Impressionism & Scotland
Until October 12; National Gallery Complex, Edinburgh

Every so often a show comes along which makes you wonder why it wasn’t done years ago. Impressionism & Scotland is one of those, and it would have been done years ago if its curator had got her way. Frances Fowle first proposed the idea in 1992, and it has taken this long to bear fruit – but what a juicy fruit it has turned out to be.

Impressionism & Scotland shows how Scottish collectors were ahead of the game, picking up scores of masterpieces by the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists before the rest of the world caught on. It also demonstrates how Scottish artists were in the thick of things, exchanging ideas with their counterparts on the continent, and producing paintings every bit as good.

This is an intelligent, good-looking show which pokes two fingers in the spine of the Scottish cringe and makes it stand up straight. The choice and arrangement of the pictures tell a story so compelling that the texts are almost superfluous. The design of the exhibition is also faultless, making the experience an all-round pleasure.

In 1883 the first Impressionist painting entered a Scottish collection; Greenock sugar refiner James Duncan bought The Bay Of Naples only two years after Renoir painted it. It was truly contemporary art, at a time when the Impressionists were not widely visible, but widely enough condemned – “Impressionism is another name for ignorance and a standing apology for ineptitude”, wrote the critic WE Henley in Edinburgh.

A new generation of collectors was not to be discouraged. Scotland’s economy was booming, and its “merchant princes” were happy to invest in modern European art as part of their progressive, international outlook. It took some time for their tastes to develop from the more rural, tonal painting of the Barbizon School and their Scottish counterparts, the Glasgow Boys; but the daring, colourful palette of the Scottish Colourists led them to an appreciation of French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.

It was all made possible by art dealer Alexander Reid, the Glaswegian friend of Vincent Van Gogh, who showed the works of the Impressionists on a regular basis. When in 1892 Degas’s famous L’Absinthe, a daring picture of an inebriated prostitute in a café, went up for sale in London, it was hissed for its degeneracy. But Reid bought it, and Glasgow businessman Arthur Kay, who had been lurking in the wings, was delighted to snap it up (it has since, sadly, slipped back to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris).

Other Scottish collectors of note included William Burrell and William McInnes, whose collections were bequeathed to the people of Glasgow, and Alexander Maitland, who gifted his collection to the National Galleries. This show is brimming full of Impressionist masterpieces owned by public galleries in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen, and seeing them all together emphasizes just how lucky we are.

But the story gets even better. Interspersed with these works of international repute are home-grown paintings by our own William McTaggart, the Glasgow School, and the Colourists, all easily holding their own. Scottish artists were part of an international conversation, moving freely between home and artists’ colonies in France and the Netherlands.

The Storm by McTaggart has a freedom and drama which quite overpowers its neighbour, Church At Vétheuil, by Monet. Bastien-Lepage’s charming Pas Mèche makes a perfect partner to James Guthrie’s A Hind’s Daughter. Still Lifes by the Colourists are positively delicious amongst those by their heroes, Manet and Matisse, and though it seems sacrilegious to put JD Fergusson’s Puff Of Smoke Near Milngavie up there with Cézanne’s Montagne Sainte-Victoire, they sit well together.

A fantastic end wall in the last room sums it up beautifully. Cézanne’s The Big Trees hangs in the centre, flanked by Van Gogh’s Olive Trees and Peploe’s Landscape, Cassis. The trio of trees is magnificent, each tilting off to the right as if they had been growing there together for some time, the colours vibrant, the brushstrokes as much a subject as the leaves. Each of them belongs to Scotland – cause enough for celebration – but seeing Peploe stand proud alongside Cézanne and Van Gogh: that’s an experience to treasure.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 27.07.08