IMPRESSIONISM AND SCOTLAND
National Gallery Complex, EdinburghIT WAS the one that got away. Among the very fine French and Scottish pictures – and those of a far more workaday nature – on show on The Mound this summer is a rea
l gem: Degas's Dans Un Café: L'Absinthe. It once hung in the office of Glasgow drapery tycoon, Arthur Kay; these days you'll find it in the Musée D'Orsay in Paris.
In a time when we're practically immune to the shock of the new, it's hard to imagine just how transgressive this image of an unmistakably miserable prostitute drinking in a bar was considered to be. Her dull eyes are as empty as the glass in front of her is full. To her left is a drunk. Their dark shadows fall on the glass behind them. As a portrayal it is unremittingly miserable and unflinchingly human. The models were actors but Degas convinces us that they are real people, living real and very ordinary lives. The painting was hissed at in Christie's when it went up for auction.
It was bought by legendary Glasgow art dealer Alexander Reid in 1892, but Kay was also in the room, waiting in the wings. Kay, proving to be as astute a collector as he was a businessman, later recalled: "When I met him (Reid] he told how some of his friends were chaffing and abusing him for having bought such a thing… I offered to relieve him of his mistake for a very moderate consideration." Kay's own friends similarly disapproved. Under pressure, he returned it to Reid, only to reclaim it some 48 hours later.
Like the fate of that painting, the exhibition Impressionism And Scotland is a confusing story and one that is a little hard to tell in mere pictures. On the surface, it's the story of how radical European art made it to Scotland and how radical Scottish painters learned from Europe and its artists. It thus combines real masterpieces with the merely mediocre.
The cool and assured tone of its excellent scholarship and the familiarity of most of the works on show mean it can't quite convey the excitement of the period. Edinburgh, in particular, is a little impressionismed-out after a sequence of shows from the period including a recent Monet blockbuster. A version of the show will be seen in Glasgow later this year; let's hope the presentation is a little more red-blooded. For this is a fascinating story of an astonishing coterie of wealthy men, Victorian masters of the universe, vying to outdo each other with feats of radical collecting without offending their clients, the temperance movement or the church.
Snaring a Degas, a Monet or a Renoir was an audacious wheeze for the besuited kings of cotton, steel and sugar, but it was a fine line to tread. It's hard to imagine how contemporary Scots must have felt when sugar refiner James Duncan purchased Delacroix's extraordinarily cruel orientalist fantasy Death Of Sardanapalus. It's now in the Louvre and, as a much earlier picture, is not part of this show, but it remains a tour de force of such excess.
The paintings are a partial picture of an extraordinary period when the surplus created by Clyde shipping, Paisley mills, Kirkcaldy lino and Greenock sugar refining purchased a very big house and a painted slice of European sophistication in Paris, London or Glasgow's West George Street. But in the pristine surroundings of Edinburgh's Mound it all feels a bit antiseptic.
The exhibition includes significant loans from overseas. Where it is otherwise strongest is in reminding audiences of the strength and depth of the Glasgow collections that are national assets in everything but name, and allowing those collections a little breathing space out of their familiar homes in Kelvingrove and the Burrell. Sir William Burrell, with his works by Degas and Manet, of course emerges as the star collector, and Reid the star dealer spinning his personal tastes as well as selling his wares, operating at times on a shoestring. The latter was an extraordinary figure, who famously once shared a flat with Vincent and Theo van Gogh. He left hurriedly when Vincent suggested a suicide pact.
The flip side of all these incoming French fancies was the influence of the Continent on Scotland's artists, most famously culminating in the work of the Glasgow Boys and then the Scottish Colourists. The show begins by comparing the work of Monet and William McTaggart. The latter was sometimes called an impressionist, but of course, the captions explain, he wasn't really one. The same doublethink is necessary at times throughout the show. To see great European art through the prism of its local collectors is fine; to tell the tale of its local imitators can be less happy. The juxtaposition of the disciplined Cézanne Montagne Sainte-Victoire, completed in 1895, with JD Fergusson's sugary landscape A Puff Of Smoke Near Milngavie, painted 30 years later, is a little like following fine wine with oversweetened tea.
Where Scotland and Europe truly and happily interwove was in art education. Almost all the Glasgow Boys spent some time training in France hanging out in international artists' colonies such as Grez-sur Loing. Most Glasgow Boys, however, never entirely embraced the outdoor life enjoyed by the great French realist painters. One of the exhibition centrepieces, Lavery's hugely loved The Tennis Party, may be set on a grassy court in Cathcart, but it was constructed in the studio.
The complex arguments mustered by Impressionism And Scotland are academically important, and the underlying social history is riveting. Whether they make for an entirely happy exhibition is a little less resolved. Most audiences will cherry pick the show for the works they know and love. In the case of a great work on loan, like L'Absinthe, its certainly worth the queues to do just that.
Until October 12