Pioneering painters: creating a stir in Glasgow

The Royal Academy of Arts will present the first major exhibition in London for over 40 years to celebrate the work of the Glasgow Boys, the young group of painters who created a stir at the end of the nineteenth century.

Their new style had a major impact in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, as they attempted to break away from the dark, staid style which was prominent at the time.

They wanted to explore the effects of realist subject matter and the particular effects of light captured through working out of doors, directly in front of the motif.

Taking inspiration from such French Naturalist painters as Bastien-Lepage and also from Whistler, the Glasgow Boys were praised in London, Munich, Vienna and further afield. Their symbolist pictures were also emulated in Germany and Austria.

The exhibition maps the Glasgow Boys’ responses in both subject matter and technique to developments in art which were taking place in Paris in the 1870s and 1880s.

Pioneering Painters: The Glasgow Boys 1880 – 1900 is an exhibition from Glasgow Museums in association with the Royal Academy of Arts, and will run from 30 October. It will feature over 80 oil paintings, watercolours and pastels from public and private collections by such artists as Guthrie, Lavery, Melville, Crawhall, Walton, Henry and Hornel.