During the late nineteenth century, a generation of young, iconoclastic painters upended the Scottish art scene, gaining renown as being among the first homegrown artists to import, from the continent, the tenets of modernism.
By focusing on truthful depictions of rural life, based on direct engagement with their subjects rather than romantic Highland scenes, they followed a style devised in France and the Low Countries. The trend also set them against Scotland's Edinburgh-based cultural establishment, where they took on the stuffier members of such influential institutions as the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA).
Brig o'Turk (The Trossachs)
1879
Edward Arthur Walton (1860–1922) 
Although initial success came from spending time in the countryside, which inspired some of their best-loved works, its foundation was based on links to their vibrant home city. Studying, living and working in a fast-rising mercantile and industrial powerhouse, the Glasgow Boys or Glasgow School painters shared the confidence and ambition of major business magnates such as Sir William Burrell, along with the emerging middle classes, both keen to show their understanding of modern trends.
From 1879, the likes of James Guthrie, Edward Arthur Walton and Arthur Melville took their lead from the pioneering French Realist movement. Copying the practice of groups such as the Barbizon School, they ventured into the Scottish countryside to capture the hard-scrabble existence of its agricultural communities.
It was an interest the Glasgow Boys shared with patrons already buying such fashionable works sourced from across the channel, cementing their influence on Scottish art. The painters themselves took advantage of easier travel and trade, so could examine the works of Jean-François Millet and Jules Bastien-Lepage – not only in their home city but on trips to London and Paris.
Meanwhile, local art aficionados were proud to invest in talent from the city where they made their fortunes. From the early nineteenth century, Glasgow had grown wealthy thanks to trade links created by the British Empire and, by this stage, had come to see itself as the second city of a globe-spanning network. Its port brought in goods of all kinds, while the city produced for export everything from textiles to iron.
By 1821, the city's population had overtaken that of Edinburgh, yet its inhabitants still lived culturally under the shadow of the Scottish capital. They discovered a distinct aesthetic identity by adopting more up-to-date tastes and values.
Culturally, Glasgow's rival held sway thanks to such institutions as the RSA, where artists aspired to gain acceptance through study or displaying their works. This conservative organisation maintained traditional tastes, which in fine art meant a hierarchy of themes that favoured grand historical subjects or dramatic views of iconic landscapes and their peasant inhabitants.
This latter genre the Glasgow Boys especially found overly sentimental and contrived. Much as the French Impressionists chafed against the conservative art establishment embodied by the Académie des Beaux Arts, so these upstarts had a target to set themselves against. As they perceived their east-coast rivals as being stuck in their ways, the Glasgow Boys nicknamed them 'glue-pots'.
Based in Glasgow, these young painters often arrived from a variety of backgrounds that included unusual routes into the art world. Among their leaders, Guthrie was mainly self-taught, avoiding the main art schools of the day – in fact, he had terminated his studies in law, placing him squarely among the Scottish bourgeoisie.
Walton, meanwhile, had studied at the Glasgow School of Art, followed by a year at the Staatliche Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf. Another Glasgow Boy, Irish-born John Lavery, came to the city to study, paying for his course by tinting photographs. Later, he trained in London and, during the early 1880s, in Paris.
While Melville studied in Edinburgh, like several of his peers, he found his distinctive style once he moved to Paris in 1878 to study, soon gravitating to the artists' colony at Grez-sur-Loing. Once he returned to Scotland, he aimed to emulate this practice in locations such as Cockburnspath, Berwickshire – away from iconic scenery, such as the mountains of the north, where ordinary folk toiled.
While the creation of a long-standing artistic base outside Glasgow failed to take hold, Glasgow School painters regularly spent summers in the countryside, heading to areas accessible from Glasgow, such as Kirkcudbright.
Back home, they gathered at the Bath Street studio of William York MacGregor, where this graduate of both the Glasgow School of Art and the Slade School in London held life-drawing classes. Here and on their rural group outings, this group flourished through sharing ideas and working collectively. MacGregor, in particular, encouraged experimentation and critiques of each other's efforts. To show their work, the Glasgow Boys turned to the relatively enlightened and progressive Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts.
Founded in 1861, the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts attracted tens of thousands of visitors to its annual exhibitions, among them members of the city's expanding, prosperous middle class, looking to decorate their new homes while showing off contemporary taste. It is hardly by chance, then, that Glasgow was home to one of Europe's most influential art dealers: Alexander Reid acted as Guthrie's agent as well as giving debut solo exhibitions to Edward Atkinson Hornel and Joseph Crawhall.
For a while, Reid lived in Paris, where he shared lodgings with Vincent van Gogh. On the dealer's return to his birth city, he popularised the work of James McNeill Whistler and the Impressionists while also taking advantage of the current vogue for Japanese prints – all key influences on the Glasgow Boys.
These influences became increasingly apparent during the 1880s as the artists began to turn away from their trademark earthy realism in favour of more decorative styles, focusing on the use of colour, seen most clearly in the careers of Hornel and Melville. While Reid imported Japanese works, in 1893, he funded a trip for Hornel and George Henry to visit Japan to evolve their styles.
Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 2: Portrait of Thomas Carlyle
1872–1873
James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) 
As for Whistler, the American artist was based in the UK for much of his career. His tonality came to be highly regarded by the Scottish painters, especially when, later in their careers, their attention turned from landscapes to a more lucrative subject genre: portraiture.
They deepened their links to patrons through commissions to paint the great and good of Glasgow – before several moved on to London, where they gravitated to seek greater fame and fortune.
John George Bartholomew (1860–1920), FRSE
(sketch) c.1910
Edward Arthur Walton (1860–1922) 
Walton portrayed John George Bartholomew, head of his family's illustrious firm of mapmakers and publishers, whose own initiatives included The Times Survey Atlas of the World. In 1884, Bartholomew also helped found the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. Walton painted him when he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Edinburgh in 1909: the globe and set of compasses are apt symbols of the businessman's interests and work.
State Visit of Her Majesty, Queen Victoria to the Glasgow International Exhibition, 1888
1890
John Lavery (1856–1941) 
Lavery, meanwhile, already enjoyed Burrell's patronage, then in 1888 was commissioned to portray Queen Victoria's state visit to the Glasgow International Exhibition. Eight years later, he moved to the English capital, where he enjoyed great success as a portraitist, while also covering contemporary events, including as a war artist. He befriended Whistler and was knighted in 1918. While Walton lived nearby, the Glasgow Boys had now spread their wings and were no longer the close-knit group of the early, outdoor days.
Several artists, such as Guthrie, later returned to Scotland, where in 1915 Walton became president of the Royal Scottish Watercolour Society. Whether painting important figures in high society, business and politics or leading major artistic institutions, by the early twentieth century, these former outsiders had become themselves leaders of the cultural establishment, albeit one more open to groundbreaking ideas.
Chris Mugan, writer
This content was funded by the PF Charitable Trust
