Pryde of Scotland

SCOTTISH art spanning three centuries goes on display in London tomorrow and leading voices north of the Border have chosen their favourite pieces. Tim Cornwell reveals the most popular of all

HE FITS into no Scottish art movement or school and he died in poverty during the Second World War, his talent obliterated by depression and alcoholism. But an atmospheric painting by the Edinburgh-born James Pryde, completed in 1912, was singled out by prominent Scots yesterday as their favoured pick from a prestigious London-based collection of three centuries of Scottish artworks.

"click here to view our slideshow of the Fleming Collection of Scottish Art"

For Inspired II, an exhibition at the Fleming Collection in London, with The Scotsman as media partner, leading figures in Scottish culture were invited to choose their favourite Scottish work and explain why it inspired them. Those who have chosen pictures include culture minister Michael Russell, painter John Bellany, Edinburgh International Festival director Jonathan Mills and musician Edwyn Collins.

Pryde took art classes as a young man, but disdained formal training. His early work featured the ruffians and beggars who, during his life, inhabited the closes of Edinburgh's Old Town. His Fleming Collection painting, The Unknown Corner – created after a trip to Venice – has resonated with several of the high-profile panellists.

The artist Peter Howson speaks of its "tremendous atmosphere" and menacing, romantic darkness. Opera director David McVicar, celebrated for his striking design of shows like Scottish Opera's La Traviata, calls it "a stage set for an unknown piece".

The playwright and artist John Byrne and the artist Merlin James have also singled it out as a favoured work, for its monumental use of scale and "dilapidated grandeur". Pryde's sister Mabel was also an artist; he collaborated with her husband, William Nicolson, as "The Beggarstaffs", a duo still famous for the posters they designed.

While his talent won over major art galleries, patrons and some critics, the last decade of his life saw the death of his beloved daughter, a ballerina, from tuberculosis, and his own decline into ill-health.

Lucia Lindsay, assistant keeper of the Fleming Collection and co-curator of this exhibition, says: "Pryde isn't as well known as he should be outside museum and gallery circles. He was very much a maverick, who followed his own vision and found beauty in abandoned places. The Unknown Corner is a painting that's really hard to define, but I think it has incredible intensity."

The Fleming Collection was founded in 1968 when Flemings, the then merchant bank founded a century earlier in Dundee by jute manufacturer Robert Fleming, was moving into new London offices. One of its directors, David Donald, suggested buying paintings for the bare walls. The board agreed, but decided all the works should be by Scottish artists or of Scottish scenes.

At that time, Scottish art was under-rated and cheap, so Donald was able to buy works by the Glasgow Boys or the Colourists, now valued at hundreds of thousands of pounds, for a few thousand, as well as iconic works like Lochaber No More by John Watson Nicol and The Last of the Clan by Thomas Faed.

The Fleming Collection was sold in April 2000 to a new charitable foundation, endowed by the Fleming Family, called The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation. It opened a Mayfair gallery in 2002. Dubbed a 'London embassy for Scottish art', it continues to add contemporary works by Scots to a collection dating back to the 18th century. It works closely with the National Galleries of Scotland on exhibitions and will show some of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery's key works in London during its closure.

Inspired II, from 2 April to 27 June at The Fleming Collection, Berkeley St, London W1

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WHERE ONCE WERE SHIPS

by Gary Anderson

I FIND Anderson's painting incredibly evocative of the city I've adopted as my hometown. It's murky and mysterious; it lures me in, despite initial trepidation. It suggests one reality, but conceals another that is entirely different.

This is an astoundingly well-crafted painting. Characters and stories abound, whispering histories from shadowy nooks. Life thrives as mould and grasses and a vast, blue sky reach upwards into an optimistic future.

There's real drama in this other story: the story of this surprising, resilient Glasgow character, pushing forward but honour-bound and ever indebted to the shipbuilders who made her great.

John Tiffany, theatre director

NORTH WEST PASSAGE: ARCTIC ROUTE

by Will Maclean

WHAT I love here is the suggestion of a narrative that I cannot quite access, a world glimpsed through fog or tidal water, a lyrical history that – in some time of dreaming – weaves land and weather and human making into a single fabric. This work reminds us of how the North West Passage – a practical, almost mercantile concept at the outset, a way of travelling more efficiently from A to B – was rendered mythical by epic loss and hope against hope, Franklin's party glimmering away in a blizzard like a faraway signal, their boats ruined, their souls blown to infinity. There is no exaggeration here, no melodrama. This is how myth works: it distills; it perfects; it tells us what we never expected to hear, yet knew all along. A true account that the mere facts could never render: stubborn; unjustified; beyond belief or doubt.

John Burnside, poet

THE UNKNOWN CORNER, 1912, oil on canvas

by John Pryde

IF IT DOES represent Venice, it's a romantic distillation of that place, reduced to its bare essentials. The Unknown Corner is really a stage set for an unknown piece. It's a strongly related to the work of Gordon Craig, but also Appia and Böklin – the lighting is by Wieland Wagner! It's a painting that cries out to be realised in plastic form; don't be surprised if I pinch its imagery for a show one day.

David McVicar, opera director

I don't know what this painting is about – I don't think anyone does. It's a romance, but the romance of darkness. It certainly looks menacing, with that huge area of nothingness. It's almost as if a giant scythe is about to come down on these people, like death…

Peter Howson, artist

A STORMY HIGHLAND SCENE

by Alexander Nasmyth

THIS painting immediately grabbed my attention, as in many ways I feel I can relate to it. It is dark but light, stormy but calm, inviting but intimidating, tame but wild. It is, in every way, how I see myself. That is why I think it caught my eye. I see a typical highland scene, not too dissimilar to the sight of Eilleen Donan castle at sunset; but there is mystery, there is trouble here, a sense of excitement, the storm is brewing up above, but all the while the seas are calm. Looking at this painting makes me want to leap inside it to discover what mysteries lie there!

Sandi Thom, singer

WORKERS IN THE FIELD

by Millie Frood

I AM really impressed by the colours, the Expressionist quality, verging on surreal… I just love the fact that (the artist] has this boldness about her and that she is clearly of the Colourist school, the same generation, but not of their ilk. I find the painting amazingly reminiscent of Van Gogh; it has a vibrancy about it, just sheer boldness and bravado. What impressed me was the sense of time out of joint, the way she sticks out as so different.

Brian Cox, actor

NEWHAVEN FISHWIFE

by Alexander Ignatius Roche

THE fishwife is really a very young girl, already locked into a life of hard labour despite her obvious beauty. This too is the future for the younger girl beside her. The subject has a nervous look: not only is she not used to being the centre of attention, but she seems to express a fear for her future. Is the black cat a symbol of fortune that she has a means to make a living, or of the bad luck and hard hand in life that fate has dealt her and her daughter/sister? And I, too, am a Glasgow boy working in Edinburgh!

John McLellan, Editor, The Scotsman

WINDOW in MENTON

by Anne Redpath

WHAT I like about Anne Redpath's paintings is their intimacy. Window in Menton reminds me of a Pierre Bonnard interior, both in the colours the artist uses and in the figure's preoccupation with something in front of her… then there is the open window. I love a painting with an open window.

Alexander McCall Smith, author