Art reviews: 150 Years of the Fine Art Society | Elizabeth Blackadder: A Life in Colour

Installation view of the Fine Art Society's 150th anniversary exhibition | Contributed

James McNeill Whistler: Etchings, Fine Art Society, Edinburgh ★★★★

150 Years of the Fine Art Society, Fine Art Society, Edinburgh ★★★★

Elizabeth Blackadder: A Life in Colour, Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh ★★★★

Over the last 30 years or so Dundas Street in Edinburgh has become Scotland’s gallery street. Galleries have come and gone, of course. The art market is always sensitive to the financial weather and chilly winds are blowing. Nevertheless, there are real veterans among the galleries still present in the street. The Scottish Gallery, formerly Aitken Dott, moved to Dundas Street from George Street around 30 years ago and recently celebrated its 180th birthday. Now, a few doors up the street, the Fine Art Society is marking its 150th birthday.

It is not of course an Edinburgh native, but was originally very much a London institution. Now, however, after the London FAS closed in 2018 when it was London’s oldest gallery, the organisation has effectively migrated north. What happened was that Patrick Bourne started Bourne Fine Art in 1978, then moved his gallery to Dundas Street in the 1990s. When he became director of the FAS in London, his Edinburgh gallery became a branch of the Fine Art Society and has now outlived its London parent. The Fine Art Society also has an earlier history in Edinburgh, however. During the 1970s and early 1980s, it had a branch in Great King Street and its then director Andrew McIntosh Patrick, son of the painter James McIntosh Patrick, played a key role in re-establishing both its reputation and its market for Scottish art. The gallery has championed Scottish art, past and present, ever since.

The original Fine Art Society began in 1876 in Bond Street. It was perhaps called a “society” because it was something of a cooperative enterprise by a group of individuals with various interests, but a shared ambition to create an artistically progressive art gallery. Marking its commitment to the “modern”, one of the new organisation’s first projects was to sponsor Whistler to spend a year in Venice to create a suite of 12 etchings. The idea was to provide him with some healing time after the notorious libel suit with Ruskin, who had accused him flinging “a pot of paint in the public's face.” Whistler was awarded just a farthing’s damages and the affair was ruinous both for his finances and his reputation. (Even-handedly the FAS also helped raise funds for Ruskin’s expenses too.) Whistler stayed more than year in Venice and produced not 12 but 50 etchings.

Detail from Whistler's etching, The Doorway, 1879-80 | Courtesy of the Fine Art Society

The Fine Art Society is marking its anniversary with two shows. One is a high quality historical miscellany, 150 Years of the Fine Art Society. Aptly, the other is James McNeill Whistler: Etchings - a display of Whistler’s etchings, including a number of Venice. When he went to Venice in 1876, Whistler had been pioneering the revival of etching for nearly 20 years. Until 1859 he was an American in Paris, but he then moved to London and launched himself with etchings of London’s dockland, its ships, its boats, its sailors and its dockers, all very unglamorous to contemporary taste. The examples here like Black Lion Wharf, with a rough looking sailor in the foreground and a muddle of boats and buildings behind, executed in an almost casually fluid line, are still convincingly “real” and were then radically new. This picture, too, mattered so much to Whistler that it hangs on the wall in his famous portrait of his mother. Working in Venice much later, he was no less inventive, but his technique is much more sophisticated. Most striking here is The Doorway, an arched Renaissance watergate with an iron grille in its top half, flanked by windows with a different pattern of iron grille, and all framed by carved stonework. Through the doorway a chair-maker’s shop is visible with all its clutter. Whistler sees all this complexity lit by flickering reflections from the canal in the foreground. It is quite brilliant. Small and prickly, notoriously Whistler thought very highly of himself, but when you see something like this you feel perhaps that opinion was not entirely misplaced.

Installation view of the Fine Art Society's 150th anniversary exhibition | Contributed

The other part of this sesquicentenary celebration is a diverse show of paintings and prints, but also of furniture and some applied art, a nod to the FAS’s early links to the Arts and Crafts Movement. There is a beautiful bent-wood Alvar Aalto chair, for instance, and a magnificently solid table by CF Voysey. The latter is adorned for the occasion with four young Olympians by sculptor Kenny Hunter, a good partnership and a also a nice demonstration of the gallery’s range across the arts and from old to new. Midway between art and craft, there are also printed hangings by both John Piper and Eduardo Paolozzi and, too, a striking woven piece by Gerald Laing called Bilyth.

The largest painting, dated 1884, is by John Brett of McLeod’s Maidens, three anthropomorphic sea stacks on the Skye coast. Brett was an interesting follower of the Pre-Raphaelites and inherits their interest in daylight colour. Rather different, Blindman’s Buff by David Inshaw is a rather disturbing image from the 1980s, a more laidback era than the present day. It is a large painting of four naked girls, one blindfolded, as they play the eponymous game. It is erotically loaded because of course the game depends on touch. Almost the strangest feature though is a huge, dark fireplace behind the girls. Ishbel Myesrscough matches this with a painting of a young man in his underpants, life size, laid out like a corpse. A star here, however, is Interior Wester Ross, a lovely early work by Will Maclean. There are also fine prints including a wood engraving of a fox by Agnes Miller Parker.

Dovecot Studios after Elizabeth Blackadder, The Red Bouquet, 2026 | Contributed

Founded in 1912, Dovecot Studios is another veteran of the Scottish art world, although it has only had a significant gallery function since 2008 when it moved into what was once the Infirmary Street Swimming Pool and Public Baths. Since then it has been a major addition to the Edinburgh gallery scene, but of course tapestry is still its primary business.

Since her first collaboration with the workshop in 1967, the work of Elizabeth Blackadder, both in her lifetime and since, has been the inspiration for more than 20 tapestries. Now Dovecot has put on a tribute to her, titled Elizabeth Blackadder: A Life in Colour. Drawn from the RSA collection and presented as part of the Academy’s bicentenary celebrations, this is not a huge show, but ranging from the sixties to around 2014 when she stopped working, the pictures are very well chosen. They are also very nicely hung in the generous space of the wide balcony that was once the site of the pubic baths. (The swimming pool was below and is now the tapestry studio.)

As well as several tapestries and a new and beautiful tufted rug after a picture called the Red Bouquet, the works chosen include several which show the artist’s own love of textiles, not least in the clothes she wore. White Still-life with Rainbow and Embroidered Jacket, for instance, is a painting of a favourite jacket. Perhaps it is the advantage of the space the pictures are given, but looking at works like Untitled (Still-life with Boxes and Red Ground), or Still-Life with Mexican Angel, the latter picture from the 1960s, it is striking to see just how bold she was. The pictures include as usual many of the brightly coloured objects she collected and indeed her cats and flowers appear together in the tapestry Cats at Play. These are incidental, however, just small events in a much wider vision that, as early as 1967 in Still life with Indian Cloth, could be startlingly jazzy.

James McNeill Whistler: Etchings until 13 June; 150 Years of the Fine Art Society until 11 August; Elizabeth Blackadder: A Life in Colour until 14 November

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