Fine Art

Artworks created by tutors and students form the heart of our Fine Art collection. These range from early student works to works made far later in an artist’s career.

As a result, some of our most interesting pieces are lesser-known or uncharacteristic works of art by some of our most notable and significant alumni during their student years. These include a small collection of drawings made around 1931 by the acclaimed animator and filmmaker Norman McLaren and a large collection of drawings by Joan Eardley, many completed during her 1948-9 Travelling Scholarship to France and Italy. Other examples include a final year painting by John Byrne from 1963, and, 32 years later, an illustrated letter of congratulations on the occasion of GSA’s 150th anniversary in 1995 from the artist to the School.

Other unusual ephemera includes a 1950 sketch of the artist and fellow student Alan Fletcher by his friend, artist and writer Alasdair Gray and sketchbooks by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, artist and designer Daisy McGlashan, and painter and printmaker Willie Rodger.

Another sketchbook by former Mackintosh School of Architecture lecturer Fred Selby is part of a fascinating biography. Selby was a German refugee who had studied architecture in 1920s Berlin under Modernists such as Walter Gropius and Erich Mendelsohn, and counted Albert Speer as a former classmate. His Wartime Sketchbook (and many other drawings) record many of his experiences.

Works by fellow World War Two refugees include drawings by Josef Herman, while works by artists who attended GSA during the war include Bet Low’s untitled abstract triptych from 1960, and a large collection of artworks, photographs, articles and catalogues as part of the George and Cordelia Oliver collection, including Cordelia Oliver’s wonderful Painting Skirt, a handmade skirt worn by Oliver as a painting student in the 1940s, with a batik pattern taken from Sergei Diaghilev’s designs for the Ballets Russes production of L’Après-midi d’un faune.

A number of works also reveal shifts of taste, style, technique and approach in the teaching of Fine Art at GSA at different times in the School’s history. The influence of certain tutors or departments, for example, can sometimes be seen across student works from periods, such as the emphasis on portraiture amongst students of Hugh Adam Crawford. As these examples demonstrate, the history of the School itself underpins our collection.

The contextual and biographical records for each item reveal intriguing histories of the figures who have contributed to The Glasgow School of Art’s international reputation. Ian Fleming’s 1937-38 painting, The Painters Colquhoun & McBryde (The Two Roberts) is a case in point. A graduate of GSA, Fleming was a tutor in the Painting Department during the 1930s whose students included ‘the two Roberts’. Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde were working-class painters from Ayrshire who met at GSA in 1933 and became almost inseparable partners in art and life – when Colquhoun won a Travelling Scholarship in 1938, additional funds were found by the School to ensure that MacBryde could accompany him. Now represented in major national collections, they were celebrated painters in their day and are regarded as key figures in twentieth century Scottish art. Their story became the subject of a 1992 play by John Byrne. Fleming’s remarkable double portrait, which won the 1938 Guthrie Award and was bought from the artist by GSA Director Harry Barnes in 1966 (the year of MacBryde’s death), depicts the two artists in their studio at GSA.

As the catalogue record for The Painters Colquhoun & McBryde (The Two Roberts) demonstrates, many of our holdings are cross-referenced, revealing interesting connections between peers, tutors and students and insights into the social and historical context of each work. The c1910-1920s etching Head of Woman, for example, was made by printmaker Charles Murray, a friend and peer of both Fleming and James McIntosh Patrick. Taught at GSA by Josephine Haswell Miller, Murray won the Prix de Rome for etching and travelled extensively as an artist and educator. In the same period as the creation of this print, Murray joined the White Army in Russia, a counter-revolutionary force who fought against the Bolsheviks, before returning to teach at GSA in the late 1920s and early ’30s.

In the 1980s, social networks between students, tutors and peers can be seen in the 1987 etching of his tutor, Alexander ‘Sandy’ Moffat by the artist Adrian Wiszniewski, and the work of the same year, by Moffat, depicting Adrian Wiszniewski and Steven Campell at a favourite Sauchiehall Street bar in Afternoon at Nico’s. These works reveal the interwoven, interpersonal narratives that are the foundation of GSA. Seen together, they form a rich portrait of the generative, creative life of the institution.

There are too many works to detail here, but highlights of the collection in addition to those above include works by Maurice Greiffenhagen, Francis Newbery, John Quinton Pringle and Benno Schotz.

Sadly, following the devastating 2014 fire in the Mackintosh building at GSA, some of our most treasured works were destroyed or damaged, including significant losses to our collection of oil paintings such as Francis ‘Fra’ Newbery’s wonderful 1911 painting A Cord, Walberswick of a ferry on the River Blyth, Joan Eardley’s 1958 Catterline, Aberdeenshire and Carole Gibbons’ 1970 painting Pan.

Most of these works had been digitised and catalogued and a full record, and further information, can be found here.