Telling it how it was

From the smoke- blackened ‘engine room of the Empire’ came a group of radical artists that stripped art of heroism and sentiment and took the world by storm. Mary Miers traces the history of The Glasgow Boys

- Mary Miers

JAMES GUTHRIE’S 1883 trailblazer To Pastures New tells no story. Unlike contemporary works by the Victorian ‘gluepots’, as he dubbed them, his picture, set in a flat, featureless landscape, conveys no moralising anecdote or episode from history. Instead, it’s an unsentimental depiction of a goose-girl wielding a twig to prod her gaggle as they walk along a muddy track. The horizontally divided composition is bold, with the girl brought close up to the picture plane and the geese waddling off the canvas. Her face, partly obscured by her straw hat, is smoothly defined, the fenland and big sky behind more loosely handled. Shadowed earth tones against bright chalky blues infuse the scene with warmth and sunlight so that, although it was finished in the studio, it has the atmospheric qualities of a painting done en plein air.

The stuffy academies may have disapproved, but Guthrie’s French-inspired rustic realism was well received when the painting was shown publicly in Glasgow in 1885, together with works by like-minded artists such as John Lavery and George Henry.

The Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts had exhibited the Barbizon painters Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Charles-François Daubigny and Jean-François Millet ('The artists' artist', August 6), as well as works by French Naturalist Jules Bastien-Lepage, and it was known as the place to see modern European art. Now, it was showing paintings in the same vein by a group of homegrown artists, which struck a chord with the city's adventurous collectors. For Lavery, who had been living and studying in France, To Pastures New was 'finer than anything I had seen in Paris'; convinced of 'the advanced state of modern Scottish painting in Glasgow', he decided to stay in his adopted city.