I HAVE JUST managed to purchase, by a staggering combination of serendipity and good luck, a painting by renowned Glasgow Boys artist William Kennedy at auction in Edinburgh. To say I am delighted would be a gross understatement. In footballer terminology I am Over the Moon. Yes, that pleased.
You may not have heard of Kennedy or indeed of the Glasgow Boys themselves. Briefly, and in reverse order, the Boys, sometimes referred to as the Glasgow School, were a loose association of painters in the period 1880 to 1900.
They were not all from Glasgow, nor did some of them learn their trade there, but they all became associated with a blossoming of the arts in what was the second city of the Empire at the time, a decade before Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his colleagues arguably picked up and ran with the torch they had lit.
Many of them studied in London and Paris and painted abroad, but most returned to Glasgow at some point in their careers to reconnect with their roots. Some became internationally famous and lauded in mainstream Victorian society like Sir James Guthrie and Sir John Lavery, others stayed virtually anonymous outside artistic circles.
William Kennedy was one of their number. Born in Glasgow, he studied at the Paisley School of Art and also possibly at the Glasgow School of Art. He then went to study in Paris around 1880, painting landscapes and figures. He returned to Stirling after his French sojourn where he became increasingly interested in the Army garrison at the castle as subjects for his paintings, so much so that he was awarded the nickname “The Colonel” by his colleagues.
It must have been during this period that he painted my acquisition, titled ‘The Vidette’, shown here.
It was sold by a well-kent Edinburgh auction house as part of a disposal of paintings by the Paisley Art Institute after a row over space allocated at the town’s new museum. Ninety works, about a quarter of the Institute’s total, were sold and raised roughly £1.5 million to support the rest of the collection and its work in its new home at the Glasgow Art Club.
When I told my sister, herself a graduate of the Glasgow School of Art, of my purchase she asked why I had gone for that particular picture. I told her there were three main reasons.
The first was that I had long been an admirer of the Glasgow School of painting and had visited various exhibitions of their work. In this I was guided by Roger Billcliffe’s 1985 book “The Glasgow Boys” which provides a pretty comprehensive description of their work together.
Having so educated myself on the Boys, I noticed, whilst standing glass in hand for a post-prandial digestif in the ante-room of the Officers’ Mess of the 4th Royal Tank Regiment, that the painting above the fireplace was one of Kennedy’s, titled “The Return of the Pickets”. So there was a connection with my military service. (I wrote to Billcliffe to inform him of its presence and received a pleasant reply).
And then there is the fact that I am a Glasgow boy myself, born and bred. These three factors prompted me to make my bid, which I thought at the time was a bit of a forlorn hope.
But fortune favours the bold, faint heart never won fair lady, and you have to be in it to win it and all that stuff. My modest bid won the day and I couldn’t be more pleased. At the same auction a marvellous painting by Sir John Lavery realised well over £500,000; my bid wasn’t even in the same galaxy as that. But there you go.
Will I go on to become a serious collector of Glasgow Boys’ paintings? I don’t think so, I haven’t the means. My offspring, however, will have something special to remember their old man by and can negotiate who inherits it in their own time.
Or perhaps they will decide to present it to some worthy recipient Scottish museum or gallery when I’m gone? That would please me no end.
