During a work visit to Scotland some years ago, I took the opportunity to visit Edinburgh’s National Gallery of Scotland. It has some excellent artworks and is well worth an afternoon’s tarriance. It houses the subject of today’s blog, Sir James Guthrie’s A Hind’s Daughter.

The Glasgow School was a circle of influential artists and designers that began to coalesce in Glasgow in the 1870s, and flourished from the 1890s to around 1910. Dubbed the Glasgow Boys, these men had a passion for realism and naturalism, as well as a distaste for the Edinburgh oriented Scottish art establishment, which they viewed as oppressive (cf. the Impressionists). Driven and motivated by naturalistic ideals, they embraced change, created masterpieces, and became Scottish icons in the process.

James, later Sir James, Guthrie was one of the leading lights of the Glasgow Boys. He focused on the life and landscape of rural Scotland for his oeuvre; the land and its inhabitants provided a rich resource for Guthrie and none typifies his artworks of this period more than A Hind’s Daughter (a hind being a skilled farm labourer). The small girl has just straightened up after cutting a cabbage and looks directly and arrestingly at the viewer, as if she has just spotted you. It’s a quintessentially Scottish scene, with girl and landscape inextricably merged.

Guthrie painted the picture in the Berwickshire village of Cockburnspath. The warm earth colours and distinctive square brush strokes demonstrate the influence of French realist painters such as Jules Bastien-Lepage, who similarly sought inspiration from the peasant farmers of rural France. I love it.