Books of To-day Sir James Guthrie
Sir James Guthrie, P.R.S.A. LL.D. : A Biography. By sir James L. Caw. (Macmillan. £5 5s.) Tut: piety of family and friends has set up in this volume a very full and handsome memorial to the successor of Sir George Reid in office and in practice as the leading Scottish portrait painter of his time. Sir James Caw has the principal part in the text, but other close associates and admirers, Sir I). Y. Cameron, Mr. Hinder and Dr. Warrack, have added their tributes. The tone is naturally more fervid than critical, but the essential biographical facts are given, and the personal groupings recorded, in which Guthrie was recog- nized as a centre of gravity. This part of the text might have been conveniently detached from the stream of descriptive commentary, which accompanies it ; on the other hand, the labour of making out a dated list of works has not been shirked, and the forty-six photogravure reproductions are from the skilled hands of Mr. Craig Annan.
Guthrie was hardly known by exhibition in London except at the beginning and very end of his career. I remember, at the Royal Academy of 1888, being greatly struck by a picture which had been skied. The subject was a goose-girl driving her flock, and the general aspect of the figure, the landscape and the paint was that of a Bastien-Lepage. But what told at that height was its clearness of design, the frieze of nicely distributed heads and necks of the birds and the shape of the girl breaking over a low horizon against the sky, and tied together below by shadow. I was again struck by a pastel, "The Rope Walk," at the New English Art Club of 1889, and in the following year it fell to me, as critic of this paper, to welcome a series of those luministic notes at the Dowdeswell Gallery, and the "Glasgow School" exhibition at the Grosvenor, in which Guthrie played a part. The ferment which came to a head in that exhibition spent itself rather abroad than in London. In many ways it was a rehearsal of the more recent ferment of" Post Impressionism," with that difference- of the effect outwards from a centre in this country. Guthrie and his band were acclaimed in Munich, Paris and at international exhibitions generally.
Before this leap into fame Guthrie, it appears, had nearly given up painting. In the pictures that followed the Goose- Girl, the element of design, perhaps brought out by association with Crawhall, became uncertain and, wrestling alone with a further project, Guthrie fell into despair, but was rescued by his cousin and constant supporter, James Gardiner, with the offer of a portrait commission. This, in 1885, determined his future, and but for the flicker of the pastels and the sunlight-flecked painting, "Midsummer," he did little more in picture-making. •
The most definite common element in the "Glasgow School" ferment was a worship of " paint " as such, and indulgence in loose, shabby handling. Guthrie was not free from this in the easier parts of his portraits, but he differed from most of the " school" in his effort, against the handicap of insufficient early training, to get beyond, in the study of features, the superficial brilliance that was within his reach. The "Major Hotchkiss" near the beginning and the head of Bonar Law at the end are among the instances of his conscience being rewarded. That head was one of the studies made for the picture now at the National Portrait Gallery, the group, "Some Statesmen of the Great War." Sir Abe Bailey commissioned three of those large war memorials, which were to prove difficult of disposition in the Gallery and would have been better assigned to panels in a public building. It is to the credit of Guthrie that in his closing years he turned from the easier practice of the half and occasional full-length single figure to face, as his colleagues did not, the problem of design. He seems to have been influenced, unexpectedly, by Delacroix in the grandiose setting he composed, and Sargent was probably right in thinking that Guthrie, of all his contemporaries, was the most likely to succeed in such an enterprise.
There was another, and a very honourable side, to Guthrie's activities—the part he played in reviving and directing the Scottish Academy on liberal lines. The chilly reception, official and popular, of his work in London helped to decide him in resisting the drain of the South. on Scottish talent. Moreover, the revolt of the West ended in an invasion of Edinburgh by Glasgow with Guthrie at its head, and the Associate of 1888 found himself, fourteen years later, called to be President. The qualities, mental and moral, that had made him a leader among the painters, told in this choice. Guthrie had a clear brain and judgement, large views, and a faculty and love for affairs that was displayed in his directorship of an insurance company and a bank. He could play a public part well, had dignity and reserve, and a pride that made pushing and self-advertisement impossible to him. Under his guidance the Scottish National Gallery and Academy obtained separate housing and full possession of the two buildings on the Mound ; the interior arrangements were improved, ampler funds obtained, the Academy exhibitions leavened by invitations to eminent outsiders, and some of the discarded pomps restored. He held on during the NVar, and resigned in 1919. From that date till the end in 1989 he was chiefly occupied with the memorial picture. He lived to superintend the details of its installation, but not to sec
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