New Year homecoming for Glasgow Boys

Published on Thursday 1 October 2009 22:18

OVER a century ago a Chicago art dealer with a passion for the Glasgow Boys group of artists gathered more than 100 of their paintings to be shown at a grand exhibition in St Louis, Missouri.

Now several "lost" paintings from that vast collection are to be seen in Scotland for the first time, The Scotsman has learned. The works will be returned for next year's milestone Glasgow Boys exhibition.

The Yale Centre for British Art in Connecticut is lending six paintings to the Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery for the spring exhibition. Three are from the collection of Charles Kurtz, a dealer and gallery director who assembled 111 of their paintings for the 1895 St Louis Exposition.

The Kelvingrove show travels on to the Royal Academy in London and is expected to prove an international showcase for the school of Scottish painting that emerged in Glasgow in the late 19th century.

The works of the Glasgow Boys, led by painters such as Sir John Lavery, and EA Hornel, George Henry, James Guthrie, and Joseph Crawhall, became popular in the 1890s.

"Many are still in private hands, and a lot of the very best Glasgow paintings are still untraced, because they were very, very popular in Europe and America at the turn of the century," said Lord MacFarlane, chairman of Kelvingrove's exhibition organising committee. "They exhibited in many of Europe's major cities and America, and when people bought them they disappeared. We managed to find quite a number not seen before."

Kurtz was of German extraction but his middle name was McKeen, while his wife's maiden name was Stephenson.

Three of the paintings from Yale, including two by Hornel, come from the Kurtz family. They were given to the collection by his daughter Isabel in 1989. The Yale Centre has about 2,000 British oil paintings and 20,000 watercolours.

"He was collecting and putting together quite a sizeable collection of Glasgow Boys pictures and promoting their work in this country," said Yale chief curator Scott Wilcox.

"After his death the majority were sold but some stayed in the family. We have about 11 paintings from the Kurtz collection."

Other works, including Sir John Lavery's Woman in Japanese dress, were later added to the collection, founded by the US industrialist Paul Mellon.

One or two of the paintings are usually on show in Yale, said Wilcox. "I don't think the group is very well known in this country. I think they are very important, and a very appealing group, and I would like to see our holdings in that area expand."

The Kelvingrove show includes about 140 pictures.

With core group of about a dozen painters who lived, worked, or trained in Glasgow., the Glasgow Boys rejected the finished style of Edinburgh for a more naturalistic approach centred on the west coast.

Their work was complemented by the Glasgow Girls, a group of female designers and artists that included Margaret Macdonald, Frances Macdonald (sister of Margaret and sister-in-law to Charles Rennie Mackintosh), Jessie M King, Annie French, Jessie Newbery, Ann Macbeth, Bessie Macnicol, Norah Neilson Gray, Stansmore Dean and Eleanor Allen Moore.