A.Y. Jackson and Scotland’s artists

Charles Hodge Mackie, Entrance to the Grand Canal, Venice. By 1912. National Galleries, Scotland.

As I researched my forthcoming book on A.Y. Jackson, Robin Rodger, a documentation officer in the collections department of the Royal Scottish Academy of Art & Architecture, was a big help in sorting out A.Y. Jackson’s relationship with several leading British artists early in his career, among them Scotland’s Charles Hodge Mackie. In thanks, I provided the academy with a research note on what I had learned about Jackson’s connections to Mackie and others, in archival materials in Canada. The research note can be downloaded below.

JacksonScottishArtistsDownload

“A.Y. Jackson is best known as a key founding member in 1920 of the Canadian landscape collective, the Group of Seven, but he was also a leading figure in the Beaver Hall Group of Montreal (also founded in 1920) and the Canadian Group of Painters, founded in 1932. Members of the Group of Seven cited Scandinavian art as a significant influence and inspiration. Less appreciated, in Jackson’s case, is the influence of Scottish artists. Early in his career, he met several noteworthy Scottish artists, and entered two works in the Royal Scottish Academy exhibition of 1912. The influence of Scottish artists was apparent to The Manchester Guardian’s reviewer of an exhibition of Canadian art in Liverpool in 1910: “The Glasgow School has apparently had some effect on the style of A.Y. Jackson, for his ‘Corner of the Maplewood’ is much in the manner made popular by that particular band of Northerners.”