In the 1880s a loose group of young painters in Glasgow started using a word for the pictures hanging in the Royal Scottish Academy. The word was gluepots.
It was an insult about varnish. The Edinburgh establishment favoured a warm brown tonality, laid on with heavy glazes, that made everything look like it had been dipped in treacle and left to set. The subjects matched: sentimental Highland scenes, misty crofts, noble stags, historical anecdotes with a moral attached. Painted indoors, from imagination, for a market that wanted Scotland to look like Walter Scott had described it.
The Glasgow Boys went outside and painted a field.
Who they were
There was no manifesto and no membership list. Around twenty painters are usually counted, and the core is roughly: James Guthrie, John Lavery, E. A. Hornel, George Henry, Joseph Crawhall, Arthur Melville, E. A. Walton, James Paterson, Alexander Roche, David Gauld, W. Y. Macgregor and Thomas Millie Dow.
Most were in their twenties. Several had trained in Paris, where they had absorbed Jules Bastien-Lepage: square-brush handling, a high horizon, cool grey light, rural labour treated with the seriousness normally reserved for history painting. What they brought back to Scotland was less a style than a permission.
Cockburnspath
The thing to understand about the Glasgow Boys is that they left Glasgow to do the work.
In the summers of 1883 to 1885 several of them based themselves at Cockburnspath, a village on the Berwickshire coast, and painted the farm year. Guthrie stayed on through the winter after the others went back to the city — which is why A Hind's Daughter exists.
That painting is the group in miniature. A hind was a skilled agricultural worker, a job, not an animal. His daughter stands in a field of kail, the cabbage that fed a labouring family from October to March, with a knife in her hand and a stare that gives nothing away. There is no story, no moral and no picturesque cottage. It is a portrait of a working child in a working field, and in 1883 that was close to a political statement.
Walton was there too, beginning A Daydream in the same landscape.
Munich, 1890
They got their reputation abroad first, which is a very Scottish story.
In 1890 the group showed at the Grosvenor Gallery in London. The picture that did the work was The Druids — Bringing in the Mistletoe, a collaboration between George Henry and E. A. Hornel: priests processing through moonlit snow with mistletoe cut by a golden sickle, loaded on the backs of white bulls, the whole surface worked in gold leaf laid over incised gesso. It is not a painting so much as a constructed object, and it is unlike anything else made in Britain that decade.
The London show brought an invitation to the Munich International, and after Munich the Glasgow Boys were a European name. Dealers in Germany and America began buying. Several of the group ended up as knights and academicians — Guthrie became President of the Royal Scottish Academy, the institution they had spent their twenties mocking.
What happened next
The group dispersed, as groups do. Lavery went to London and became the society portraitist of his generation. Hornel settled at Kirkcudbright and spent forty years painting children among bluebells in Galloway woodland, in paint so thick the surface is almost relief. Crawhall went on making his extraordinary animal watercolours from memory, on brown Holland linen, destroying anything that fell short of his own standard. Melville died of typhoid at forty-nine, contracted in Spain.
Henry and Hornel spent eighteen months in Japan in 1893, funded through the Glasgow shipowner William Burrell. Neither of them painted conventional space again.
Why the pictures still work
Because they are about looking rather than about telling. The gluepots had a story to deliver and the paint was a delivery mechanism. In a Glasgow Boys picture the paint is the point: the square strokes sit on the surface, the light is cold and northern and accurate, and the figures are doing something ordinary with complete conviction.
A hundred and forty years on, the sentimental Highland scenes look like period furniture. A girl in a cabbage field still looks straight back at you.
See the Glasgow Boys collection — archival prints, framed or unframed, made to order and shipped free worldwide.