Like many people who saw the hugely popular Glasgow Boys exhibition at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum five years ago, I was taken by the joyful vivacity of Arthur Melville’s beautiful watercolours. Most were new to me – and a revelation.
Something else which struck me about the work of Melville was the sheer modernity of his paintings – in both oil and his watercolour. Here was someone painting in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, but there was an abstract quality to many of his later paintings which seemed out of kilter with his contemporaries.
But, as a new exhibition of Melville’s work at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh reveals, he influenced many of the artists who followed in his wake following his premature death at the age of 49 in 1904. In 1943, Scottish Colourist, JD Fergusson, wrote in his book, Modern Scottish Painting, that Melville’s work "£opened up... the way to free painting – not merely freedom in the use of paint, but freedom of outlook.”
Melville was not to the manner born. Born in 1855 in Loanhead-of-Guthrie, Forfarshire (now Angus), he was the fourth son of a coachman in a family of nine. The family moved to East Lothian when he was little and with his precocious talent evident from a young age, at the age of 13 he managed to persuade his parents to allow him to travel into Edinburgh for drawing lessons. His mother Margaret, "a pious and hard-working woman", disapproved of his interest in drawing, but he continued to work as a grocer’s assistant, eventually studying at the Royal Scottish Academy Schools.
This major new exhibition of Melville’s work brings together 70 watercolours and oil paintings from the very beginning of his career as a precociously talented 22-year-old influenced by the French Impressionists, to its premature end in 1904 when he was painting grand scenes influenced by the New Testament in an attempt to capture in oil the freedom he’d mastered in watercolour.
One of the earliest works on display is the oil painting, A Cabbage Garden (1877), an example of contemporary realism depicting a gardener and his daughter. In 1878 it was the first painting by Melville to be accepted for show at the Royal Academy in London. That same summer, he set off for France and spent the next two years studying in Paris, painting on the Normandy coast and working at the burgeoning artists’ colony of Grez-sur-Loing, where he painted open air studies of fieldworkers such as Paysanne à Grez (1880).
Late works in Adventures in Colour include watercolour, Autumn, Loch Lomond, (1893), painted at Brig O’Turk in the Trossachs. With the lightest of touches, he manages to depict the Highland landscape with a visionary and unprecedented freedom. Another stand-out work is the stunning – and well-before-its-time – portrait in oil, The White Piano – which created a sensation when it was first exhibited in London in 1893.
The exhibition’s title, Adventure in Colour, was chosen quite carefully, says Charlotte Topsfield, senior curator of British Drawing at the Scottish National Gallery.
“Melville is a master of colour,” she says. “It’s so spectacular. So pure and so intense. It’s like you are looking at stained glass, with his choice of acid yellows and other dazzling colour. He had this technique of saturating paper in white and using it as a base. And this gave the work its intense dazzle. The finishing touches were always important to Melville. He would let it dry on sheet of glass. His work looks spontaneous, but it’s very exacting and precise.
“His composition in masterful; using blank space to create drama. There’s a real contrast between empty space and crowds. You can see this really clearly in a watercolour like The Fête of the Dosseh.”
This painting teems with light and life. It also highlights Melville’s derring-do attitude to reportage. Melville witnessed the last ever Ceremony of the Dosseh in Cairo in 1879; an annual ritual, which that year, saw some three or four hundred Saadeeyeh dervishes, many in a state of religious trance, lie down prostrate, while the sheik, astride a white horse, trampled over them.
Melville’s watercolour technique was so unusual critics invented a new term for it: blottesque. This was an attempt to describe the he painted in ‘blots’ and ‘spots’, deploying colour in a way that predicted the work of early 20th century artists, such as the Fauves.
Adventure in Colour also showcases Melville’s rich and varied career, charting his often hair-raising Boy’s Own-style adventures in the Middle East, Spain and North Africa. It follows his relationship with Glasgow Boy painters such as James Guthrie, Joseph Crawhall and E A Walton; his re-interpretations of the Scottish landscape and paintings of modern life; his abstracted oil paintings; not to mention the unmatched virtuosity and excitement of crowd scenes like The Fête of the Dosseh.
As a man, Melville was a vital presence: athletic, intrepid, gregarious and charismatic. His extended travels in 1881-2 took him to Cairo, Karachi and Baghdad, and then overland to Constantinople, providing a constant source material for his most spectacular watercolours and established his reputation as an artist-adventurer. Ever restless, his exploits in the Middle East were followed by later journeys to Orkney, Paris, Venice, Spain and North Africa, all of which inspired him in different ways.
His death in 1904 from typhoid contracted on a painting trip to Spain, robbed the world of a real pioneer in paint. Who knows what this ever-adventurous artist would have gone on to do?
Arthur Melville: Adventures in Colour is at the Scottish National Gallery, The Mound, Edinburgh from today until January 17, 2016.
www.nationalgalleries.org
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