Lot 94
WILLIAM MCTAGGART R.S.A., R.S.W. (SCOTTISH 1835-1910)
SHRIMPING, MACHRIHANISH
£2,750
Scottish Paintings & Sculpture
Auction: Evening Sale: 16 June 2022 | From 19:00
Description
Signed and dated 1878, watercolour
Dimensions
Provenance
Provenance: D.M.Jackson Esq
J & R Edmiston, 14 February 1957, Lot 43 to Fairweather (this receipt accompanies the lot)
Literature: James L. Caw, William McTaggart: A Biography and an Appreciation, Glasgow, 1917, p.243
Footnote
Occasionally an artist becomes inextricably linked to a specific location; a place or scene they are compelled to capture and examine anew time and again, whose genius loci inspires the purest distillation of their abilities. Machrihanish Beach on the wild, westerly tip of the Mull of Kintyre was such a place for William McTaggart.
McTaggart is noted for having developed an incredibly forward-thinking informality to his brushwork which in turn had monumental effects on his approach to landscape, belying his Victorian context and all its associated staid conventions. The constraints of technical draughstmanship were all but abandoned by the artist in favour of what Constable described as “the chiaroscuro of nature”; formality subordinated to his intuitive grasp of light and texture. This stylistic leap would reverberate influentially down the next generations of Scottish artists. McTaggart was heralded as having pushed forward against artistic tradition in a manner many thought only Continental artists capable of at this point in history.
