over a year and returning with work that carried the influence of Japanese art directly into Scottish painting.

Triumph at Munich

The Boys owed much to the wealth of their home city, then the Second City of the Empire, whose rich industrialists became their patrons, and to the shrewd Glasgow dealer Alexander Reid, who championed and sold their work. Their moment of triumph came in 1890, when they exhibited together in London and, above all, at the great International Exhibition in Munich, where their fresh, vigorous painting caused a sensation and carried off honours. Almost overnight the Glasgow Boys were famous across Europe, sought after in Germany, Austria and beyond — and Glasgow, so long overshadowed in the arts by Edinburgh, found itself hailed as a serious and original artistic centre.

The legacy of the Boys

The blaze of the Glasgow Boys was brilliant but brief. Success drew several of them, Lavery and Guthrie among them, into lucrative society portraiture, and the radical edge of their early years softened; Guthrie ended his career as the respectable President of the Royal Scottish Academy, the very institution his generation had rebelled against. Yet their achievement endured. They had established Glasgow, once and for all, as a place where important art was made, and the decorative instinct in their later work helped prepare the ground for the Glasgow Girls and the wider Glasgow Style that followed. Their finest paintings hang today in Kelvingrove, whose collection of the Boys is unrivalled, and their pictures also grace the walls of the great Banqueting Hall of the City Chambers — a permanent monument, in the heart of the city, to Glasgow’s brief reign at the forefront of European painting.

Leading figures