Game over, you’ve seen the pigeons and the village! It’s a big, square picture with a grey-black background and a frenzy of bright colours to the fore. You might say to yourself, ‘ah yes! I get it: pigeons scattering from the viewer, creating a commotion at close quarters’.

It’s not scary. It’s not The Birds. It’s not gulls. These are pigeons, and it’s a friendly scene, an everyday occurrence in busy cities and towns. No need to feel anything special.

That’s enough, time to move on, and skim over to the right where John Maxwell’s “Wall Vase” is excellently positioned on a corner wall in Perth Art Gallery to segue you from birds in abandon to birds as ornament.

Turn back to “Pigeons and Village” and you might suddenly realise that in the midst of the commotion a pigeon sits perched on a nest in almost the same pose as the one Maxwell used in 1951.

“Pigeons and Village” was painted by John Houston in late 1959 or early 1960 when he was 29. Houston was a part-time (soon to be full-time) lecturer at Edinburgh College of Art, where Maxwell was employed as Senior Lecturer in Composition.

“Pigeons and Village” hung at the RSA’s Annual Exhibition in 1960, alongside Maxwell’s sketch for “Harvest Moon”, which along with “Garden At Night” (1960) was to be the last painting Maxwell produced. His ill health led to his retirement from teaching and he died in June 1962.

Houston’s painting won the Guthrie Award that the RSA present annually for the best painting by a young artist under the age of 35.

He shared the accolade with David Michie, son of Anne Redpath, who lived downstairs from him in the tenement stair at 7 London Road, Edinburgh.

Perth Art Gallery bought the picture, along with a Redpath (“Ubeda, Spain”) and William Gillies’ “Still Life, Black Table”. They are both hanging in the Gallery, along with “Pigeons and Village” right now. (Note 1) The National Gallery bought the Maxwell.

Returning to “Pigeons and Village” and looking longer brings you more. The background masses of blacks and greys split the painting vertically into two halves, and then the right hand side splits into two sections of grey, the upper one grey-blue, seemingly depicting sky; the lower one grey-pink, perhaps representing a town square. These are divided by a mass of blocks in grey, blue and black interspersed with flashes of turquoise, white and yellow, which would be difficult to decipher if not for the aforementioned steeple.

Above the black mass that dominates the left hand side of the painting is a crescent moon, pale grey-white strokes in the left rim of a circle that Houston leaves with a thin grey paint. It’s the area of the painting with the least pigment coverage. Maxwell’s “Garden At Night” also features a crescent moon, similarly making it clear that we’re looking at a night picture. Maxwell’s tapestry “Phases Of The Moon”, produced in 1957 and 1958, features two crescent moons with dark circles in which birds fly, nest and roost: another referential point for “Pigeons and Village”.

Suddenly, the picture divides again, this time into back and front. Its origins seem to have been as a nocturne with dark blocks that might be buildings on the left, and more variegated colours in the village depiction on the right, but now there’s a figure clearly articulated, a woman with dark hair, a pink shawl, yellow skirt and white apron coming towards us carrying something in front of her, cradled under her outstretched hands.

Then, as if you have not really been looking, it becomes clear that the apex of the architectural off-centre cross is lost behind a rectangular shape, landscape mode. Houston has clearly produced this as a key element of the planned structure, emphasising it with highlights near the end of his picture making. Does it represent anything? Yes. It’s surely a canvas sitting on an easel.  This is made even clearer by its positioning, which is such that the viewer sees the painting as though standing behind the easel. Houston is asking us to look as he looks.

Detail from John Houston, Pigeons and Village, oil on canvas (Courtesy of Culture Perth and Kinross Museums & Galleries), © Royal Scottish Academy/Bridgeman Images 2023.

But his easel and canvas have been overwhelmed. An explosion of colour that suggests an American Abstract Expressionist taking charge of the paint, is extraordinarily interwoven with an impression of not just how it looks, but how it feels to have tens of pigeons flying within feet or inches.

The canvas, which one might at some point think contains an image of its own, perhaps a man sitting behind a rectangular block of yellow and turquoise, is on closer inspection empty. It’s almost as though Houston is asking the question: “What am I going to do?”

His answer seems to be: two paintings in one.

“Pigeons and Village” is perhaps a child of its time. Houston came from a world of miners. His painting suggests he’s asking the birds to check the atmosphere.

What was going on? Time to broaden the context.

Firstly, let’s talk birds. Houston had Maxwell’s fantasies to his right, and to his left, the accepted master of birds in motion, Robin Philipson. Philipson was Houston’s colleague and clearly, in 59-60, the future successor to Gillies at ECA (Note 2)

Philipson had spent part of the war in Burma and been fascinated by a Burmese tribe, the Nagas, who loved cock-fights. It was Robert Henderson Blyth who persuaded him to turn some of his cock-fighting sketches into paintings, and once he’d started (around 1953) it was a theme that endured throughout his life.

In 1959, television was still in its relative infancy, and the BBC had no Scottish television studios. However, some Scottish content was produced using outside broadcast facilities and the first Scottish arts programme, Counterpoint, had commenced monthly broadcasts in December 1958. On 6th February 1959, Robin Philipson was featured, and created what the producer, Maurice Lindsay, called “an astonishing tour de force” in front of the cameras, a rapidly produced charcoal drawing of cock-fighting.

The impact was huge. People instantly associated Philipson with a wizardry for portraying motion. His fame was such that Scotsman reviewers could suggest to their readers that Philipson might need to see a ballet performance, for example, in order to get a message over about speed and blurring action.

Detail from John Houston, Pigeons and Village, oil on canvas (Courtesy of Culture Perth and Kinross Museums & Galleries), © Royal Scottish Academy/Bridgeman Images 2023.

Houston came from Windygates in Fife, a grouping of small mining settlements. In the 40s it was a tough, working-class place, as was Buckhaven where he went to school. The birds of choice were, of course, pigeons. Houston kept some as a boy. He told Sydney Goodsir Smith that childhood memory played a great part in his work.  Pigeons carried a lot of meaning.

Secondly, there’s Houston’s life story. He grew up amongst kids whose fathers went down the mine; from aged nine to fifteen the war cast an enormous shadow; at seventeen, his father died.

He was lucky to go to a school with a strong art department. Three of his classmates went to Edinburgh College of Art in 1947: Willie Thomson, Lawson Wallace and Thelma McDonald, all celebrated by art teacher, Robert Morris. Wallace was Dux in Art; Houston unmentioned. Perhaps he was too interested in – and too good at – sport. He stayed on for an extra year at school, playing football for Bayview, East Fife’s youth team.

By 1953, six years later, at the age of 22 or 23, Houston was being commissioned to paint by Shell. They would have been advised perhaps by the Arts Council, Edinburgh College of Art, or the National Gallery. Whoever did it, Houston’s name and his qualities were known by some of the most influential people in Scottish Art circles. They also trusted him to respond maturely to such an important commissioner.

He had gravitated quickly at college to close association with some of the more committed artists, including Frances Walker, from just down the road in Kirkcaldy; David McClure, and David Michie. McClure, Michie and Houston were close colleagues and friends from then for the rest of their lives.

They had all arrived when Gillies had established his own regime in the Drawing and Painting department, of which he had become head in 1946. There was a strict timetable and a broad-based teaching approach, with an emphasis on fundamentals, notably drawing, perspective, and composition.

Over the course of four years, Houston progressed his status from a working class outsider to perhaps the most favoured student.  And he did so while still undecided about his future career. He played part-time for a professional football team, Dundee United, and was capped at Under-21 level for Scotland. It was only a serious injury half-way through his course that ended his football aspirations. 

John Houston, Towers and Flowers, oil on canvas, 1959, © Royal Scottish Academy/Bridgeman Images 2023.

We might assume that Houston was driven by his artistic interests and peers, but also by the need to get a job, and secure his life prospects. He would need to be a teacher. Few artists could sell enough paintings. The post-war era offered career and social progress as never before, and Houston’s family circumstances did not offer much of a safety net.

His work ethic must have been good, even as a student, and we know his level of productivity was always high. In his student years, whilst absorbing from Maxwell, Blyth and Philipson, Gillies was his main influence, and such was their relationship that Gillies later invited Houston to go on painting and drawing trips with him.

In 1952 he was granted a postgraduate year, along with David Michie. He was elected a member of the Society of Scottish Artists when he’d just turned 23. Then, he and Michie got a travelling scholarship from ECA that took them together to Italy over the winter of 1953-54.  Houston, according to Packer (Note 3), applied himself to his vocation and returned with “ full sketchbooks and a bulging portfolio.” They exhibited at ECA on their return. Once he’d completed his year of teacher training in 1954-55, he was immediately employed as a teacher by Edinburgh College of Art.

Houston clearly worked hard to be accepted, and accepted he was. His student efforts laid the foundations for his entrance into the Scottish art establishment. In his final year at college he developed a relationship with Blackadder, whose approach was close to his, and after getting back together on his return from Italy, they cemented their positions, painting still-lifes, landscapes, and exotic scenes from their trips in Europe, mostly in the vein of an Edinburgh scene dominated by Gillies, Redpath and to a lesser extent, Maxwell and Philipson (Blyth left for Aberdeen in 1954).

By 1959, Houston was establishment. He lived with Blackadder, his wife of three years, above Redpath, within 100 metres of William MacTaggart, the President of the RSA, who lived at 4 Drummond Place. He was a member of the SSA and RSW. He, Philipson and Michie were the Hanging Committee of the SSA (Philipson was the dominant force on the Selection Committee). He’d previously selected an incoming exhibition of French contemporary art with James Cumming. He was a regular exhibitor at the RSA. He had his first picture presented at the Scottish Gallery’s summer exhibition and had a date in his diary for his first one-man show there: May 28, 1960. 

It was time for him to establish his individual stamp on the art world. Flowers and fruits and Gillies-influenced landscapes had got him to a position where in every exhibition that included his works, the critics were prone to consider his work first before the rest of his generation of “young Scottish artists”.

John Houston, Flowers and Village, oil on canvas, 1959, © Royal Scottish Academy/Bridgeman Images 2023.

Blyth and Maxwell had a modus operandi: intense use of colour in a central commotion as a focus of paintings that remained “in the tradition”. Houston’s 1959 oil on canvas “Flowers and Village” and his 1959 RSA Watercolour entry, “The Blue Compotier and Fife Village”, took the idea forward: a colourful bouquet or a fruit bowl in the foreground with a block of buildings (including a church steeple in Blue Compotier) to the right, and a murky grey sky with a low-toned sun (or perhaps full moon) just off-centre. Flowers and Village and especially Blue Compotier are both two pictures in one, the background subdued, a historic village, while the foreground is packed with ravishing colour. These descriptions should ring a bell.

Thirdly, in our 360 degree tour around Houston at the turn of the 60s, there’s the cultural world of the time.

Let’s remind ourselves of a few facts.

In Edinburgh, there were no one-way streets. There were traffic policemen, but not enough cars to justify parking meters. There were very few restaurants, no flights abroad, no supermarkets (well, St Cuthbert’s/the Co-op piloted the idea in 1959), no motorways, no street advertising and it would be strange to see a man out and about in the city centre without a jacket, collar and tie. There was industry and manufacturing and working class self-esteem.

The media was black and white. There were colour specials, but generally art books, magazines and newspaper articles were mono. The television programme in which Philipson performed his wizardry required the use of charcoal so that viewers could see the medium exactly as it was.

Photography was still largely black and white for most people. Colour was still the domain of the artist, but the painters knew that colour photography was coming. They needed to find a new differential.

Commentators liked to present Scottish life at the time as grey and dour. The exotica was often foreign:  in Edinburgh, there were French films at the Cameo cinema and Italian delicatessens like Valvona and Crolla, and the very excitingly French L’Aperitif restaurant.

For many, trips to Europe were the way to bring colour into life. By 1959 Houston had already spent lengthy periods of time in Italy and Spain.  However, to Houston, the difference between Windygates and central Edinburgh must have been mono and full colour.

The background scene in “The Blue Compotier and Fife Village” is probably Windygates, Houston’s history. The fruit bowl might represent his  modern living in Edinburgh, overflowing with brightly coloured fresh fruit.

“Pigeons and Village” is a new statement. The monochrome background is a warm evening in Europe, the foreground is brilliant colour and action, with pigeons from Windygates, or maybe Drummond Place.

And how about the art scene? In Edinburgh, Gillies, Redpath, Maxwell, Philipson, Blackadder, Philipson’s wife Brenda Mark, Houston and his friends Michie and McClure (now in Dundee), were all working carefully forward from similar concepts.  James Cumming, also teaching at ECA, was still mining his mystical dislocated post-Picasso Hebridean people; Charles Pulsford, in his final year at ECA before moving to England was engineering shapes, colours and sometimes figures, but still referencing Paris-based modernism. The rebellious element at the time were felt to be people like Alexander McNeish, Rod Carmichael, Alistair Park, and Eric Ritchie, but looking back from the vantage of sixty years, they weren’t breaking any moulds.

Among the most active Scottish-based artists working in the tradition at that time, the names that were at the forefront of exhibitions and critics minds were William Armour, Barbara Balmer, William Birnie, Henderson Blyth, William Burns, David Donaldson, Joan Eardley, Ian Fleming, Jean Fleming, Robert Leishman, William Littlejohn, Bet Low, James Morrison, Alberto Morrocco, James McIntosh Patrick, Denis Peploe, Frances Walker, William Wilson. There’s no question that this was a wonderful moment for Scottish art, with people pushing boundaries, but always retaining reference to reality. In terms of pure abstraction, with Alan Davie, William Johnstone, William Gear, and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham all re-located to England, perhaps we could point to Philip Reeves, Talbert McLean, and Pulsford.

Every month, the magazines coming in to the College were shouting the excitement of a new world. Studio, Domus, L’Oeil, and to a lesser extent, Realites, were creating a new atmosphere and Houston’s students were hearing and seeing the new thing from New York, and they were seeing that Paris was responding to American Abstract Expressionism too. The international art world was talking about Rauschenberg, Pollock, Rothko and Still. The energy and excitement that they brought to their work was worth the sacrifice of painterliness for their admirers.

I am sure that Houston might have felt that his fellow Fifers, Gear (also from Buckhaven High School) and Barns-Graham (from St Andrews) had covered all the ground the New Yorkers were shouting about many years before, but he would still have felt the heat from across the Atlantic at that moment.

Joan Eardley, low down on the beach under the waves and amidst the barley fields at Catterline, was a model of how the Scottish tradition could embrace kinetics: painterliness and energy.

In more rarefied artistic circles in Scotland the fundamentals of art practice were being challenged and undermined. Some of the first stirrings of global capitalism’s destruction of the old order and re-invention of the world in its own service was manifesting itself in the art world. Modernism meant the complexities of Iannis Xenakis’s music or the intellectual weight of Hiroshima Mon Amour or the free spirited improvisation of Ornette Coleman to some, and the simplistic white music of Duane Eddy and pop art of Robert Rauschenberg to others.

Heightening the debate, the Scottish art scene was turning Modern with a capital M. The National Gallery of Modern Art was to be established in 1960. Inverleith House had become available and the Government in London had committed the funds. The news was announced in January 1959, with the building expected to open in the late summer of 1960.

Despite protests from the west, Edinburgh had won the tussle for location, but now the focus was on what modern art in Scotland meant, and what would be represented in this new edifice?

“Pigeons and Village” is a public space painting. Its ambition and size was unlikely to find a domestic home. It may have been the largest painting he had painted up to that moment. Houston wanted to make a statement at the turn of the 60s.

He had been injecting his still lifes with confusion, churning and sometimes overwhelming distress, and brighter colour too, both in oil (e.g.“Towers and Flowers” [1959]) and watercolour (e.g.“Flowers at Sunset” [1959]). The issue with flowers was that they offered little potential for motion and emotion. Philipson’s birds had motion, but Houston was looking for the visceral. Perhaps he wanted to express the sense of confusion and excitement, abandon and adventure, intellectualism and fun that the new modernity offered.

He must have realised that whilst a colour photograph of an autumn hedgerow or birds in flight could decipher the details of a thus far overwhelmingly complex picture by freezing a moment, a painter could explore his feelings amidst such complexity of movement, and those of his viewers too. The artist could bring life to what photography killed.

Let’s turn back to “Pigeons and Village”.

There is a morphology, and with some concentration the opportunity to see the strata that identifies sequence.

Where the weave of the canvas is exposed, the original brush strokes seem to have been executed with relatively thin paint: peaches, oranges, roses, the colours that Houston frequently used for his flowers and fruits. It’s not possible to see any forms, and perhaps these tones were base warmth for what Houston planned, which was a nocturne, a night-scape.

Dark blues, blacks, browns and greys followed, with the same consistency, and in the bottom right hand section of the painting they covered the ground and left the canvas texture still apparent, at which point Houston arrested further development.

Detail from John Houston, Pigeons and Village, oil on canvas (Courtesy of Culture Perth and Kinross Museums & Galleries), © Royal Scottish Academy/Bridgeman Images 2023.

There is no sense that the artist had the final image in mind at this stage. The female figure was formed at a later moment, and the church steeple in the final set of actions.

However, the formal structure was understood at this point; the key horizontals and verticals were in place.

Elsewhere across the canvas, the paint gets thicker and the bristles too, and then brushes give way to a palette knife’s smoothing of brushed strokes.

Around this point the nocturne is completed. It’s hard to know what state that was, and for how long Houston assessed the next steps. It could have been five minutes, and it could have been five months. He may have had a central, intense, highly actioned image in the centre in mind, as with “Flowers and Village” and “Blue Compotier and Fife Village”, he may have had birds and questions about modernity in mind. Only he knew, or perhaps didn’t, because there’s an instinctive feeling to the second phase of the painting.

Whatever the plan, as the paint gets thicker, the application seems looser, faster, improvisatory, whilst at the same time extraordinarily confident, given Houston’s very limited experience in this high-wire approach. The nocturne is immediately transformed, shocked with an explosion of colour.

The palette knife takes on more, the paint is thicker and then straight out of the tube, mixed with other undiluted pigments at source, and then spread, thrown, brushed, dried, overpainted in a series of what appear to be rapid responses to the colour and texture that Houston saw in front of him.

Detail from John Houston, Pigeons and Village, oil on canvas (Courtesy of Culture Perth and Kinross Museums & Galleries), © Royal Scottish Academy/Bridgeman Images 2023.

The sequence becomes impossible for me to follow. Perhaps the hot streak of Abstract Expressionism met a cool dawn and he felt he needed to make his actions fit a reality, but at some point, perhaps at the start, perhaps nearing the end, the pigeons suggested themselves and the existing mark-making was fashioned into shapes of multiple wings beating, heads, and some full bodies in stasis.

Some of the colours resemble ‘pigeon reality’, others have more in common with Houston’s harmonic language of that time. In one section the palette has bright blues, turquoise, white and grey; in another one the pink he used on fanned wing bones, and the bright orange he loved for shock and awe. The blues have extraordinary power - Houston builds layers of blue on blue: a murky mid-blue, with lighter blue flashing on top and then ultramarine, full strength out of the tube and applied with metal in a free and fast stroke.

Detail from John Houston, Pigeons and Village, oil on canvas (Courtesy of Culture Perth and Kinross Museums & Galleries), © Royal Scottish Academy/Bridgeman Images 2023.

In the highly impastoed central sections, the thick application of paint with a palette knife is so pronounced as to suggest the physicality of collage, stuck on to the brushed surface, solid slabs of vivid paint, streaked blues and mud-brown, or sand and grey and blue and white; blue-green and black, or black and brown and off-white. They stick to the surface like external building plaster, with slightly curled edges where the paint has solidified thickly at the end of the stroke.

This is just one of the geomorphological features.  

Elsewhere, I’m guessing on how shapes are formed. There is a single whipped-cream-like peak of dark brown. The colour is thickly contoured all around, so I assume Houston must have pulled the brush away slowly, bringing the paint to a tapered head.

Ridges of inexplicable formation are exposing bright geological strata of colour on the surface: chocolate brown, dark yellow, blue-green, white, ultramarine, blue-black. Its structure seems unshaped by any human hand. It must have come by air: a flick of a palette knife?

In some of the flatter morphology where a single colour is smeared, a section of it can be matt, and another gloss; a shiny sheen of black, for example, creating a richer, more intense colour.

As the frenzy of application continued, Houston’s choices are clear – the fundamental structures established early on are kept, retaining their original colour. Where the warmth he hoped to shine through the dark paint is lost, he re-applies reds. A black ridge of paint is covered on both slopes with a strong dark red, but the peaks and the upper slopes stay black. There is finesse amidst the explosion: painterliness and energy.

And, lest we forget, at every twist and turn, he’s manipulating shapes of bird wings, heads, tails, roosting, sitting on nests.

Finally, on the right hand side of the picture, he decided to reinforce the original nocturnal framing, applying a pink-grey or a blue-grey-pink over all his recent vibrancy.

So, he stands back and what does he see? An explosive commotion of orange, blue, yellow and white emanating from the centre of the picture against a monochrome backdrop.

Houston must have still felt assured and unselfconscious. There’s a certainty about his work. He was trying something new and he was satisfied with what he achieved. It was right for him, challenging and exciting, and he was confident the viewer would see it for what it is. And if they didn’t, so be it.

Meanwhile, his eye kept returning to a couple of murky yellow marks (painted over streaked pink and white) in the centre of the picture. The power of yellow against black!

Detail from John Houston, Pigeons and Village, oil on canvas (Courtesy of Culture Perth and Kinross Museums & Galleries), © Royal Scottish Academy/Bridgeman Images 2023.

In the top left of the painting, Houston had left two sections of dull yellow under-painting and clearly saw how they shone out of the subsequent blacks and greys. He clearly liked the effect, because he went back after all the other paint had been applied and added a third yellow gleam, a pure rich yellow in a thick triangle of pigment, with some more sparsely-loaded brush strokes of the same colour around it to imply glow.

That was it. Perhaps he thought about what Robin Philipson would say, how the New York School would have reacted, how his students might be impressed, whether the Gallery of Modern Art might consider it, how Gillies and the establishment figures in the RSA would be surprised. We don’t know.

I don’t think he’d painted birds in flight like this before. There had been vases of flowers against many backgrounds, with freely expressed colour, but I don’t think he’d used this kind of rapid attack, straight out of the New York ‘avant-garde’ playbook before. The birds were central to his work for the next couple of years and were part of his repertoire for most of the 60s. Often in flight, they feature in a variety of landscape settings, whenever Houston needs a spark, a sense of vitality. There’s often great energy applied, but it never seems as close to the edge as it does in “Pigeons and Village”

The complete abandon may have been a one-off, but it was an important moment for Houston, perhaps a time where he could see a few things afresh. He’d proved to himself and all of his peers and viewers that he could do it, but he’d dismissed the extreme. He had openly tested the ‘new thing’ within the context of the Scottish tradition, and he decided that he could adapt its energetic core into his work, without loss of form, structure and technical traditions, and most importantly he could carry his audience with him.  His new vision would help him and many artists around him to see things differently, with painterliness and energy.

It wasn’t long before the impact of the experiment manifested itself in his work. From 1960-62 there are many paintings in this vein, though none as large. “Still Life With Pheasant” (1960) in Stirling Smith Gallery is close family. In “Pigeons and Village” the exotic component is monochrome and background, and the Scottish element is foreground and brilliant colour. What a turnaround! In the RSW annual exhibition in 1960, he exhibited “October Landscape”, one of the hottest coloured pictures he had made up to then, probably a Scottish subject, and a forerunner for future red-hot paintings. He was on his way to seeing Scotland with the brightest colours.

The birds, flowers and foliage were exploding in the centre of everyday Scottish scenes in thick textured brilliant colour throughout the 60-62 phase and for the rest of Houston’s life in slightly less energetic application. Look at the difference between “ Towers and Flowers” from 1959 and “Flowers and Moon” in 1960.

John Houston, Flowers and Moon, oil on canvas, 1960, © Royal Scottish Academy/Bridgeman Images 2023.

The ‘two pictures in one’ quickly blended into foreground slashing abstraction, criss-crossing foliage and bird forms with a coherent link to a background setting. There are aviaries and birds in flight against blue and jet black backgrounds, then in what Houston calls gardens - abstract compositions with bold reds, yellows, pinks, greens and glaring sun. A small 1964 watercolour, “Birds in Landscape”, repeats the main ideas in “Pigeons and Village” but loses all figurative elements from the background, and presents black silhouetted birds in flight against bright lights emanating from the distance. It’s a coherent single picture.

“Pigeons and Village” was a success. Houston underlined his position as the establishment young artist who embraced modernity, but within a tradition. Meanwhile, his approach changed: he found a way to combine traditional painting skills with the energy and excitement that the new decade demanded, and he saw Scotland and his own work emerge from mono into stereo.

What is more, a public gallery bought it! Not the new Gallery of Modern Art: they settled for getting the establishment off the ground and worrying about the content later. Perth has it. With the new Gallery about to be opened in 2024, it has re-emerged, and with more space and hopefully more interest, maybe it will be seen more often than it would have at SNGMA. Its current position sets the context well: Philipson to the left, Maxwell to the right. If you retreat back left, still with “Pigeons and Village” in view, you can see William Gear over your shoulder and William Gillies and Elizabeth Blackadder straight in front.

The Houston knits them all together, and sets the needle in a new direction.

Roger Spence

Note 1: Perth Art Gallery also bought Archibald McGlashan’s “Child In Pram”, Mary Armour’s “Flowers and Peaches” and Gordon Cameron’s “The Barley Field” from the same exhibition. A good year for Perth art!

Note 2: Robin Philipson was appointed Head of Drawing and Painting at ECA, succeeding William Gillies in the summer of 1960.

Note 3: William Packer’s book on John Houston is the only one to date. Published in 2003, it is currently out of print, but very much recommended, especially for its considerable quantity of high quality images.