Arts review: William McTaggart

Published on Monday 22 February 2010 18:08

WILLIAM MCTAGGART, RSA, RSW (1835-1910): A CENTENARY EXHIBITION **** SCOTTISH GALLERY, EDINBURGH

THIS April will mark the centenary of the death of William McTaggart. He was one of Scotland's greatest painters, but he is unlikely to be commemorated with much fanfare. Unlike our poets, our artists don't seem to rate in our national consciousness and Raeburn's 250th anniversary passed with scarcely a flicker of notice. The Scottish Gallery has, however, put on a modest exhibition of about a dozen pictures to commemorate McTaggart. The gallery has good reason to remember him gratefully. The Scottish Gallery (aka Aitken Dott) has been in business since 1842 and over his long career McTaggart was one of its biggest-ever earners. He could command 1,000 for a picture, roughly equivalent to 70,000 in today's money, and he was prolific.

This small show includes the loan of two pictures from Kirkcaldy, Summer Sunlight and Broken Water, Port Seton. Kirkcaldy has one of the best collections of McTaggart's work and, though neither picture is large, both remind us just what a great artist he was. Summer Sunlight is a picture of just that and little else. There is a hint of beach in the foreground. The rest is rolling waves in sunshine beneath a strip of sky. The picture's only inhabitants are a flight of patrolling gannets. The blue and white of the sparkling water is set off by a hint of warmer grey in the transparent shadows of the rising waves and by a few touches of red where scraps of seaweed mark the shoreline.

The picture is typical of McTaggart in both its economy and its liveliness. Broken Water, Port Seton is as lively, but whereas the former picture is almost all silver and blue, for a sea painting the latter has a surprising amount of warmth in it. Indeed, it is painted on a brown primed canvas. Built up of solid lights and warm transparent shadows, the constant contrast of depth and surface, of warm and cool, is what gives the picture such a vivid sense of the restlessness of wind and water.

A third picture here, Summer's Glamour, is also of outstanding quality. It is a glorious evocation of a warm summer evening. The golden corn and a row of red roofs in the distance are touched by the pink glow of the setting sun. The harvest moon hangs pale in the sky above two children in the foreground and a row of reapers in the distance. The picture is a small variant of The Harvest Moon, one of three pictures that represent McTaggart at the Tate B. It is particularly fitting that it should be here. It belonged to P M'Omish Dott, who, at Aitken Dott, provided McTaggart with support even when his pictures went far beyond the limits of contemporary taste.

The conventions of Victorian landscape that formed that taste were largely literary, variations on a set of associations that together formed the standard clichs of Scottishness. In direct contrast, McTaggart's painting was experiential. It was about sensations, about physical experience and its power over our emotions – the luxury of summer warmth, the scents of it even, or the freshness of the wind in your face beside the sea. For McTaggart, not just sight, but the other senses too, especially hearing, were important to his experience of landscape. The whole sensation was what mattered, not just how things looked. In that, he was both very original and very modern.

Born in 1835, McTaggart was two years younger than Manet, five years older than Monet. This conjunction of dates has meant an awful lot of ink has been spilt about his relationship, or otherwise to Impressionism. It is a complete red herring. He was a quite different artist. He only parallels the Impressionists in his rejection of the convention of finish. On this he was emphatic, and his dismissal of WP Frith, the Victorian master of detail and high finish (and with him most of his English contemporaries), is majestic: "He suffers from the English dread of giving expression to his inmost promptings – a feeling that makes so much of their art commonplace."

The persistent attempts to push McTaggart into some subset of Impressionism reflects the enduring tendency to want to see art as centralised, as at any one time reflecting one dominant idea to which it must either be beholden or else be of no account. That is certainly true today. No ambitious artists would dirty their hands with paint. To get ahead, all you need is the wizard wheeze that gets you media exposure.

&#149 William McTaggart, RSA, RSW (1835-1910): A Centenary Exhibition runs until 27 February.