Studio: international art (40.1907)

The Scottish Modern Arts Association

“a SCOTTISH pastoral” (Acquired by the Scottish Modern Arts Association) BY E. A. WALTON

ward and to see to what extent the generations of
art immediately preceding the present are repre-
sented in the national collection. Of the Scottish
painters of the nineteenth century, only Raeburn,
Phillip, Thomas Duncan, and, possibly, Thomson
of Duddingston, are adequately represented in the
Scottish National Gallery. Of George Watson,
Alexander Fraser, Sam Bough, George Paul Chal-
mers, Erskine Nicol and Tom Faed—to mention
only a few—there is a very meagre representation;
so meagre, indeed, as to remove its representative
character. Of such distinguished Scottish painters
as J. C. Wintour, Milne Donald, Pettie, George
Manson, Colin Hunter, W. E. Lockhart, Arthur
Melville, and Robert Brough, there is not a single
example. A similar remark applies to those living
artists, of the calibre of Mr. McTaggart, Mr. W. Q.
Orchardson, and Sir George Reid, who may be
regarded as belonging to a former generation of art-
craftsmen. The sequel to such a condition of affairs is
obvious. The blank to be faced by future generations,
under circumstances prior to the foundation of the
Scottish Modem Arts Association, promised to be
no less striking, and to constitute an anomaly of the
most unusual description—an anomaly which finds
expression to-day in the fact that there is not yet a
gallery in Scotland to which the student of art,
professional or amateur, resident or visiting, can be
31°

referred, as containing a permanent collection of
work, adequately representative of modern Scottish
art. Even if we include galleries, south of the
Tweed, which are ostensibly representative of
British art, such as the Tate Gallery in London, it
is clear that little note is taken of the majority of
those painters who are considered by Scotsmen to
be an essential part of their national artistic asset.
As was forcibly pointed out by Sir James Guthrie in
his evidence before the Chantrey Commission, no
collection of British modern art could possibly be
called representative that did not contain a single
specimen of Sir William Fettes Douglas, Thomson of
Duddingston, Sam Bough, J. C. Wintour, Alexander
Fraser, and William McTaggart. On this count it
may be noted that, in the constitution of our new
association, one of the specified objects is to
endeavour to secure adequate representation of
Scottish art in British national collections. As
pointed out by the “Daily Telegraph,” “the
National Gallery, of which the gallery at Millbank
is an important branch, is the National Gallery of
the United Kingdom, and the fame of Scottish
artists, both deceased and living, can be best
assured and enhanced by assisting, and bringing
about, that there shall be found for them on its
walls the prominent place to which they are entitled
as a matter of right, not of favour. It is this that