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Description: | This collection consists of forty seven works, most of which are drawings in various colours and combinations and of wash and ink, but also includes seven watercolours and three works combining ink and watercolour. They were acquired in 1989 as part of a bequest by Hope Montagu Douglas Scott. Hope Scott was the only daughter of Henry Johnston Younger, of the long established brewing dynasty. In 1918 she married Charles William Montagu Douglas Scott, a grandson of the 5th Duke of Buccleuch. Having met him at an exhibition of his paintings in 1969, she became an enthusiastic collector of Johnstone’s work. Altogether, the works by Johnstone now belonging to the University constitute a major collection of the later work of one of the most important and influential Scottish artists of the twentieth century. Born to a Borders farming family, Johnstone’s earliest instruction in painting was from watercolour artist, Tom Scott. After a brief spell in the army, William went to Edinburgh College of Art and attended lectures on Celtic and Anglo-Saxon art at the University. He spent time in the 1920s in both Paris and California, where he was exposed to the influences of surrealism and abstract expressionism. As well as these artistic influences he was also friendly with major poets of the period, Hugh MacDiarmid and T.S. Eliot, the former of whom shared his ambition to realise a Scottish Renaissance. Although Johnstone always saw his work as intimately linked with the experience of landscape, he expressed this in increasingly free, abstract forms. His originality lay in this combination. Having spent many years in London as Principal of Camberwell School of Art from 1938 and Central School of Art from 1947, Johnstone returned to the Borders in 1960. It was there, during the last twenty years of his life, that he developed the late style that is seen in much of the present collection. | Subjects: | Landscapes. Ink Washes; Scottish Art; Watercolours; Drawings; Surrealist; Abstract Expressionist; Pen-and-Wash Drawings; Scottish Artists; Abstract; Fine Arts; | Source: | University of Edinburgh | Address: | Old College, South Bridge,
EH8 9YL | Creator: | Hope Montagu Douglas Scott | Contributor: | The collection was left to the University of Edinburgh as a bequest on the death of Hope Montagu Douglas Scott in 1989. | Identifier: | http://hdl.handle.net/10683/311... | Relation: | University of Edinburgh Collections (http://hdl.handle.net/10683/701) | Go to resource |
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