‘Didwepay too much?’ Far-sighted collectors’ fears revealed as priceless Impressionists go on display
They came, they painted and...they were largely ignored.
The genius artists of the Impressionist movement might have crafted some of the world’s best-known paintings that would enthral art-lovers for generations but at the time the likes of Claude Monet and Edgar Degas were largely dismissed by the establishment and their work sold for a tiny fraction of the millions it goes for today.
Several Scottish art collectors in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, however, were ahead of their time and their investment in what were then seen as radical and edgy works led to the country becoming home to one of the world’s greatest collections of Impressionist and PostImpressionist art.
A new exhibition, A Taste For Impressionism: Modern French Art From Millet To Matisse, on display until November at the National Gallery of Scotland (NGS), explores their story, featuring a number of worldfamous pieces by Monet, Degas and Gauguin and later work by Van Gogh, Picasso and Matisse.
Professor Frances Fowle, senior curator of French art, said: “A lot of these collectors were ‘new money’ industrialists, often coming from ordinary backgrounds, making their fortune on the back of things like shipbuilding, textiles and heavy metal. Some were merchants as well, engaged in imports and exports.
“They were quite often first generation and more prepared than previous collectors to buy modern, contemporary art.”
Dealers like Alexander Reid, who became friends with Van Gogh while living in Paris in the late-1800s, promoted French art back home and sold Impressionist pieces to industrialists, with the market really getting going in the 1920s.
The exhibition features about 120 paintings, sculptures and works on paper taken from the NGS, as well as loans from Glasgow Museums, Tate, Aberdeen Art Gallery, Berwick Museum and private collections.
The world-renowned holdings are largely down to chance, resulting from a series of innovative purchases by previous gallery directors like Stanley Cursiter and donated items.
These include purchases from Sir Alexander and Rosalind Maitland, who began buying in the 1930s and amassed Van Gogh, Monet and Cezanne pieces, gifted and bequeathed to the NGS in 1960 and 1965.
“If any collector bought impressionist art before the prices really began to rise, then they were very canny,” Fowle said. “They weren’t certain that these artists’ reputations would endure. There’s actually a letter with one of the pictures in the show, Paul Gauguin’s Three Tahitians.
“The Maitlands said they felt worried that they paid quite a high price – £13,500 – for this picture in 1936 and hoped nobody else in Edinburgh found out because it was slightly obscene to spend so much money. I find that fascinating that they kind of felt quite nervous about it.”
The exhibition also aims to rewrite into history a number of the female collectors whose contributions have been overlooked.
This includes champion yachtswoman Elizabeth Workman, who was raised in Helensburgh, as well as Indian-born newspaper editor Rachel Beer, known as “the
first Lady of Fleet Street” and the flamboyant socialite Eve Fleming, whose son was Ian, the creator of James Bond.
“I was really interested in the number of women collectors who took an interest in Impressionism,” Fowle said. “They’ve been slightly written out of history, I think, because we tend to think about these big industrialists.
“Sometimes when women bought pictures, it was done in their husband’s name and so they become invisible.”
As Impressionist works became more and more popular in the early 20th Century and fetched increasingly high prices, a side industry in forgeries began to take hold.
This is acknowledged in the exhibition, with a number of counterfeit works among those on display – but left for the visitors to detect themselves.
“What it does is it makes people look much more closely, and try to think as connoisseurs,” Fowle said. “What is it potentially that is wrong about this picture?
“It’s quite interesting, because a lot of people try and guess and get it wrong. I find it fascinating how people formulate these ideas about why they think it’s wrong, how you tell whether art is genuine or not.
“Forgers use all sorts of ruses to pull the wool over people’s eyes. People love programmes like Fake or Fortune and I think it’s quite good to get people involved.”
A Taste For Impressionism: Modern French Art From Millet To Matisse, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, until November 13