Preview: Glasgow Art Fair

Published on Sunday 7 February 2010 10:34

Glasgow Art Fair will offer a glimpse of how Scots blazed a trail in tennis long before Andy Murray.

• Sir John Lavery's The Tennis Party, featuring a game at Cartbank House

PROFESSIONAL tennis today is played on a glamorous international circuit, with sponsorship and live broadcasting across the globe. Yet the sport was invented in 1874. So what did it look like back then? Why did it take off and who played it?

New answers may come not from the well-thumbed archive of the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, but from a group of innovative 19th century artists who embraced all that was modern. The Glasgow Boys, it turns out, were tennis mad.

On 25 March, a pastel by Scots artist Arthur Melville will go on show at the Glasgow Art Fair, demonstrating how tennis provided artists with a rich seam of new subject matter. Two weeks later the exhibition Pioneering Painters: The Glasgow Boys 1880 To 1900 at Glasgow's Kelvingrove will include a clutch of tennis-related artworks and some new scholarship on the subject.

Art dealer Duncan Miller, a London-based Scot, is bringing Melville's pastel A Souvenir Of Wimbledon to his stand at the Glasgow Art Fair, where traditionally paintings by Glasgow Boys have achieved the highest prices of the work on show. It's not a slice of action, but the painterly equivalent of the BBC camera that lingers a little too long on a good-looking girl in the centre court crowd. The picture shows a fashionable lady, with a fur collar, a fashionably vertiginous orange-trimmed hat, and splash of yellow at her throat.

In 1889, Angus-born Melville was doing well. He had spent much of the 1880s on the move, from a couple of years in the Middle East to spells in Paris. He moved from Edinburgh to London in January 1889 and spent the summer down south making new work and social connections. "He had a summer doing the rounds," says Miller. "There are pictures of Henley Regatta, a visit to Glyndebourne, and they must have fitted in Wimbledon as well."

Why was tennis important? Miller takes a pragmatic view. "Socially, I think. It was a good place to meet patrons."

The Glasgow Boys, that loose innovative group who summered across Scotland and Europe but gathered in the studios and smoking rooms of Glasgow in the winter months, were often found on the grass courts of wealthy Scots friends and patrons. Melville portrayed tennis on a well-to-do lawn in Angus as well as at the fashionable heart of London society.

One of the most famous Glasgow Boy paintings, John Lavery's The Tennis Party of 1885 – which hangs in Aberdeen Art Gallery – shows the scene on the lawn at Cartbank House, a Georgian mansion near Paisley. "They were young at the time," says Hugh Stevenson, curator of British Art at Glasgow Museums, and co-curator of Pioneering Painters. "It was something new, a nice way to socialise, particularly with members of the opposite sex. After London, tennis had quickly come to Scotland; it was the in thing."

Cartbank belonged to William McBride, a lawyer, and the painting probably portrays his daughter Elizabeth. Among the figures who sat (and indeed ran) for the composition were prominent artists on the scene including James Guthrie, EA Walton and Arthur Melville.

Tennis, with its outdoor setting, its active and fashionable men and women, provided a way to paint figures in a landscape that was far from the images of rural simplicity in French painting that had first influenced the Boys. Tennis was the favoured sport, not just of lawyers but the wool and thread manufacturers who provided much of their patronage. In some sense they were following the money.

"This was modern life," says Stevenson. "Everyday, though quite posh life actually. Not the poorer streets of Glasgow but the mansions of Cathcart, Paisley and particularly Helensburgh."

Miller is perhaps best known as a dealer in the Scottish Colourists and he expects Pioneering Painters will transform an already active market for the Glasgow Boys. "What I'm hoping is that perhaps when it moves to the Royal Academy in London later in the year, it will do for the Glasgow Boys what the Scottish Colourists exhibition and television programme did for them. It created a much broader base of interest. Before that I might have sold a Colourist to the United States but only to somewhere like Greenwich, Connecticut. Now it might be Texas, California, anywhere."

Stevenson agrees. "We do expect the reception of the Glasgow Boys will change, but that's not the intention of the show. Our feeling is that the Glasgow Boys are more important than, for example, the Scottish Colourists. They were more pioneering, more international, more leaders rather than followers. The Glasgow Boys opened things up and put Scotland on the map as an artistic centre."

In doing so they also provided an insight into how and when the centre court became all the rage.

This year's Glasgow Art Fair runs from 15-18 March. Scotland on Sunday is the event's media sponsor www.glasgowartfair.com Pioneering Painters: The Glasgow Boys 1880 To 1890 is at Kelvingrove Museum, Glasgow, 9 April until 27 September

&#149 This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday on 07 February 2010