ONE of Scotland's leading painters Dame Elizabeth Blackadder is set to stage what is likely to be her final exhibition of new works this summer.
The showcase, entitled 'Decades', will display a range of the lauded painter's work from the 1950s to present day and will coincide her 85th birthday.
Dame Elizabeth is renowned for producing detailed paintings of flowers, landscapes, depictions of cats as well as work inspired by Japan and European locales.
The exhibition features a number of her distinctive still lifes, studies, and landscapes, with the earliest work a painting of a church in Aegina, Greece, from 1954.
Decades will contain 60 early drawings, lithographs, oils and watercolours as well as recent etchings and screenprints.
The Scottish Gallery, which will host the event from August 4, said the artist’s ill-health suggests it is very likely to be her last exhibition.
Director Tommy Zyw said: “It is a fantastic show, it covers a huge period of her working life, from early landscapes from her travels in Italy in the 1950s and 1960s, right up to a recent work in 2014, after that major retrospective show at the National Galleries of Scotland in 2011.
“There is new work and much work that hasn’t been seen before.”
In the exhibition catalogue, fellow director Guy Peploe said: “She can perhaps best be considered as a national treasure, like Burns or Scott or Raeburn, her body of work a monument to quiet application, restraint, enlightenment and cultural variety.
“Each work has the simple poetry of a haiku but is presented with the perfect pitch of a tuning fork.
“In this exhibition we make a considered selection from each decade of her life in a show which aims to be a celebration.”
He adds: “Today her working life is severely restricted by ill-health and this is likely to be her last festival show in this long, eloquent sequence; not a retrospective but rather a serendipitous choice to remind us of her extraordinary variety and genius.”
Dame Elizabeth Blackadder was born in Falkirk in 1931 and studied at Edinburgh University and the Edinburgh College of Art.
She married fellow painter John Houston in 1956 and, after earning membership of both the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Academy, she became first woman to be elected to both institutions.
Dame Elizabeth Blackadder was awarded an OBE in 1982.
She holds several honorary doctorates and was in 2001 appointed Her Majesty’s Painter and Limner in Scotland and in 2003 made a Dame.
Dame Elizabeth has been exhibiting with The Scottish Gallery since 1961.
Her first first solo exhibition was held in 1959 at 57 Gallery, Edinburgh.
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