Girl Reading

Today's the day ......................... for the Glasgow Girls and Boys

Great to be able to make an actual visit to Kirkcudbright Art Gallery today - to see an exhibition of paintings by some of the artists commonly known as 'The Glasgow Boys and Girls'.

It was a collaboration between the Kirkcudbright Galleries and the Fleming Collection and contained some fine works by artists such as Joseph Crawhall, James Guthrie, Edward Walton, Flora Macdonald Reid, George Henry, James Paterson and E. A. Hornel.  The pastel drawing above by George Henry is entitled, 'Girl Reading' and was painted in 1896.  By the late 1880s a number of the Glasgow painters including Henry, Guthrie and Lavery pursued careers as fashionable portrait painters in London.  This fluently drawn pastel coincided with a vogue for 'Fair Women' exhibitions, celebrating the fin de siecle cult of beauty, put on by leading art dealers and art institutes in Glasgow and London.

The oil painting in extras by Edward Atkinson Hornel is a view of Kirkcudbright from the river Dee upstream from the town.  He painted it in 1886 - but it's a view that remains much the same today and one which we have come to know very well ..........................