ART
Scottish Art at Burlington liMise
IN the advance publicity for the Scottish.exhibition at Burlington House stress was laid on the bulk in which the principal painters were to be represented. There were to be forty Raeburns, twenty-five Ramsays and a very large number of Guthries and McTaggarts. But it is not in the event the fact of quantity which gives the exhibition a special instructional importance. The painters whose personalities can be adequate- ly appreciated only through a large-scale study of their work are few in number, and Raeburn, alas, is not among them. Though his portraits inevitably vary in quality, any one of them is sufficient to reveal precisely what his capacities and limitations were, and when as at the Academy the revelation is accomplished forty times we tend to be more conscious of his limitations than of his many compensating merits. Where merits are slight, as with McTaggart, or non-existent, as with Guthrie, the case becomes more serious. The prin- cipal advantage of the exhibition is that there is no phase of Scottish oil-painting which is not shown and shown thoroughly. It must for example have been tempting when arranging the display as a national manifestation to omit Sir Joseph Noel Paton, and the organisers deserve gratitude for their decision that no skeleton ih an artistic cupboard is too disreputable to exhibit. Those who believe that art history should not be confined solely to the study of the first-rate paintings of a period will find much fresh material for analysis. On the aesthetic side there is much that gives great pleasure. The Ramsays are enchanting, the Wilkies very good, there is a very pretty Dyce, and a number of attractive Henning medallions.
In terms of artistic personality there will be little question that the most interesting painter in the exhibition is Geddes. Geddes' popular reputation was made at the British Exhibition in 1934. Where critical judgementi are founded on evidence so slight as that then offered, there is a danger that they may be fundamentally mistaken. With Geddes, however, this was not the case, for he occupies a quite individual position in Scottish painting. If we except Ramsay, who was influenced both by Naples and Paris, the paintings at the Scottish Exhibition never allow us to forget that they were made in the northern extremity of an island in the north of Europe. Nine-tenths of Scottish. painting is wholly unconnected with any central European artistic tradition. But when we come to Geddes, we find a painter who conceived his own style as some- thing basically founded on an international past. After a training in the Academy schools we know that he travelled on the Continent, and the effects of the journeys he then made penetrate a great part of his later work. A pastel study of the Chapeau de Paine (780) testifies to an admiration for Rubens, an oil, study after Giorgione in the Victoria and Albert Museum to a restricted. sympathy for Venetian painting. A small land- scape (i6i) shows obvious affinities with the Rembrandt school, an ink drawing in the British Museum for the Finding of the Regalia is reminiscent of Eckhout, and the etchings of a direct study of Rembrandt himself. At its worst this method resulted, in the case of The Artist's Mother (136), in unashamed pastiche, saved from banality only by the technical skill with which the paint is applied. But at its best, in The Young Falconer (132), it makes possible the creation of an off-masterpiece.
By all accounts the simplicity and objectivity which give the Scottish portrait its special character should have produced an original school of landscape painting. But in fact the exhi- bition reveals no conception of landscape as uniform as that of Scottish portraiture. Thomson of Duddingston occupies a corner in text-books as the chief Scottish landscape painter, and his work has acquired a certain celebrity for topographical reasons. With such a reputation one is tempted in front of single pictures to believe the artist's work better than it appears. The exhibition, however, leaves no possible doubt that Thomson was a very bad painter indeed. On the other hand the stock of Patrick Nasmyth appreciably rises. How much of the attraction of his work is duc to imitation of Hobbema it is difficult to say. But it provides nevertheless a pleasant memory to carry forward into a world of Wintours and McCullochs. To some extent the not very favourable impression of Scottish landscape painting given by the exhibition could have been redressed by a wiser selection of water-colours. But these seem to have been chosen by someone interested only in the water-colour painting of the last half of the nineteenth century and are of an almost unbe-
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