John Duncan (painter)

Signatures by John Duncan from the paintings The Sleeping Princess (above) and Phlegethon

Isolde (detail, 1912)

John Duncan (incorrectly listed in some books as John McKirdy ; born July 19, 1866 in Dundee , † 1945 in Edinburgh ) was a Scottish painter, illustrator, glass artist and designer of symbolism .

Life

Training and first trip to Italy

John Duncan was the son of grocer William Gardiner Duncan and weaver Helen Thomson. At the age of eleven, Duncan attended the Dundee School of Art. Later, probably from 1879, he drew for the monthly sociopolitical comic newspaper The Wizard of the North . At the same time he provided illustrations for the Dundee Advertiser . Around 1885 he moved to London, where he worked as a book illustrator for three more years. Duncan decided to pursue a career as a portrait painter and briefly attended art schools in Antwerp and Düsseldorf before returning to Dundee in 1890. In the same year he began his first trip to Italy, which took him via the intermediate stops in London and Paris through Rome, Florence, Lucca , Bologna and Venice. Presumably he returned to Scotland in the spring of 1891.

In 1891 or 1892 Duncan became friends with the botanist and sociologist Patrick Geddes . Together with William Gordon Burn-Murdoch , he provided the artistic material for his seminars (“Summer Meetings”). He also worked as an illustrator for the Patrick Geddes Colleagues and Company, founded by Geddes. His work, produced for the magazine The Evergreen (1895), which specializes in Celtic literature and art, shows clear influences of Japanese printing. Duncan also took part in Geddes' Old Edinburgh School of Art, which was active from around 1893, and trained four women there. He mainly made decorative works of art and some portraits. Duncan was disappointed when Geddes gradually lost interest in this project in 1895. In 1896 or 1897 the school was closed due to a lack of customers, and in 1898 Duncan returned to Dundee.

Dundee and Chicago

As a member of the Dundee Graphic Arts Association, Duncan came into contact with virtually all local artists. He was named one of the 20 founding members of a new Arts and Crafts Society in Glasgow. In 1898 he taught Celtic ornamentation at the Young Men's Christian Association . Duncan's hope of a place at Robert Rowand Anderson's School of Applied Art in Edinburgh was shattered by the school's financial ruin in 1899. In the spring of 1900, however, Geddes put him in a position as an art teacher at the Chicago Institute (later: University of Chicago School of Education) under the direction of Francis Wayland Parker .

After helping Geddes organize a seminar in Paris, Duncan went to Chicago in late August 1900. Disappointed by the immature students and lacking sufficient free time, he returned to Edinburgh in 1904, where he rented a studio in the west of the city.

Edinburgh and second trip to Italy

In Edinburgh, Duncan devoted himself entirely to painting. His Pre-Raphaelite style work Hymn to the Rose (1907) was exhibited in the Society of Scottish Artists , the oil painting Angus Og (1908) in the Royal Scottish Academy . On a trip to London in February 1910, he was impressed by the naturalness of Gustave Moreau's paintings and tried to achieve a similar effect in his work. In Edinburgh, Duncan was elected Associate Member of the Royal Scottish Academy, so he could be sure that his work would be exhibited in the future. In 1911 he completed his first major work in tempera , The Riders of the Sidhe (the first he painted in 1910 and depicted the head of Venus).

In April 1911, Duncan traveled to Italy for the second time, visiting Florence first. There he had the opportunity to talk to other artists about tempera painting and to get to know some of the pitfalls of this technique. Duncan was particularly impressed by the frescoes in the Church of San Marco .

Duncan's students whom he received in his studio included Joyce Cary , Stanley Cursiter, and Cecile Walton . Other artists who met in his studio included Stewart Carmichael , Alec Grieve and George Dutch Davidson . In 1912 Duncan married Christine Allen, then 26, and moved to a house in St Bernard's Crescent, Stockbridge. Here he worked and lived until the end of his life. During the First World War, Duncan ran into financial difficulties.

Late years

In the 1920s, Duncan's financial situation improved. From 1919 to 1922 he taught at the Royal Scottish Academy School of Painting. A year later he presented the painting Ivory, Apes and Peacocks and was subsequently made a full member of the Royal Scottish Academy. From 1925 until his death he also worked there as a librarian. He received increasing orders for altar paintings and glass windows. Duncan's marriage was unhappy. In 1925 his wife left him and went to South Africa with their two children, whereupon Duncan filed for divorce.

In the late 1920s, Duncan began an enduring and platonic friendship with the poet Bessie MacArthur. In the 1930s he painted some pictures with only subtle color variations, which he also called "colored monochrome". To Duncan's delight, his younger daughter Vivian returned to study medicine in Edinburgh and stayed with him from then on. In 1941 the National Gallery of Scotland hosted an exhibition of Duncan's work, making him the first living artist to receive the honor. One room alone was reserved for his designs for glass windows.

plant

Stylistically, Duncan's works are similar to those of the symbolists Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and Gustave Moreau and the pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne-Jones . Duncan was the main promoter of motifs from Celtic mythology in Scottish art , but he also devoted himself to biblical scenes and themes from Greek mythology . The decorative quality of a painting was very important to him, even if he did not always pursue this ideal as consistently as in St. Bride (1913). Stuchtey describes Duncan's paintings as "in the choice of subjects, the decorative and increasingly refined representation and the technical skill exceptional and unique in Scottish art of the first half of the 20th century" . Duncan's works are mostly found in Scottish museums.

Duncan was dissatisfied with oil painting and with rough surfaces. From 1910 he painted in tempera, which was time-consuming and laborious. For the emulsion he used egg yolk, some water and mastic and varied the ingredients, whereby he was repeatedly plagued by technical problems. It was only after years of experimentation that he succeeded in finding a reliable and satisfactory composition. He rejected watercolors for larger pictures because they seemed too insubstantial to him. But because of their simplicity, he used them for drafts or when he was on the go. Temporarily maneuvered it with water colors on a Gessogrund .

Duncan valued Gustave Doré , Byzantine art and the Italian Renaissance , especially Sandro Botticelli , Fra Angelico , Andrea Mantegna and Carlo Crivelli . At Impressionism he complained about the poor technical execution.

literature

• John Kemplay: The paintings of John Duncan: a Scottish symbolist . Pomegranate, San Francisco 1994, ISBN 1-56640-991-8 .
• Henriette Stuchtey: Entry in the Allgemeine Künstlerlexikon , vol. 30, p. 536.Saur, Munich and Leipzig 2001

Web links

Commons : John Duncan (painter)  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Some works at The Athenaeum