ALISON Watt is, deservedly, one of Scotland’s most celebrated living painters. Her pictures of drapery, with their emphasis on the visual and emotional possibilities of folds, are a particularly distinctive strand in her oeuvre.
In her new exhibition, in which she responds to the work of the 18th-century Scottish painter Allan Ramsay, we find points both of continuity with and departure from her previous work. She takes her primary inspiration from Ramsay’s formal, yet intense, portraits of his wives Anne Bayne and Margaret Lindsay of Evelick. Watt also considers a series of Ramsay’s drawings.
The portraits (which were completed in 1739 and 1758-60, respectively) have, as Watt has observed of the picture of Bayne, a fascinating intimacy. It’s in the eyes, which sparkle with recognition and intelligence, and the directness of the gaze. These are portraits, not of idealised, feminine beauty, but of the subject looking at the painter as the painter looks at her.
Both paintings reflect the couture and the artistic fashion of the day. Bayne, who is all but tied up in white lace and pink ribbons (the latter of which is the subject of Watt’s painting Anne, pictured right), stands in a formal pose, looking at us (or, perhaps more accurately, at Ramsay) with a calm confidence. Lindsay appears to have been caught in the everyday pastime of flower arranging, and gazes at us solemnly, a pink rose drooping from her hand.
Despite their ostensible bourgeois gentility, it is difficult to look at these pictures without reflecting on the precariousness of life for infants, children and childbearing women, in 18th-century Britain. Not only did Bayne die in childbirth in 1743, but all three of her children with Ramsay died in infancy or childhood.
Following the tragedy of Bayne’s death, Ramsay married Lindsay. The couple had 10 children, only three of whom lived beyond childhood.
This terrible state of affairs – which continues to afflict a great many women, children and, of course, grieving loved ones in the world today – is referenced, subtly in Watt’s paintings, all of which alight upon objects from Ramsay’s works. In Evelick and Rosa (both of which depict bunches of cut roses), loose petals have fallen on to Watt’s naked, pale grey surface, reminders that flowers are in a state of decay from the moment they are cut; a metaphor, perhaps, for the precariousness of life and the inevitability of death.
READ MORE: A conversation in time with Alison Watt ahead of new exhibition
If there is melancholy here, there is beauty, too. Watt executes the paintings of these ornate, pink and white “old roses” with gorgeous delicacy and technical brilliance.
The aforementioned lace in Ramsay’s portrait of his first wife lends itself to Watt’s fascination with folds. All of the new paintings are interested in the shadows cast by their subjects.
However, the shade thrown by the folds within a lace handkerchief, such as in the painting titled Bayne, for example, takes on another dimension. The deep fold down the centre of the fabric, and its attendant shadow, look like nothing so much as a mountain range depicted by a photographic cartographer.
In addition to such subjects there are notebooks with blank pages, feather quills, even vegetables. The stuff, in other words, of intellectual and bodily life.
All of which is set out in stark simplicity on backgrounds of varying states of white, a palette that has long been a favourite area of exploration for Watt.
As a response by one painter to the work of another, A Portrait Without Likeness is a wonderfully insightful show and one which, despite the titular absence of the human form, is allusively humane.
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