The Hebrideans
Artist: Cumming, James William Hunter, RSA · 1922-1991
Cumming studied at Edinburgh College of Art, completing his Post Graduate Year in 1948, during which he was awarded a travelling Scholarship. In 1949 he used this award to travel to Callanish on the Island of Lewis in the Western Isles. For the next 18 years (until 1967) Hebridean subject matter, in the form of semi abstracted figure studies, became the essence of Cumming's output.
In 1960, the year in which this work was painted, the artist gave a statement to the writer David Cleghorn Thomson for an article which the latter was writing about Cumming's work for The Studio magazine, in which he made the following comment on his Lewis experience; "When I went to the island of Lewis in 1949 it seemed to offer unending material and a challenge to translate into paint the character of the islanders living and working in a land of gneiss rock, flat, wind-exposed, desolate. Seaweed and white sands, pipelines, boats, lochs and inlets, peat bogs and peat cutters in rolled-up trousers and white sand-shoes; herdsmen and animals. I saw tinkers, flat-nosed, pie-hatted musicians in old clothes playing tin whistles; burnt-out machinery beside a black house; crofters of the Grazings Committee making irrevocable decisions amidst wintry laughter. I had visions of curtains drawn at 4.30 to let in the cold early morning sunlight, the gun and last night's bouquet of field flowers lying on a kitchen table."(quoted in Firth, Jack: James Cumming: The Mercat Press, Edinburgh, 1995, p.19)
© The Artist's Estate
Additional details
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Object data
Date 1960 Accession 2007.020 Type Painting Watercolour and gouache Dimensions 86.1 x 99.3 x 79 x 68.5 Acquisition Purchase Cumming, James William Hunter, RSA (1960) -
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