Scots artist is celebrated in month-long retrospective

Published on Friday 26 June 2009 23:11

A SCOTTISH artist whose career has been overlooked is being celebrated in a major gallery exhibition of his work at the age of 98.

John McNairn enrolled at Edinburgh College of Art in 1927, but his career as a painter was hit by the upheavals of the Second World War, his family said.

His work is held by the Fleming Collection of Scottish art, and in Edinburgh's City Art Centre. Philip Long, senior curator at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, called his work "a treasure to be uncovered and explored."

Born in Hawick in 1910, McNairn travelled to Paris and Spain to study and work in the 1930s, but spent his post-war working life as an art teacher at Selkirk High School. He served in India during the war.

Bourne Fine Art in Edinburgh, the prestigious private gallery showing and selling work by major Scottish artists living and dead, is staging the month-long retrospective.

Bourne director Emily Walsh said it was "especially exciting" to handle his work from the 1930s, when he was a contemporary of better-known Scottish artists William Gillies and William MacTaggart. "In terms of who he met and what he saw, he makes a very interesting figure in Scottish art," she said.