The Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts (RGI)[1] is an independent organisation in Glasgow, founded in 1861, which promotes contemporary art and artists in Scotland. The institute organizes the largest and most prestigious annual art exhibition in Scotland - open to all artists.
The RGI also owns and runs the Kelly Gallery. Situated on Douglas Street in Glasgow City Centre, the Kelly Gallery hosts a running programme of exhibitions and events.
The award of RGI is made to artists for artistic merit and their dedication to the institute. There is a corpus of fifty such awards. Any vacancy is filled through persons being proposed, demonstrating work, and being elected at a specially convened meeting of RGIs.
Early days
Frances MacDonald: Poster for the Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts (1895)
By the middle of the 19th century, Glasgow had become the most important center for trade and industry in Scotland. The city had numerous theatres, concert halls and libraries, but no regular exhibitions for the works of contemporary painters and sculptors. From the 1780s onwards, various organizations had unsuccessfully tried to fill this gap but failed through lack of finance or direction. In 1861 a group of Glasgow's prominent citizens - including the artists John Graham (later John Graham-Gilbert), John Mossman and C N Woolworth - met to discuss the establishment of an annual Art exhibition of the works of contemporary artists.
The Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts was duly founded and the first exhibition took place that very same year at the (hired) Corporation Galleries (later renamed the McLellan Galleries) in Sauchiehall Street. It was an artistic and popular success, attracting nearly 40,000 visitors, though financially it made only a small profit. Subsequent exhibitions achieved similar success: Over 45,000 visited the second exhibition, 53,000 the third and the numbers of visitors increased steadily over the next twenty years.
The institute continued to exhibit at the Corporation galleries until 1879 when it opened its own Gallery in Sauchiehall Street - designed by architect John Burnet who took on his son as junior partner J J Burnet.
The governing body (council) of the institute decided that it should open its reach to encompass not only local artists but also the best in modern painting from the whole of Britain and beyond. Paintings were loaned from local collections and agents sent out to London to acquire new pictures. By the 1880s, some of the most famous English artists of the day were regularly shown at the institute's annual exhibition.[2] Notable French and Dutch artists also featured, either on loan or contributed for sale.
By 1880, the institute had become an influential and well-established venue on the British art exhibition circuit. It helped to inspire the group of painters known as the Glasgow boys who in turn helped steer the institute towards more avant-garde painting. From this period up until the outbreak of World War I, in Britain the institute was second only to the Royal Academy in the diversity of work on show.
In 1896 it received a royal statute and could now call itself the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts.
However, the financial cost of running its own gallery proved to be too much of a burden and the institute was forced to sell its premises and revert to hiring exhibition space from the Corporation again at the McLellan Galleries.[3]
After the war, French art was rarely seen in the institute's exhibitions and avant-garde work from the South was not so much in evidence. Now seen as part of the art establishment, the institute (like other established art bodies) found it harder to attract work by younger artists, and adopted a more conservative stance which lasted until the 1950s.
Since the 1950s a considerable effort has been expended to rekindle the original spirit of the institute. A new gallery, The Kelly Gallery, was opened in 1965 offering exhibitions throughout the year, lectures and demonstrations. The institute continues to show and promote a wide range of contemporary art from the west of Scotland and beyond.
↑ The institute's old gallery in Sauciehall street was sold to department store Pettigrew and Stephens. After a fire the premises were demolished in the early 1970s.
Further reading
Roger Billcliffe: The Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts, 1861-1989: A Dictionary of Exhibitors at the Annual Exhibitions, (Woodend Press, 1990). ISBN978-0-9515945-0-6.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of English painters, poets, and art critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens and Thomas Woolner who formed a seven-member "Brotherhood" partly modelled on the Nazarene movement. The Brotherhood was only ever a loose association and their principles were shared by other artists of the time, including Ford Madox Brown, Arthur Hughes and Marie Spartali Stillman. Later followers of the principles of the Brotherhood included Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris and John William Waterhouse.
The Walker Art Gallery is an art gallery in Liverpool, which houses one of the largest art collections in England outside London. It is part of the National Museums Liverpool group.
The Lady Lever Art Gallery is a museum founded and built by the industrialist and philanthropist William Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme and opened in 1922. The Lady Lever Art Gallery is set in the garden village of Port Sunlight, on the Wirral and one of the National Museums Liverpool.
The Scottish Colourists were a group of four painters, three from Edinburgh, whose Post-Impressionist work, though not universally recognised initially, came to have a formative influence on contemporary Scottish art and culture. The four artists, Francis Cadell, John Duncan Fergusson, Leslie Hunter and Samuel Peploe, were prolific painters spanning the turn of the twentieth century until the beginnings of World War II. While now banded as one group with a collective achievement and a common sense of British identity, it is a misnomer to believe their artwork or their painterly careers were heterogeneous.
Sir Edward John Poynter, 1st Baronet was an English painter, designer, and draughtsman, who served as President of the Royal Academy.
Events from the year 1877 in art.
Valentine Cameron Prinsep was a British painter of the Pre-Raphaelite school.
The Glasgow School was a circle of influential artists and designers that began to coalesce in Glasgow, Scotland in the 1870s, and flourished from the 1890s to around 1910. Representative groups included The Four, the Glasgow Girls and the Glasgow Boys. Part of the international Art Nouveau movement, they were responsible for creating the distinctive Glasgow Style.
The Royal Birmingham Society of Artists (RBSA) is an art society, based in the Jewellery Quarter in Birmingham, England, where it owns and operates an art gallery, the RBSA Gallery, on Brook Street, just off St Paul's Square. It is both a registered charity, and a registered company.
Samuel John Peploe was a Scottish Post-Impressionist painter, noted for his still life works and for being one of the group of four painters that became known as the Scottish Colourists. The other colourists were John Duncan Fergusson, Francis Cadell and Leslie Hunter.
George Leslie Hunter was a Scottish painter, regarded as one of the four artists of the Scottish Colourists group of painters. Christened simply George Hunter, he adopted the name Leslie in San Francisco, and Leslie Hunter became his professional name. Showing an aptitude for drawing at an early age, he was largely self-taught, receiving only elementary painting lessons from a family acquaintance. He spent fourteen years from the age of fifteen in the US, mainly in California. Hunter made an extended trip to Scotland, Paris and New York from 1903 to 1905. In 1906 he left San Francisco and returned to Scotland, painting and drawing there, notably in Fife and at Loch Lomond. Subsequently he travelled widely in Europe, especially in the South of France, but also in the Netherlands, the Pas de Calais and Italy. He also returned to New York in 1924 and 1928–1929.
John Roddam Spencer Stanhope was an English artist associated with Edward Burne-Jones and George Frederic Watts and often regarded as a second-wave pre-Raphaelite. His work is also studied within the context of Aestheticism and British Symbolism. As a painter, Stanhope worked in oil, watercolor, fresco, tempera, and mixed media. His subject matter was mythological, allegorical, biblical, and contemporary. Stanhope was born in Cawthorne, near Barnsley, Yorkshire, England, and died in Florence, Italy. He was the uncle and teacher of the painter Evelyn De Morgan and encouraged then unknown local artist Abel Hold to exhibit at the Royal Academy, which he did 16 times.
Alexander Mann was a Scottish landscape and genre painter. He was a member of New English Art Club and Royal Institute of Oil Painters.
Alexander Reid (1854–1928) was a Glasgow art dealer and amateur artist, and friend of James Abbott McNeill Whistler and Vincent van Gogh. He was one of the most influential art dealers in Europe in the early 20th century, exhibiting and selling artworks by some of the finest artists of his period, including the Impressionists, the Post-Impressionists, the Glasgow Boys and the Scottish Colourists. He helped build up the French painting collection of Sir William Burrell. and many of the works he dealt with now feature in major private, civic and national art collections all over the world. Within the Scottish art world he was called Monticelli Reid.
Mary Newbery Sturrock, née Mary Arbuckle Newbery was a Scottish artist who worked across various media. She is best known as an embroiderer and watercolour artist of flowers.
Ronald Forbes RSA, RGI is an artist who is primarily a painter but who has also made films throughout his career. He is an academician of the Royal Scottish Academy, was elected a Professional Member of the Society of Scottish Artists in 1971 and a member of the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts in 2013.
Beatrice Huntington was a Scottish artist, sculptor and musician exhibiting regularly at the Royal Academy, Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Glasgow Institute. A natural colourist, she is most celebrated as a portrait painter.
Duncan Shanks RSA, RSW, RGI, is a Lanarkshire born painter best known for work made around his home in Carluke, Scotland.
James Wallace Ferguson was a Scottish painter, born in Stirling, and resident in Glasgow for most of his life. He went to the Glasgow School of Art before the First World War. He won the Guthrie Award in 1923 for young artists of the Royal Scottish Academy. He became the President of the Glasgow Art Club in the 1950s. He also was a Principal Lecturer in Art at Jordanhill Teacher Training College. He died in New Zealand while staying with his son.
The Society of Eight was an artistic grouping of Scottish painters. The Society set up its own gallery space in Edinburgh to exhibit their work. It was founded in 1912 and last exhibited in 1938. The Society did not reform after the Second World War.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
