As proud as we are here at Blondes Fine Art to offer quality work from a highly comprehensive selection of the finest English and Welsh 20th century art, we also routinely see the works of many of the last 100 years' greatest Scottish artists enter our stock.
Our gallery's current Scottish contingent includes Sir Robin Philipson, Elizabeth Blackadder, John Houston, Victoria Crowe, Alberto Morrocco, David McClure and George Devlin, and we can think of few more befitting ways to describe this group than as the 'magnificent seven'. But of course, it is always instructive to learn more of these artists' respective artistic practices, not least as the histories of each have been so often intertwined.
Of these, the best known is undoubtedly Blackadder. Born in Falkirk in 1931, the artist who continues to enjoy great recognition and success in London, while also being one of Scotland's most significant printmakers, studied at Edinburgh College of Art between 1949 and 1954 under the tutelage of Robert Henderson Blyth and William Gillies.
By 1956, Blackadder had married Houston and began a teaching career in Edinburgh, with Blackadder, Houston, Crowe and Philipson all holding staff positions at the College of Art - the latter as Head of School of Drawing and Painting. Indeed, Sir Robin had been a lecturer there as far back as 1947, having been a student of the College himself from 1936 to 1940.
For more than three decades, Philipson - born in Broughton-in-Furness in 1916 - was one of the most influential figures on the Scottish art scene, eventually becoming President of the Royal Scottish Academy and receiving a knighthood for services to the arts in 1976. He died in 1992.
Victoria Crowe, by contrast, is a member of a much younger generation of Scottish portrait and landscape painters, with works in the collections of the National Galleries of Scotland, the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Royal Scottish Academy. In many ways, she can be seen as having taken over from Blackadder, particularly in terms of botanical drawing.
That leaves, of our 'magnificent seven', Morrocco and McClure, the former born in Aberdeen in 1917 and later a student of the city's Gray's School of Art, and the latter born in Lochwinnoch in 1926 and graduating from Edinburgh College of Art - a contemporary of Blackadder and Houston - in the early 1950s.
Morrocco and McClure were great friends and colleagues, and it was the former's position as Head of Painting at Dundee College of Art that the latter took over and eventually retired from in 1985.
With such tightly associated histories, it is no surprise that these great Scottish artists are so closely linked in the public mindset, and we couldn't be happier to offer many fine works by them all here at Blondes Fine Art.