University of Hull hosts ‘Glasgow Girls and Boys’ exhibition

A new exhibition which shines a spotlight on a remarkable group of Scottish artists – The Glasgow Girls and Boys – will be on show in the University of Hull’s art gallery from October.

The exhibition will run from Friday 14 October to Saturday 4 December in the University’s Brynmor Jones Library.

University staff, students and members of the public are invited to attend.

This exhibition, which is being created in collaboration with The Fleming Collection, will see the Glasgow Girls and Boys’ work brought back into focus, highlighting their significant role as the first internationally-renowned contemporary painters from Scotland.

The show concentrates on the years between 1880 and 1895, when the Glasgow Girls and Boys were at the height of their fame on a global scale, and brings together more than 30 paintings and watercolours, including works from every key member of the group.

John Bernasconi, Director of the University Art Collection, said: “We are delighted to be working in partnership with the Fleming Collection once again – having shown the Scottish Colourists in 2018.

“This exhibition is the prequel to that show and once more the quality of work makes a stunning addition to the University of Hull’s own collection of contemporaneous works hanging in the gallery.”

The artists’ narrative begins in artists' colonies in Berwickshire, Lincolnshire, and Fontainebleau before they relocate to Glasgow, where they came together at the epicentre of one of the richest cities in Western civilization's thriving art scene. Their promotion to stars on the worldwide exhibition circuit known for their early experimentalism and later symbolist work brings the show to a close.

During the 1880s, the group of rebellious young Scottish artists had defied their High Victorian elders – with their fondness for theatrical Highland landscapes and sentimental ‘story‐pictures’ –by taking themselves off into the British and French countryside to depict the unadorned realities of contemporary rural life.

Although originally dubbed the ‘Glasgow Boys’, the group is also distinguished by a group of previously neglected female artists such as Flora MacDonald Reid, Bessie MacNicol and Katherine Cameron.

The Glasgow Girls and Boys will also seek to bring new and greater appreciation for the talents of Flora Macdonald Reid, who was just 23‐years old when she painted Fieldworkers, depicting a potato harvest in 1883. It has since been recognised as one of the most important works in the story of Scottish art. In 2023 the painting will be on long-term loan from the Fleming Collection to the Scottish National Gallery.

James Knox, Curator of the exhibition and Director of the Fleming Collection of Scottish Art, said: “Art is a great consolation in difficult times – and never more so when it displays the energy, innovation, technical brilliance and beauty of the work of the young Glasgow painters of the 1880s.

The exhibition will feature outstanding works such as: The Blue Hungarians, which was shown at the 1888 Glasgow International Exhibition by Sir John Lavery; Highland Glen by Arthur Melville (c.1893); and The Bridge Crowland, Lincolnshire by James Guthrie (c.1882), all on loan from the famed Fleming Collection. They will be shown with seldom-seen pieces from private collections, including Playmates (1884) by George Henry – which was first shown in public in 1885 at the Glasgow Institute and marked a turning point in the group's rising fame – and Two Sisters (Mother and Daughter) (1899) by Bessie MacNicol from Hull's Ferens Art Gallery.

The University of Hull’s art gallery, located in the Brynmor Jones Library, is open from 10am to 5pm.

For more information please email pr@hull.ac.uk or call 07484 534322.

The University of Hull Art Collection was founded in 1963 when the University decided to form a collection to bring its students into contact with real works of art. With the available resources it was realised that this could only be done, ‘by concentrating on the unfashionable and inexpensive’ so they decided to specialise in the then largely neglected area of art in Britain from 1890 to 1940. Today the Art Collection remains small but outstanding and includes works by Augustus John, Aubrey Beardsley, Philip Wilson Steer, Samuel Peploe, Stanley Spencer, Wyndham Lewis and Ben Nicholson. Visit the Gallery Website here.

The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation owes its existence to the formation of the finest collection of Scottish art outside public institutions, comprising over 600 works from the 17^th-century to the present day. The Collection dates back to 1968 when investment bank Robert Fleming & Co, began to acquire Scottish art to hang in its offices worldwide to reflect its Dundonian roots. Following the sale of the bank in 2000, the Collection was vested in the Foundation. Today, the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation is endowed to care and enhance the Collection and to promote an understanding and awareness of Scottish art and creativity across the UK and beyond through a programme of cultural diplomacy, touring exhibitions, individual loans, events, publishing and education. Visit the Fleming Collection website here.

Banner Image: Cameron, Katherine, Apple Blossom and Bees, Unknown. Pencil and watercolour on paper. The Fleming Collection ⒸThe Artist's Estate