Milwaukee Art Museum has recently acquired Golden Eyes by Norah Neilson Gray (1882-1931) from The Maas Gallery.
Gray was born in Helensborough near Glasgow and became one of the group of women known as the ‘Glasgow Girls’. A native Scot in an international art school, she evolved a distinctive style to become the foremost female painter of her day there. Her success was perhaps only possible in the enlightened cultural atmosphere of Glasgow then, under the benign and encouraging influence of ‘Fra’ Newbery, Director of the Glasgow School of Art, where Gray was taught and later in turn became a teacher. She flowered in Newbery’s hothouse, where the dominant influence on her was the Belgian artist, Jean Delville, a Symbolist painter (and Theosophist) who spoke little English but was an inspirational teacher, grafting exotic continental ideas onto solid Scottish stock. Gray was known to her students later as ‘Purple Patch’ because of her insistence that there is colour in shadows, and her liking for pattern and flowers.
This painting, of a model she used more than once and may have been one of her sisters, was exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy in 1917. The hard profile is softened by muted browns and soft creams, painted with a flat brush, while the yellows in the cat’s eyes and of the pansies give the picture a vibrant rhythm. There’s even purple in the patches of shadow.
Click here to see a video of Rupert Maas talking about the painting.
