![[L-R] William Crozier, William Geissler and William Gillies in Florence, 1924. Photo: National Galleries of Scotland.](https://artlogic-res.cloudinary.com/w_1050,c_limit,f_auto,fl_lossy,q_auto/ws-royalscottishacademy/usr/images/blog_entries/main_image/items/8c/8cfce7ffa98b42f1acb4abe27ee53264/175_gillies-william-geissler-and-william-crozier-rear-in-florence-1924-.-ngs.png)
Between now and 2026 (when we’ll be 200 years old!), our exhibition on the life and work of William Gillies RSA is travelling across Scotland, touring from the islands to the borders. The main exhibition moved to Hawick and opens on 6 July, but a parallel show has been selected especially for the Pier Arts Centre in Orkney.
Modernism and Nation: William Gillies and his Contemporaries opened on 22 June and as it says on the tin, includes a selection of works by Gillies’ artist friends and associates.
One of these friends was William Crozier ARSA, who is represented in the RSA collections by sketchbooks and sketches that came to us from William Gillies himself, when he bequeathed his estate to the RSA on his death in 1973. Until earlier this year, we were still lacking an example of Crozier’s painting, but that changed when we purchased two oils and a watercolour from the artist’s family.
The most notable of the three paintings we acquired dates from the post-college trip that Crozier took with Gillies to Italy in 1924, where they both began experimenting with the cubism they had learnt at the studio of Andre Lhote in Paris the year before. Crozier is credited with bringing cubism back to Scotland, and his Italian Village is a wonderful early example of this reductive approach to painting. The painting is currently on public display at The Pier Arts Centre for the first time since it was purchased.
William Crozier ARSA, Italian Village, c.1927. Oil on canvas.
When Crozier returned to Scotland he continued to evolve his cubist approach and this led to magnificent paintings like Edinburgh (From Salisbury Crags) and View from the Mound, Edinburgh, Looking West. In 1930, Crozier died tragically from a fall in his studio and so Scotland was robbed of one of its most promising artists of the twentieth century. Gillies took on Crozier’s studio space, which was shared with another friend and artist William MacTaggart. In 1933 Gillies painted his overtly cubist Still Life with Black Jug, which features a memorial to his recently lost friend in the softly glowing black vase to its left side.
Crozier lived on in Gillies’ painting and in the survival of his sketches in the Gillies Bequest. Although the four Crozier sketchbooks from our collection were unable to travel to Orkney due to their fragility, we are delighted to be able make them accessible through the Bookshelf feature on our website thanks to the support of our student intern Charlotte Barry from St Andrews University.
William Crozier ARSA, Sketchbook page relating to Italian Village.
The sketchbooks are an invaluable insight into how Crozier’s ideas developed from his time in Europe. They show him responding to paintings by Old Masters, breaking them down through cubist approaches, and experimenting with portrait and landscape compositions that relate to some of his most famous paintings.
We are delighted to present Crozier’s Italian Village at The Pier Arts Centre and accompany it with new online access to his sketchbooks from the RSA Sir William Gillies Bequest.
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About the author
Sandy Wood
Sandy Wood is Head of Collections at the RSA. He is responsible for the management, care of, and access to the RSA’s uniquely formed collection, Recognised as a collection of National Significance to Scotland.
Sandy joined the RSA in 2003 after graduating in Fine Art from Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen, later completing a Masters in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester. Of particular interest to him are the stories woven between historic and contemporary practice and practitioners, artistic lineage and legacy, and the revealing of art through process and artistic voice.
