Watercolours from Thurso, the Thames, and Tahiti
E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-916846-88-3
Verlag: Unicorn
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Dr Iain Macdonald is Associate Professor in the Department of Design Innovation, Maynooth University, Ireland. Born in Edinburgh and graduating from Edinburgh College of Art, he began his career at BBC Television Centre as a motion graphic designer and was a Senior Designer nominated for a BAFTA before becoming a commercials director at the Moving Picture Company. Since 2010 he has been a Design academic achieving a Doctorate while working at Edinburgh Napier University. His research and publications cover motion graphics, co-design and public health communication.
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2 Early Life and London
In 1861, W. Alister Macdonald was born on the morning of 12 July in the Free Church Manse of Brora, a parish of Clyne, in Sutherland, of which his father, John, was then Minister of the Parish of Clyne. He was only four years old when both his parents died under tragic circumstances: firstly his mother of puerperal fever after the birth of his brother Sinclair, and then little over a year later his father after a mental collapse brought on by the devastating loss of his wife. This was in a religious community where ill fortune was viewed particularly harshly as God’s judgement upon someone for their sins. But retribution belonged to God, not man; in one sermon the Rev. John Sinclair, minister of Bruan in Caithness, made the point explicitly: ‘It is true that we often see the wicked enjoy much comfort and worldly ease, and the Godly chastened every morning; but this dreadful rest to the former and a blessed chastisement to the latter.’… The miseries of this life were not therefore simply to be endured but were in themselves a necessary agony for those who wished to attain eternal salvation in the next.19 2.1 Grandmother, Mrs Jane Sinclair c. 1885 by W. Alister Macdonald He and his four siblings were taken into the care of their maternal grandmother, Mrs Jane Sinclair, in the small village of Melvich, under the guardianship of their uncle, David Sinclair, who ran his own drapery business in Thurso. Macdonald later recalled of the road to Melvich, ‘characteristically and vividly the moonlight playing over the sea as he journeyed by stage coach (there were no railways then in these remote parts) to the north, as the road wound for miles along the coast’.20 The Inverness to Thurso stage coach was pulled by a train of four horses that would have strained over the steep braes past the herring fleets harboured in Helmsdale, Dunbeath, Latheronwheel and Wick, before crossing the barren stretch of bog on the Causeymire to arrive at the Royal Hotel with the mail and its many occupants clinging to the roof as well as seated inside. The Macdonald orphans were not alone as they joined an already established family of three Fraser-Sinclair cousins who had similarly been orphaned in 1862 (2.1 William Alister is sitting bottom right). 2.2 Macdonald orphans with maternal grandmother, Melvich c. 1870 For the next six years Macdonald grew up amongst this devout Presbyterian community where Gaelic was often spoken in the home and in sermons, as many who were now living there had been evicted from their villages in the Strathy glen in the brutal Highland Clearances by the Duke of Sutherland’s infamous factors to make way for sheep. It was a wild, desolate, treeless landscape washed by the Atlantic and with the high cliffs of the Orkneys glimmering across the sea. Here freedom could be found in solitary wanderings amongst the dunes, and along the salmon river flowing into the bay or watching the herring fleet come into harbour with their catches. 2.3 B. Sinclair Macdonald c. 1920s At the local school he was unable to do a sum correctly and ‘his chief delight was in caricaturing the masters and pupils and in making sketches – the ruling passion strong in his youth’.21 Fifty years later on his passage to Tahiti his sketchbook reveals how that skill for observation flourished. But one can assume his competency for numeracy made significant improvements as he progressed to his first job as bank clerk in the Thurso branch! It was not until later, when he was sent to Rattray’s School in Aberdeen, that he had his first lesson painting with watercolours. His drawing master, Mr Kennedy, was impressed and awarded the young student a high commendation. However, his ‘rather unscrupulous guardian’22 was not as impressed with Macdonald’s writing and drawing accomplishments, and he was sent at the age of fifteen into a Thurso bank on a salary of £10 a year. And there he might have remained in a steady job with possible prospects of advancement in the bank in this remote northern-most town. His younger brother, Sinclair (2.2), returned after graduating as a qualified architect in Edinburgh to build a practice that covered all of the Highlands north of Inverness to Orkney, as did his son, Hugh who carried the business successfully on until his death in 1979. Instead, through an intervention from one of his aunts who was married to the then head of the Consul Office in the Bank of England, he obtained a post in the London & Westminster Bank, in Lothbury, right in the heart of the City. In 1880, London was the capital of the British Empire, the largest and richest city in the world; the contrast of Dickensian streets thronging with people, merchants, horses and carriages, could not have been more extreme. For the nineteen-year-old, while his day was occupied by the bank, he began attending evening classes at St Martin’s School of Art, in St Martin’s Lane, ‘that thoroughfare which for over two centuries had been a sort of Quartier Latin of London’.23 Perhaps now the budding artist had found his tribe, as under the direction of John Parker RWS, his craft was propelled and led him to the Gilbert Garret Sketch Club. Spending what daylight was available in his leisure hours, most often as the sun was rising or setting, he would draw and paint on the banks of the Thames. What he learned through study and practice over years of dedication and passion for his painting is evident in his complete mastery of the medium of watercolour. In 1885, his early talent was recognised by his peers as he succeeded in taking the second landscape prize in the competition organised by all the London Sketching Clubs and Royal Academy students at the Society of British Artists, as reported in the Illustrated London News.24 Perhaps that was the nudge Macdonald needed to leave the drudgery, but safe employment of the Bank and take the daring action to make his own way as an artist. With lodgings over-looking the river at Greenwich, almost foretelling his last domain on the shore of Cook’s Bay halfway round the world in French Oceania, he paid a modest five shillings a week in rent; ‘and records with pride that he lived on another five!’.25 With a month’s salary in his pocket, he cut loose for the unspoilt tranquillity and boating paradise of the Norfolk Broads with two other artists. Here now we see the fascination with water and boats influence the subject of his work that was to last his lifetime. In London Macdonald was already in good company, as the American artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) had been painting scenes of the Thames since he arrived in 1861, the year Macdonald was born. In 1882, Walter Sickert (1860–1942) began his artistic career in Whistler’s London studio, adopting his tonal approach in oils, painting London street scenes and shop fronts. English maritime artist W.L. Wyllie (1851–1931) exhibited ‘Heave Away’ Barges upward bound, shooting Rochester Bridge at the Royal Academy, and further popularity of his paintings of the Thames came through patronage by The Fine Art Society. In 1886, Macdonald gained his first significant commercial success through the publication of drawings and a story about cod fishing in the North Sea in the Illustrated London News. One day from his Greenwich window he observed a cod-fishing smack moored beneath him, which suggested adventure. In his charming manner that would be repeated often thereafter, he approached the captain and owner. The resulting conversation led to the artist boarding the vessel and sailing with the crew to the North Sea. Unperturbed by a south-west gale that forced the captain to lay off the Norfolk coast for three days, he spent the following weeks sketching and fishing on the Dogger Bank, ‘and generally enjoying himself’. For this ‘first blood’ he received ‘eleven guineas: ten, he is proud to remember for the drawings and one for the writing’.26 Other travels brought him home to Scotland, spending time in Inverness with his nephews Alister and Jack Mactavish (1879–1984), and in Invergordon with his elder brother John, who owned the general store, London House, where he displayed and sold a number of watercolours. In 1892, Doubtful Weather, Loch Hourn was his first watercolour to be accepted by the Royal Academy. The coastal landscape of the mountains of Skye, is another image that again almost mirrors the topographic drama of Moorea and his last resting place. The artist’s life was not all plain sailing; there were real hardships and vicissitudes to endure. There was still much to be learned, and to improve his drawing technique Macdonald attended the Westminster School of Art. In these hard times the encouragement and attention of a master, in the...
