RSA Scottish Art
Mauve Landscape
 | Artist: William George Gillies |
| Title: Mauve Landscape | |
| Year: c. 1956 | |
| Medium: oil on canvas | |
| Dimensions: | |
| Suggested topic: natural environment | |
| Source: RSA | |
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| Open print version of this work | |
| © the RSA | |
| Description: William George Gillies was strongly attached to Scotland and almost all his landscape paintings depict views of his native country.This Mauve Landscape belongs to a series of paintings carried out by Gillies between the mid-1940s and the mid-1960s. This view is close to the village of Howgate and looks across the countryside of Midlothian towards the Pentland Hills in the west.As with earlier versions of this subject he is exploring the pattern of the landscape through the branches of a dominant bare tree. Compare this view with Brown and Grey Landscape.This tree however has a character unlike the other trees in the painting and is very much in a class of its own. The bare branches twist and turn in quite a sinister way as though they are limbs or fingers reaching out to grab you. It is the only object in the painting where tone has been used to take it from a flattened decorative image into 3D.This painting belongs to a period when Gillies had stopped using thick, rich layers of oil paint and was working with thin oil paint, applied flatly. In earlier work he tended to paint very restless-looking skies which reflect the everchanging weather patterns particular to Scotland. Here, the sky is stiller and contains variations of deep mauve but the colour is unsettling as though a storm is about to break. The mood of the painting is slightly nightmarish. In paintings such as this one Gillies comes close to the work of his Welsh contemporary, Graham Sutherland. | |