One of my favorite things about going to a museum in someplace I’ve never been, is the possibility of discovering new artists that I’ve never heard of, and artistic movements that I never knew existed. It’s happened to me a few times and when it does, I always come out of a museum feeling like I’ve finally been let in on something.
A perfect example of this comes in the story of a group of painters that I’ve only recently heard of. It’s a group that emerged in the Scottish city of Glasgow in the later 19th century. The National Galleries of Scotland sets the stage this way: “Traditionally, Glasgow had been overshadowed by the political, financial and artistic domination of Edinburgh, where artists aspired to study, and...exhibit their work at the Royal Scottish Academy.”
More than often than not, any artistic institution calling itself the Royal Academy—certainly in the 1800s—is chiefly going to be playing the role of gatekeeper: making reputations and, basically defining the parameters of what counts as art and who is an official artist. Back then, such institutions made sure that new ideas stayed outside.
In the middle of the 19th century, a lot of Royal Academy artists went up to the Scottish Highlands. They painted vast sweeping landscapes of the beautiful, rugged mountains and deep glens. During these years, on both sides of the Atlantic you saw landscape painters influenced by the Romantic movement, trying to portray the power of nature and the insignificance of humans by painting these huge awe-inspiring canvases.
Younger up-and-coming painters in Glasgow saw this old style as overly sentimental and therefore unnatural and phony.
A group of painters that became known as the Glasgow Boys, considered themselves anti-establishment, and referred to those stodgy landscape painters as gluepots, because they were so stuck in their ways. They themselves took their paints and went outside, too, but not to paint any majestic landscapes. They wanted to paint scenes that captured the way the people away from the cities really lived. They wanted to paint anonymous people who scraped out an existence in often very primitive conditions—to see the nobility in them.
The most famous names from the Glasgow Boys would probably be Edward Arthur Walton, George Henry, and James Guthrie. Take a look at their work online, and when you do, remember that you’re seeing the work of a group of artists trying to do something radically different.