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Description: | 76.0 x 86.0 CRE STURROCK, Alick Riddell; (Scottish; 1885-1953) Although he exhibited his work from 1912 onwards, Alick Riddell Sturrock gained clearer recognition as one of the active members of the 'Edinburgh Group', which was reconstituted in 1919 from a promising pre-war nucleus. The group, one of those confederations of talent which so characterised the landscape of early 20th-century Scottish artistic life, was a strange interweaving of brash young postulants and respected names. Sturrock's fellow members were Eric Robertson - he of the light-drenched, terpsichorean nudes; W.O. Hutchinson; D.M. Sutherland; Dorothy Johnstone; Cecile Walton (E.A. Walton's daughter, and Eric Robertson's wife); and Mary Newbery, Francis Newbery's daughter and Sturrock's wife. Truly a Bloomsbury-style convolution of alliances!
The Edinburgh Group gained prompt critical notice with their exhibitions of 1919 and 1920, during which period the tag of 'pagan brazenness' was first applied to their artistic preoccupations. Shockingly figurative and frustratingly elusive at the same time, the young artists were notable for their bold subjects and 'belle peinture'.
Sturrock's prevailing love of landscape subjects distinguished him from his Edinburgh Group companions with their primarily figurative concerns. He exhibited sporadically at the Royal Academy in the 1920s and 1930s, displaying titles such as 'Corfe Castle' (1921), 'The White Farm', 'Midsummer' (1929) and 'The Parson's Garden' (1937). If anything of his early Edinburgh years did remain with him, it was surely that unearthly quality, that whiff of paganism, which had so galvanized the Group's first commentators. The present landscape of a river in spate is transmitted in assured dabs and flicks of paint, which the artist modifies to suggest distance. Such a technique endows the natural scene with a corybantic, complex energy. This energy is checked and counterbalanced by the cool tonality of the palette, and the outcome is a picture of considerable tension.
Text© Marion Lawson, History of Art Department, University of Glasgow 1984. | License: | http://www.hmag.gla.ac.uk/spirit/rights/ | Publisher: | Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow | Rights holder: | Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow | Subjects: | SCOTLAND : LANDSCAPE : CAMPUS : CAMPUS : | Source: | Hunterian Museum | Creator: | Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow | Identifier: | http://www.huntsearch.gla.ac.uk/cgi-bin/... | Language: | en-GB | Go to resource |
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