Scottish art: more than meets the eye
A legacy once dismissed as provincial deserves reappraisal, the historian Lachlan Goudie says
In the spring of 1895 a 25-year-old Glasgow artist, Bessie MacNicol, painted the head of a French girl in Paris. It is an exercise in sensuality, extraordinary for an age when female art students were a small minority; the critic John Ruskin had even pronounced that there had never “been such a being as yet as a lady who could paint”.
The picture shows a girl with black hair, leaning forwards, lips parted, a black band round her neck. MacNicol dismissed it as “the head of a French tottie”.
For Lachlan Goudie, however, author of a new book, The Story of Scottish Art, it is one of a number of under-rated Scottish works that argue for the need to re-assess an artistic legacy that