* SIR WILLIAM MACTAGGART HRA PRSA HRSW LLD (SCOTTISH 1903 - 1981),
STILL LIFE WITH MOONLIGHT OVER DRUMMOND PLACE GARDENS
oil on canvas, signed, titled label verso
image size 78cm x 130cm, overall size 93cm x 143cm
Framed.
Handwritten artist's label verso.
Comment: MacTaggart lived at No 4 Drummond Place and this is a view from one of his windows, looking east towards Bellevue Church.
Note: Born at Loanhead in 1903, Sir William MacTaggart is one of the best-loved and yet least well-understood of Scottish artists. MacTaggart, grandson of the great landscape painter, took his Diploma at the same time as William Gillies and Geissler and followed the same route to Paris. Back in Edinburgh he was a founder member of the 1922 Group (of younger painters), in 1927 he joined the Society of Eight whose members included Colourists Cadell and Peploe and began a consistently successful exhibition career starting at The Scottish Gallery in 1929. A sumptuous painter in oils, he was a prolific draughtsman and preferred pastel to watercolour; instinctively an expressionist and romantic painter his outlook shifted dramatically after the Munch exhibition at the SSA in 1931 (eventually marrying the Norwegian curator Fanny Aavatsmark) and again after studying Roualt in Paris in the early sixties. MacTaggart taught at the Edinburgh College of Art, 1933–58, and was president of the Royal Scottish Academy, 1959–64. He was knighted in 1962 and made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1968. UK Public collections hold seventy-three of his paintings.

Condition Report

Condition is good overall, with no visible issues.