The National Galleries of Scotland is celebrating International Women’s Day by acquiring the artwork of a pioneering Glasgow artist.
Olive Carleton Smyth (1882 – 1949) was one of Scotland’s most accomplished female artists and her vibrant artwork forms part of the National Galleries of Scotland’s aim to represent the generation of Scottish women who trained at the Glasgow School of Art in the late 19th and early 20th century.
The painting Bacchanale will be free to view as part of the Glasgow Girls display which will run until June 8. The exhibit also features four drawings from renowned Scottish artists Jessie M Kind and Annie French are too.
Smyth’s work is extremely rare. Bacchanale is only the second painting by the artist to enter a UK museum collection.
Described as ‘small, fast-talking and tweed suited’, she was a key figure in the Glasgow art world for more than 35 years. She was a brilliant and versatile artist and an effective and inspiring teacher.
The painting was created in the early 1920s and shows a group of musicians and revellers dancing ecstatically through a mountain forest, sweeping up wild animals in their midst.
Bacchanale is full of symbols linked with Bacchus, God of wine, theatre and festivity, including gold pinecones, flower garlands and the thyrsus , a wand wreathed in ivy.
(Image: Neil Hanna)
Smyth studied at the Glasgow School of Art from 1899, joining the staff in 1903 – teaching a wide variety of decorative and fine art courses, including metalwork, woodblock printing and poster design.
She left the school in 1915 to concentrate on creating work for exhibition and teaching at Westbourne School for Girls in Glasgow.
However, she returned to the Glasgow School of Art as Head of School of Design (Pictorial and Commercial Art) in 1933, teaching stage design and the history of costume.
Smyth’s earlier works were miniature portraits, soon followed by watercolours and line drawings on vellum. Her drawings appeared in The Studio, a prestigious fine and decorative arts magazine, and she exhibited regularly at the Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts for over 40 years from 1904.
On the international scene, she showed her work at the Paris Salon in 1913 and in Lyon, Munich and Cork.
Over the last 10 years, the gallery has worked to acquire more work by women artists for Scotland’s national collection, spanning from 1300 to the present day.
Works from female artists before 1945 are considerably rarer due to the nature of training and the constraints put on women wanting to persue art as a profession until well into the 20th century.
Charlotte Topsfield, Senior Curator of British Drawings and Prints at National Galleries of Scotland, said: “We are so excited to have acquired this remarkable work by Olive Carleton Smyth.
“A dynamic artist, who worked across so many different media, Olive is an outstanding representative of the extraordinary generation of women who trained and taught at the Glasgow School of Art around 1900.
“Full of colour, energy and amazing detail, Bacchanale is an intriguing and spectacular painting, and we hope our visitors love it as much as we do!”
The acquisition was made possible by funds from the Cowan Smith Bequest, the Iain Paul Fund and the Treaty of Union Bequest.
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