Bessie MacNicol was a brilliantly talented artist but, as a woman, she had to go to Paris to paint nudes. Now, after a sensational acquisition, this leading light of the Glasgow Girls is finally getting her day in the sun
et al, late 19th-century pioneers of the school of naturalistic, plein air painting – I asked a question: where were the Glasgow Girls? The historian practically laughed in my face: didn’t I realise that the Glasgow Boys was an art movement? And they were all men: there were no women.in Edinburgh took possession of one of the loveliest works of the women who worked alongside the men at the Glasgow School of Art in the final years of the 19th century.
The problem, where the Glasgow Girls are concerned, is the same issue curators across the world are facing when it comes to redressing the gender imbalance on their walls. It’s one thing knowing the women were there and painting, but quite another trying to track down their work. Much of MacNicol’s work is in private collections; the acquisition of The Lilac Sunbonnet came about due to a rare instance of her work coming to market.for five years from 1887 when she was 18.
MacNicol, by all accounts, would have been unfazed: she sounds to have been a fun gal, prone to breaking into a little jig when something took her fancy. She loved music, cycling and fashion, which is what led curator Charlotte Topsfield of the National Galleries of Scotland to suggest recently that the Girl in the Lilac Sunbonnet almost certainly references a novel of the same name by Samuel Rutherford Crockett, which was a massive bestseller at the time, and a fashion influencer.
Not yet 30 when she painted The Lilac Sunbonnet, MacNicol should have had a long and successful career ahead. Instead, tragically, she was to die from pre-eclampsia during her first pregnancy, aged 34. Her child also died. A later director of the National Galleries of Scotland, James Caw, would in 1908 describe MacNicol as probably the most accomplished artist her country had ever produced. The Kelvingrove also has a self-portrait: it’s much darker than the sunbonnet painting, and in it MacNicol is unsmiling and serious-looking. She looks as though she wants to tell us something – perhaps we’re still trying to work out what it is.
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