James Pittendrigh MacGillivray [also known as James Pittendrigh McGillivray] was born in Inverurie, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, on 30 May 1856 and was the son of a sculptor William Ewan McGillivray (1829-1879). He studied under William Brodie (1815-1881) at Edinburgh School of Art and with James Steel, an ornamental plasterer in Glasgow. His commissions included portrait busts of the 'Glasgow Boy' painter, Joseph Crawhall (1881) and the philosopher, Thomas Carlyle (1889). He also sculpted a number of monuments in Glasgow's cemeteries which feature bronze portraits and figurative reliefs. His architectural sculpture can be seen on several important Glasgow buildings. These include the City Chambers, for which he carved the spandrel figures in the loggia.
MacGillivray's prints were made by Zincograph. The earliest ones date from the mid-1890’s, and he returned to the medium in 1926 when he published a few sets of prints, some of which are in colour. He was appointed Sculptor Royal in 1921.
He died in Edinburgh on 29 April 1938.
His small-scale pieces are well represented in collections in Glasgow and Edinburgh, though his public works are rare. The most important of these is the Monument to Robert Burns, Irvine (1895) and a multi-figure Monument to William Ewart Gladstone, Edinburgh (1899-1917). His architectural work outside Glasgow includes a sculpture on Dumfries Public Library (1904). The Aberdeen Art Gallery exhibited a small group in their exhibition of his work in 1988. His work is in the collections of the Hunterian, Glasgow and Aberdeen Art Gallery and he was elected a Member of the Royal Society of British Sculptors and was also a member of the Scottish Guild of Handicraft.
Text source: Arts + Architecture Profiles from Art History Research net (AHRnet) https://www.arthistoryresearch.net/
