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Locality and Pleasure in Landscape: A Study of Three Nineteenth-Century Scottish Watercolourists

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 October 2008

Janice Helland
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Extract

Helensburgh is a Scottish town whose quiet streets lead uphill away from the North Clyde Estuary. A short walk from the waterfront esplanade, almost hidden behind a naval housing estate (1957), an observant tourist can contemplate the stone remains of Ardencaple Castle, parts of which might date to the thirteenth century but more of which dates to the eighteenth century. Walking near the stone wall which runs parallel to the small street, it is difficult to imagine that a large, imposing, perhaps intimidating, building once stood upon vast grounds, housing the chief of the Clan MacAuley (or Macaulay). Recently, I stood with a friend in the warm September sun looking at the grey wall, trying to imagine the visage and the determination of nineteenth-century watercolourist Kate Macaulay as she might have gazed, sketchbook in hand, at the then extant house, once the property of her dispersed clan. She may have turned her eyes and her pencil away from the house toward the river or toward the rolling, treed and rocky terrain that stretched beyond the castle walls toward Loch Lomond. She, after all, preferred to draw and paint land and water more than the buildings sprouting from the stone and the soil. But she did paint ‘MacAuley’ land, recording numbers of scenes in and around Loch Lomond, Gare Loch and Loch Long, sometimes moving beyond clan boundaries to Oban and Skye or to the area around her own ‘Ardencaple House’ in North Wales.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , October 1997 , pp. 149 - 164
Copyright
Copyright © Edinburgh Mathematical Society 1997

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References

Notes

1 Scottish architect Robert Adam designed additions to the earlier buildings some time after 1764. Walker, Frank Arneil and Sinclair, Fiona, North Clyde Estuary, An Illustrated Architectural Guide (Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland, 1992), p. 88.Google Scholar

2 In addition, I have selected artists whose career is well-documented in exhibition reviews and catalogues, who exhibited widely, but whose pictures remain virtually impossible to locate. My contention is that art history recycles information about established artists whose pictures exist in public collections; however, the conditions of production and consumption surrounding the art making of [particularly] women has been ignored when pictures cannot be found thus perpetuating the discourse of art history within and around a commercial market-place. Social historians can discuss the work of female farm-workers, for example, without viewing their gleanings; female art-workers might be given the same consideration.

3 Richards, Eric, A History of the Highland Clearances: Agrarian Transformation and the Evictions 1746–1886 (London, 1982), pp. 484.Google Scholar

4 Hemingway, Andrew, Landscape Imagery and Urban Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 1992), p. 7.Google Scholar

5 Minutes of the Society of Water Colour Painters, 21st December 1877. I thank Roger Frame, Glasgow for giving me access to the Minutes of the Society. The Society formed as the Scottish Society of Painters in Water Colours in 1878 and became the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Water Colours in 1888.

6 Glasgow Herald (19th January 1878), p. 3.Google Scholar

7 Glasgow Herald (12th January 1878), p. 4.Google Scholar

8 Glasgow Herald (31st October 1878), p. 7.Google Scholar

9 Glasgow Herald (2nd February 1880), p. 5.Google Scholar

10 Glasgow Herald (6th February 1882), p. 7.Google Scholar

11 Minutes of the Society, 18th March 1878 and the Glasgow Herald (5th April 1878), p. 10.Google Scholar Francis Powell was President of the Society, Charles Blatherwick its treasurer. See also the catalogue of the First Exhibition of the Scottish Society of Water Colour Painters, 1878.

12 Minutes of the Society, 18th March 1878 and 3rd April 1878.Google Scholar

13 The Society formed with 25 artists then added 13 associates for a total of 38 in their first year of organization. Minutes of the Society, 29th December 1877 to 18th March 1878. There were to be no more than forty members and twenty associates at any given time. The Society's rules of procedure stipulated that two-thirds of the members must approve the electing of an associate; thus, the female associates had secured the support of well over half of the male members of the group. Minutes of the Society, 3rd February 1879.

14 Glasgow Herald (9th April 1878), p. 7. The exhibition opened on 8th April 1878 in Yuille's Gallery, 89 Union Street, Glasgow. The purpose of the exhibition was to obtain watercolour drawings ‘direct from the studios of the artists’.Google Scholar

15 Glasgow Herald (8th October 1878), p. 4. The private view was held on 1st November 1878.Google Scholar

16 Glasgow Herald (31st October 1878), p. 7.Google Scholar

17 Ibid.

18 Glasgow Herald (2nd November 1878), p. 4.Google Scholar

19 Glasgow Herald (15th November 1878), p. 3.Google Scholar

20 Minutes of the Society, 21st October 1878 and 13th November 1878.Google Scholar

21 Glasgow Herald (14th December 1878), p. 7, and (28th December 1878), p. 4.Google Scholar

22 Minutes of the Society, 16th January 1879.Google Scholar

23 Glasgow Herald (20th December 1879), p. 3.Google Scholar

24 Ibid.

25 Ross was one of three newly elected associate members; Pollock Nisbet and J. H. Lorimer were elected along with her. Minutes of the Society, 2nd February 1880 and Glasgow Herald (3rd February 1880), p. 4.Google Scholar

26 Cherry, Deborah, Painting Women, Victorian Women Artists (London, 1993), pp. 165–74.Google Scholar

27 Macinnes, Allan I., ‘Scottish Gaeldom: The First Phase of the Clearances’, in Devine, T. M. and Rosalind, Mitchtson, People and Society in Scotland, Volume I, 1760—1830 (Edinburgh, 1988), p. 70.Google Scholar

28 Richards, , Highland Clearances p. 484.Google Scholar

29 The Catalogue of the 1878 exhibition of the Scottish Society of Painters in Water Colours lists Greenlees pictures By the River Side, Callander; At the Roman Camp, Callander; Near to the River among others.

30 Glasgow Herald (18th March 1878), p. 8.Google Scholar

31 Glasgow Herald (23rd April 1878), p. 4.Google Scholar Two years later she sold A Woodland Path for £40 and On the Moor Above Callander for £6.6s; she quite likely sold other pictures as well but this gives some indication of her income. Greenlees earned £25 a year as a student teacher at the Glasgow School of Art in 1872; her salary by 1876 had been raised to £40 per year (Governors' Minutes, Glasgow School of Art 31st July 1872 and 5th October 1876). An annual average wage income in Glasgow in 1880 was £24; thus Greenlees was earning above average but she would have had to buy paints and supplies from her sales. For information on incomes in Scotland during the late nineteenth century, see Morgan, Nicholas and Trainer, Richard, ‘The Dominant Classes’ in Hamish Fraser, W. and Morris, R. J., People and Society in Scotland, Volume II, 1830–1914 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1990), pp. 103–137.Google Scholar

32 In June 1855 Elizabeth Patrick was employed as an assistant teacher at the Glasgow School of Art; her salary was £10 per year. In the autumn of 1861 she was appointed to the new ‘special class for females’, and by 1872 she was earning £40 per year (Governors’ Minutes, Glasgow School of Art, 5 June 1855 and 29 November 1869). Obviously, like Greenlees, selling watercolour pictures supplemented her income.

33 Glasgow Herald (18th March 1878), p. 8.Google Scholar

34 Glasgow Herald (3rd February 1879), p. 4.Google Scholar

35 Glasgow Herald (17th March 1879), p. 4.Google Scholar

36 Glasgow Herald (26th December 1878), p. 7.Google Scholar

37 See the Catalogue for the 1880 exhibition.

38 Glasgow Herald (10th April 1880), p. 7.Google Scholar Two years later she sold what was probably a genre picture The Village Belle for £15.15s attesting to her ability to earn money with this kind of picture as well (Glasgow Herald, 19th October 1882, p. 4). In 1883 she sold The Favourite Air for £30 and After the Dance for £25 (Glasgow Herald) (6th February 1883), p. 4 and (16th April 1883), p. 6. During the 1880s she also became more known for her portraits probably because she took on more commissions upon leaving her teaching position.

39 Greenlees, along with her father, Elizabeth Patrick and Robert Brydall (Georgina Greenlees' brother-in-law), resigned from the Glasgow School of Art because of a dispute between the teachers and the Board. She and Patrick continued to teach privately. Georgina Greenlees, in her letter of resignation to the Board, wrote that she intended to accept ‘offers of engagements in private tuition.' Governors’ Minutes, Glasgow School of Art, 22nd March 1881.

40 Mitchell, W. J. T., ‘Imperial Landscape’, in Mitchell, W. J. T., Landscape and Power (Chicago, 1994), p. 17.Google Scholar

41 The Scotsman (26th October 1885), p. 4.Google Scholar

42 Vickery, Amanda, ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women's History’, The Historical Journal 36: 3 (1993), 391.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

43 The 1881 census shows Ross living with her parents in an 8-room flat at 78 Queen Street; valuation rolls for Edinburgh in the 1880s show Ross renting a studio in the same block of flats for £32 per year.

44 As indicated above Ross was in Spain in 1885 but in addition she seems to have spent much of 1887 in Europe. She exhibited only one picture in 1887 with the Water Colour Society, then the following year exhibited a number of pictures from the Netherlands, Belgium and Normandy. Her earliest visit to Holland appears to have been in 1882 or 1883.

45 In the 1891 census Ross listed herself as ‘neither employed nor employer, but working on own account’.

46 Hall, Stuart, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in Williams, Patrick and Chrisman, Laura, Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory (New York, 1994), p. 394. My use of Hall does not suggest that I view Macaulay's experience as similar to/the same as the black diaspora.Google Scholar

47 Irving, John, Dumbartonshire County and Burgh: From the beginning of the Nineteenth Century to the Present Time (Dumbarton, 1924), p. 436.Google Scholar

48 Ibid.

49 Kate Macaulay was a member of the London Society of Lady Artists from 1874 until at least 1896 during which time she exhibited regularly with them. Joanna Soden is presently compiling an index of these exhibitions and I thank her for this information.

50 Glasgow Herald (10th December 1880), p. 5.Google Scholar For those who are unfamiliar with Scottish geography Tarbert is in Kintyre near Loch Fyne and Tarbet is a small town on Loch Lomond.

51 Glasgow Herald (22nd September 1881), p. 7.Google Scholar During the 1870s and 1880s, Macaulay painted several pictures of Dunstaffnage Caste near Oban, Dunolly Castle, Oban and coastal scenes which often included Kerrera or the coastal cliffs of Argyllshire.

52 Glasgow Herald (3 April 1882), p. 9.Google Scholar

53 An 1887 estate sale in Oban listed three of her pictures. Thus, Macaulay had patrons in this area. Catalogue of Valuable Pictures and other Effects belonging to the Sequestered Estate of James Nicol (removed from Craigievar), 17th November 1887. I thank Murdo MacDonald, Archivist, Argyll and Bute District Council, for bringing this to my attention.

54 Minutes of the Scottish Society of Painters in Water Colours, 23rd December 1878.

55 Glasgow Herald (20 December 1880), p. 4.Google Scholar

56 Macaulay lived with her parents who in turn lived on Hector Macaulay's retirement pay. Macaulay was the sole inheritor of her father's estate (he died in 1896) which was valued at just over £2600. When Macaulay died in 1914 her estate was valued at almost precisely the same amount. The £28 I managed to track down would not represent all the sales she made; she may well have earned at least twice that much, definitely enough to supplement her income and provide supplies to continue painting.

57 Massey, Doreen, Space, Place and Gender (Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1994), p. 5.Google Scholar

58 Greenlees married landscape painter Graham Kinloch Wylie in October 1885.

59 Rose, Gillian, Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Oxford, 1993), p. 104.Google Scholar