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At the time of his death in 1948, the Dundee-born painter David Foggie was hailed as “one of the great personalities of our time”. It was said that his name “is known in every part of Scotland where Art is in question.” In the years since then, however, that name has been all too often forgotten. This online exhibition explores his life and work.

16 artworks

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Mother and Child
Image credit: Paisley Art Institute Collection, held by Paisley Museum and Art Galleries

The introspective, technical qualities of Foggie’s work have always appealed to other artists. During his lifetime, the Glasgow Herald claimed that “The problems of actual painting interest him - light, form, colour and technique - and it might without disrespect be said that his work is more interesting to the artist than the general public.” Yet his work is also tender and humanist, celebrating everyday life. Family portraits were a common subject. Here the model was a Mrs Macdonald, who had known Foggie for some years before he asked her to pose for this picture, holding her infant son.

Mother and Child
David Simpson Foggie (1878–1948)
Oil on canvas
H 78 x W 68 cm
Paisley Art Institute Collection, held by Paisley Museum and Art Galleries

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David Foggie (1878–1948), Artist, Self Portrait
Image credit: National Galleries of Scotland

David Simpson Foggie was born on 31 December 1878, the last of 14 children (only half of whom survived to adulthood) born to James and Margaret Foggie in the Hilltown area of Dundee. James Foggie was an architect and town councillor with a keen interest in improving the standard of living for the working classes of Dundee.

The young Foggie attended the High School of Dundee, where it was soon apparent that art was his main talent. At that time the High School was also home to Dundee’s first Art School, and Foggie began taking classes there at the age of just eight. He later became a Pupil Assistant at the School.

David Foggie (1878–1948), Artist, Self Portrait 1945
David Simpson Foggie (1878–1948)
Oil on canvas
H 45.9 x W 35.7 cm
National Galleries of Scotland

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Joseph Lee
Image credit: University of Dundee Fine Art Collections

In 1896 Foggie joined the Dundee Graphic Arts Association, whose members included the city’s leading professional artists of the day - Stewart Carmichael, John Duncan, Alec Grieve, Frank Laing, W B Lamond, C G L Phillips and others. “They were a talkative and argumentative lot,” Foggie later recalled, “and their conversations and example were the most formative influence I ever met... With the stimulus of this atmosphere I determined to be an artist.” This quick sketch shows another of Foggie’s artist friends, the newspaper illustrator Joseph Lee.

Joseph Lee 1919
David Simpson Foggie (1878–1948)
Ink on paper
H 15.5 x W 11.5 cm
University of Dundee Fine Art Collections

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David Foggie at Work
© DACS 2024. Image credit: University of Dundee Fine Art Collections

Many members of the Graphic Arts Association had studied on the continent, and in 1898, with £30 left to him by his late father, Foggie set off for Belgium where he enrolled at the Antwerp Academy. At that time the Belgian Fine Art Academies awarded grants giving free tuition to both native and foreign students. It was here that he honed his drawing skills, learning from the same teacher who had earlier taught Van Gogh. He had little time for his other professors, however, and later claimed to have learned much more from his fellow students. He kept this and other sketches made by one of them.

David Foggie at Work c.1898
Walter Vaes (1882–1958)
Pencil on paper
H 26 x W 19 cm
University of Dundee Fine Art Collections

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Forfouchten (Tired Out)
Image credit: Dundee Art Galleries and Museums Collection (Dundee City Council)

After two years in Antwerp, Foggie returned to the family home (now in Tayport) and began attempts to make a living as an artist. At this point he was still struggling to find the right approach. To make money he tried part-time manual labour on local farms, giving him the chance to observe and sketch his fellow workers. On his 22nd birthday he wrote: “Today has been particularly happy. Due, as far as one can assign, to my finding the drawing of these outworkers in line with my life.” Farm workers and other manual labourers would become one of his principal subjects, such as this 1919 painting of Mr Kinnear, an 82 year old farmer from Leuchars. The expression ‘fair forfouchten’ means worn out or exhausted.

Forfouchten (Tired Out)
David Simpson Foggie (1878–1948)
Oil on canvas
H 91.4 x W 71.1 cm
Dundee Art Galleries and Museums Collection (Dundee City Council)

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Portrait of the Artist's Wife
Image credit: Dundee Art Galleries and Museums Collection (Dundee City Council)

In 1902, Foggie married Margaret Anne Jack of Spring Cottage, Tayport. A gifted musician, she had studied at the Berlin Conservatory. Later that year he returned to further study in Antwerp, this time taking Margaret with him. They went on to visit Florence, Paris and London before returning to Scotland in 1904, where they had a cottage built on Lucklaw Hill overlooking Leuchars and Balmullo. He missed the regular contact of his Dundee friends, however, and a few years later he rented a studio at 132a Nethergate, to which he bicycled every day via the Tay Ferry.

Portrait of the Artist's Wife 1922
David Simpson Foggie (1878–1948)
Oil on canvas
H 91.4 x W 71.1 cm
Dundee Art Galleries and Museums Collection (Dundee City Council)

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Street in Tayport
Image credit: Dundee Art Galleries and Museums Collection (Dundee City Council)

In 1905, Foggie became one of the founder members of the Tayport Artists Circle, along with Frank Laing, Alec Grieve, James Douglas and others. Their first exhibition was held in the Subscription School in Tayport; its success meant higher profile shows the following years in the Victoria Galleries (now The McManus) across the Tay. Foggie contributed significantly to these shows (12 works in the first exhibition, 28 in the next), and the prices he was charging for his work also increased. Foggie was now making a reasonably good living - his surviving accounts show that his average expenditure throughout the 1910s was £72, compared to an annual income of nearly £234.

Street in Tayport
Alec Grieve (1864–1933)
Oil on canvas
H 37 x W 45 cm
Dundee Art Galleries and Museums Collection (Dundee City Council)

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The Dressing Table
Image credit: Paisley Art Institute Collection, held by Paisley Museum and Art Galleries

Foggie left Dundee in 1919, but in 1921 (the year of this painting) he returned to stage a solo exhibition at Thomas Murray & Son's gallery in the Nethergate. The show comprised 16 oils, 8 watercolours and 7 pastels. Fellow Dundee-born painter John Duncan wrote in the catalogue: “Mr Foggie does not dress his figures in bygone modes, nor rely on mythologies or poetic associations, but is satisfied to render his folk as they are, believing that they are wonderful enough and beautiful enough for the purposes of the highest Art. But this does not entail a merely objective realism; he aims at simplification and elimination of all that is indifferent or insignificant to liberate the aesthetic and human elements.”

The Dressing Table
David Simpson Foggie (1878–1948)
Oil on canvas
H 60 x W 49 cm
Paisley Art Institute Collection, held by Paisley Museum and Art Galleries

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The Crescent in Wartime
Image credit: Royal Scottish Academy of Art & Architecture

In 1919, the Foggie family (which also now included four children) moved to 38 Danube Street in Edinburgh. John Duncan had been living round the corner in St Bernard’s Crescent since 1912, and no doubt encouraged Foggie to choose his home nearby. During the Second World War, the gardens in St Bernard’s Crescent (which Foggie could see from his window) were home to the air raid shelter seen here. At the time, Duncan was on the Board of Management at Edinburgh College of Art, and it may be more than mere coincidence that Foggie was promptly offered a part-time teaching position at the College.

The Crescent in Wartime 1940
David Simpson Foggie (1878–1948)
Oil on canvas
H 63.8 x W 76.8 cm
Royal Scottish Academy of Art & Architecture

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Life Study
© Royal Scottish Academy / Bridgeman Images. Image credit: Royal Scottish Academy of Art & Architecture

Foggie took up his duties as a teacher of Life Drawing at Edinburgh College of Art in autumn 1920. One of his students, Jack Firth, later recalled: “David Foggie’s inexorable insistence on accuracy honed his students’ drawing skills to the limits of their achievement”. His time at the College produced some of its most successful graduates - William Gillies, John Maxwell, William MacTaggart, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and William Gear all studied under him. The life studies that William Gillies produced at the College are particularly reminiscent of Foggie’s work, and Gillies later joined Foggie on the teaching staff.

Life Study 1922
William George Gillies (1898–1973)
Oil on canvas
H 91.5 x W 61.2 cm
Royal Scottish Academy of Art & Architecture

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The Blue Jug
Image credit: Dumfries and Galloway Council

One of Foggie’s students at Edinburgh College of Art, H Harvey Wood, wrote that Foggie’s emphasis “was on tonal relations, and the use of colour to construct a painting in depth was hardly considered.” This painting, like The Dressing Table above, shows that Foggie could make very effective use of colour and form. He greatly admired S J Peploe, and wrote an article about him for The Scotsman which shows interesting similarities to the way other critics often wrote about Foggie: “Peploe was a painter for painters,” he said, claiming that his art was “restrained and calculated; classic not romantic. It was sensitive, intellectual, logical, but not tender or sympathetic.”

The Blue Jug
David Simpson Foggie (1878–1948)
Oil on canvas
H 74.2 x W 62.2 cm
Dumfries and Galloway Council

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Mrs Mary Noble
Image credit: University of Dundee Fine Art Collections

Fisherwomen were a popular subject for Foggie. He had apparently spotted Mary Noble (née McInnes) working in a fish shop in Newhaven and asked her to sit for him in his Danube Street studio.

It is notable that many of his favourite subjects were people who worked with their hands – farmers, fishwives, miners, shipwrights, umbrella menders – with whom he evidently felt a strong affinity.

Mrs Mary Noble 1929
David Simpson Foggie (1878–1948)
Oil on board
H 50 x W 40 cm
University of Dundee Fine Art Collections

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The Young Miner
Image credit: Royal Scottish Academy of Art & Architecture

Foggie’s socialist principles influenced many of his portraits of working men and women. During the strikes of 1926, he helped to support a family of miners by paying for each of them to sit for him individually. The young miner shown here suffered badly from tuberculosis.

The Young Miner 1926
David Simpson Foggie (1878–1948)
Oil on canvas
H 76.2 x W 64 cm
Royal Scottish Academy of Art & Architecture

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Sir James Key Caird (1837–1916), Bt, LLD
Image credit: University of Dundee, Tayside Medical History Museum Art Collection

At the opposite end of the social scale, Foggie also undertook private commissions from wealthy clients – he had far less interest in undertaking these works but it was a source of much-needed income. His subjects didn’t come any wealthier than Dundee jute millionaire James Caird, but this was actually a posthumous portrait commissioned by Dundee Royal Infirmary along with one of his sister Emma Marryat, both of whom were major benefactors of the hospital. Foggie was later asked to make copies of these to be displayed in Caird Hall, where they can still be seen today.

Sir James Key Caird (1837–1916), Bt, LLD c.1922–1929
David Simpson Foggie (1878–1948)
Oil on canvas
H 91 x W 70 cm
University of Dundee, Tayside Medical History Museum Art Collection

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Woman with Clasped Hands
Image credit: Royal Scottish Academy of Art & Architecture

Foggie devoted a huge amount of time and energy to the Royal Scottish Academy. He was elected Associate in 1925 and Academician in 1930. In 1931 he became the RSA’s Treasurer, and in 1932 was made Secretary, a position he retained until his death. Douglas Bliss, Director of Glasgow School of Art, later described him as “the very soul of the RSA”. This is Foggie’s RSA diploma work, a striking example of his interest in the beauty of the everyday – here capturing the awkward pose of an unconventional model (Annie Doherty). Foggie explained: “It is not enough to copy beauty, [the artist] must achieve it… Personally this seems to me easier to do when the elements with which he deals are not beautiful in themselves."

Woman with Clasped Hands 1927
David Simpson Foggie (1878–1948)
Oil on canvas
H 92 x W 71.2 cm
Royal Scottish Academy of Art & Architecture

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Grandmother Knits
Image credit: Glasgow Life Museums

David Foggie died on 2 June 1948 after a severe attack of asthma, aged 69. His wife Margaret (shown here) survived him by 27 years; she died in 1975, aged 96. The artistic genes have been passed on through the generations - David’s son Neil was a skilled landscape painter and art teacher who exhibited many works at the RSA. Several of his grandchildren became amateur painters, and his great-granddaughter Shaeron Averbuch is a professional artist and curator. The Scotsman summed up Foggie simply but effectively in his obituary as “a figure painter who found beauty in ordinary life and expressed it with honesty.”

Grandmother Knits 1943
David Simpson Foggie (1878–1948)
Oil on canvas
H 88.9 x W 63.5 cm
Glasgow Life Museums